100 Mile Pizza

100-Mile Pizza

During any given season, most of us can saunter into our local grocery store and find strawberries, tomatoes, celery and fresh herbs. It's easy to take it for granted that we can get our hands on most types of produce at any time of the year. And yet nothing beats the way you shudder with delight after taking a bite out of a freshly picked locally-grown tomato. In fact, it is often a stark reminder of how bland and cardboard-like "fresh" produce can be during off-season.

With growing concern for the environment and for our own health, there is one concept that is gaining popularity all over the globe: The 100-Mile Diet. Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon spent one year eating only food that was produced within a 100-mile radius of their home in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This is not an easy task. However the idea of eating food that is fresh, local and has not spent countless hours travelling hundreds or thousands of miles in trains, trucks, planes or boats, has been catching on worldwide.

On the surface, eating a 100-mile diet seems somewhat easy to do, but depending on where in the world you live, it can be quite challenging to get your hands on certain ingredients. With some digging and asking questions around the neighbourhood, you will be surprised what you can find.

Take one popular food: Pizza. Any pizzeria in the vicinity has probably ordered flour from wheat grown in an area likely many hundreds of miles away. The oil used in their dough is also likely from afar—most likely a different country; perhaps from the other side of the globe.

Tomatoes are a commonly imported vegetable in many countries during the off-season—especially canned tomatoes. Herbs, garlic, salt and spices are all very likely to be from some far away land as well. Ask any chef where they get their garlic from and they might be able to tell you which distributor delivered it, but that's about it.

Tags & Keywords : pizza, mozzarella, locally produced, fresh, dough, oil