We’ve been watching the series 100 Mile Challenge on the Food Network and of course, we’ve always tried to eat as much local food as we can. Remember how we decided to take on a raw food diet a couple of years ago? (Of course, we were assisted by the fact that our oven was essentially a carpenter’s bench in the middle of the floor at the time)
Well, we’ve been contemplating an all-PEI diet this time as the island is small enough to basically consider that our 100 mile radius. (Technically, we could even include some areas of other provinces, but the PEI border is much simpler to use.)
So far, we’ve simply started making a list of what we think we’ll have to do without to see whether there are any real snags or non-starters, and of course debating whether PEI roasted coffee counts. (What do you think?)
Our concerns right now:
- yeast – we make our own bread and can buy local flour at the Spring Street Farmer’s Market, but I don’t know whether we can get local yeast
- rice – we do eat a lot of rice because it’s convenient, but we can always cut it out
- bananas – I’ve heard the kind of bananas we have access to are little more than nature’s junk food anyway, but we do like them for a quick hit of something
- tea (for me, green tea) – I don’t like herbal teas at all, so unfortunately I don’t think any of the crazy alternative melanges will cut it for me. It will probably have to be just hot water and lemon for me. “Lemon?” you ask?
- lemon – apparently it’s super easy to grow lemon trees indoors in Canada. This will happen. (I’ll just buy the tree before we start any challenge!)
- sugar – I don’t like honey, so this will be interesting
- salt – I’m not a big salt person anyway, and I’m not sure whether Summerside harbour is the best source water for home desalinization.
So, this is very preliminarily stage 1 of the pre-PEI diet challenge. I spent some time this afternoon reading about the nutritional benefits of potatos, and that will become its own post later.
Right now, though, Joe wants to play pool, where locally-brewed beer is served, so we’re already in compliance! Well, technically, we’d need to find out whether all their ingredients, especially yeast, are from the island.
This leads us to one of the discussions we’re having – is it good enough to include local products like the coffee and the beer because at least we’re supporting local enterprise? Or, is that hypocritical because we won’t be supporting the local Chinese restaurants and coffee shops, for example?
We have some details to hash out, and probably will try to read the 100-Mile Diet book for some suggestions.