When we sit down to eat, many of the ingredients we use have typically traveled at least 1,500 miles. In early 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple experiment. For one year, they would buy or gather their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver, B.C.

Since then, James and Alisa have gotten up-close-and-personal with issues ranging from the family-farm crisis to the environmental value of organic pears shipped across the globe. They've reconsidered vegetarianism and sunk their hands into community gardening. They've eaten a lot of potatoes.

Now their 100-mile diet has turned into a movement with a number of people in Western Washington trying to do it as well.  The Cascade Agenda supports these ideas because of its work in farmland preservation.

The Agenda works to preserve working farms in the region, providing the locally grown food that make the 100-mile diet even remotely possible. If local residents consumed only 5 percent of their calories from locally produced food, that level of consumption would be enough to support a strong farm economy here.  Currently we eat about 1-2 percent of our food is locally produced.

Community Supported Agriculture