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From:	E Praetzel (eestaf81.uwaterloo.ca)
Subject:	Re: The 100 mile diet.
Date:	June 20, 2006 at 11:29 am PST

In Reply to: The 100 mile diet. posted by Chumly on June 16, 2006 at 7:54 am:

Life gets complicated pretty quickly!

We went vegetarian after my wife read Diet For a Small Planet. I did more reading and went mostly vegan. Meanwhile we were also reading Your Money Or Your Life and other books about sustainability and community.

So - we want to buy local & fresh & organic but that doesn't leave much to eat outside of summer!

The complex sort of planned vegetarian / vegan diets I see over here have no relationship to what friends from India do. They don't plan meals and try to shovel nuts and seeds into their kids while also trying to cram in particular high calcium veggies.

The 100 mile diet makes sense. Peak Oil is coming - wake up. Natural gas is in past peak; uranium is being used up fast and coal will kill us as it's dirty and we've used up the clean burning types.

But I predict that many of us will re-evaluate our diet in a peak oil world. Meat is an easy source of calories and in moderation, for many of us, the cholesterol isn't a problem. In a climate where I'm riding my winter bicycle 5 months of the year and the heating on our house is on 8 months of the year a vegan-vegetarian diet isn't viable year round if you're trying to live a 100 mile diet.

As it is take your set of goals, prioritize them and keep that in mind as you buy food. We just bought local strawberries for $3 / box as opposed to the California ones (no doubt grown with ozone decimating chemicals that have been banned everywhere else in the world) for $2 / box.

In the end what we spend on food is tiny fraction of our amazing wealth. Food is cheaper than it's ever been - at least the unsustainabily grown variety.

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