The Year of Magical Eating

The 100-mile diet and other food stunts

Katherine Mangu-Ward | April 30, 2007

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Some of the escalations in uberethical eating at the haute cuisine level are just the slow dawning of inevitable conclusion from certain premises: The environmental illogic of importing Italian bottled water to a restaurant based around local produce has finally penetrated, with path-breaking Chez Panisse chef Alice Waters (no pun intended) recently announcing her intention to serve tarted-up tap water instead of their previous offering, imported Santa Lucia. (A great piece in Slate hits the nail on the head on the elitism angle here: "So long as only a few people were drinking Evian, Perrier, and San Pellegrino, bottled water wasn't perceived as a societal ill. Now that everybody is toting bottles of Poland Spring, Aquafina, and Dasani, it's a big problem.")

After that first pricey dinner, Alisa says, "This might not even be possible." It has taken the better part of a weekend day and 130 dollars to make this one meal. She is worried about price, something none of her competitors in the ethical stunt-eating field give more than a passing nod to in their accounts. But she's also worried about time. Even a freelance writer and a novelist have to work sometimes. The acquisition of three cases of corn takes up "one half of a precious Saturday." Of an outing for berries with a girlfriend, following by canning, she says, "Making jam had taken up all afternoon and evening, but the last thing I'd call it was work. It was living."

This is a legitimate point: Those who defend the pleasures and economies of modern life against the romanticizers of a zero-impact, local eating, fresh fruits and veggies past often overemphasize the soul-numbing drudgery of rural life. Picking berries and turning them into jam while chatting with a friend has been one of womankind's great pleasures for centuries. But just because it isn't awful doesn't mean that it isn't time-consuming labor. And in modern times, laying a hand on local berries in the first place can be pricey, U-Pick or not.

The authors have the good grace to admit that their household may have started to seem a bit "unusual." James sees the house through his brother's eyes in November, nine months into the experiment. Alisa has just bleached the walls to rid the house of weevils and other tiny wheat-dwelling bugs. Herbs hang willy-nilly in the entryway. A former clothes cupboard is full of potatoes and onions. Piles of squash abound. The kitchen is full of the scent of rotting apples and homemade sauerkraut, which is basically fermented cabbage, and smells "not unlike the smell of an unflushed urinal at the end of a long summer day."

They also admit that they don't ever have to grapple with real scarcity, real privation. When an industrial spill puts the river they were planning to rely on for salmon off limits, James writes: "No one depends—truly depends—on the Cheakamus fishery." Likewise with an inconvenient potato blight that devastates the harvest of many farmers in their area. They find a few potatoes, and everyone else just eats potatoes flown or trucked in from elsewhere.

Smith and Mackinnon know that they're not going "back to the land" or "starting a revolution." They aren't in the business of polemics. Their experiment is modest, and it succeeds modestly.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of reason.

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