Forget the 100-mile diet. What's really in vogue these days is the 100-yard diet, where eating locally means eating what's in your and your neighbors' backyards. Particularly intriguing are the new breed of urban farmers, city dwellers who've made it their mission to produce most or all of their food within whatever (confined, urban, often difficult to cultivate) space is available.
Over at the Your City Farmer blog, "intrepid urban farmer" Novella Carpenter tried the 100-yard diet (a phrase she coined) for a month, subsisting on ducks, rabbits, chickens, pigs, bees, vegetables and more that she raised on a rented plot of land in Oakland, California. What I particularly love about Carpenter's blog (which she continued to write after her 30-day experiment was finished) is that it doesn't conceal the warts of farming--you hear about the gross things (rendering duck fat; cruising Dumpsters for pig feed and supplies) as well as the sublime (making nocino, a type of liquor, out of green walnuts, cinnamon, honey, and vodka.) Your City Farmer is more of a traditional diary-style blog than an informational guide, but it will inspire you to at learn more about your food and how you can produce more of it yourself; I don't know how to raise and butcher a rabbit, but now I want to find out.
Down the road in Menlo Park, California, Sunset Magazine, Food Editor Margo True and her crew of cooking and gardening experts have created a blog to document their efforts to eat a "One-block diet." Far from the strictly vegetarian asceticism you might expect from such a project, the Sunset crew is raising chickens, growing olives, and even making wine and beer on a small plot of land outside Sunset's offices. Although the tone is a little cutesy for my blood (the crew divided into "teams" with names like "Team Chicken" and "Team Beer") the practical information is incredibly helpful for anyone interested in taking their diet extremely local; who knew, for example, that baby chicks need to be kept at 90 degrees during the first days of life--or that their eyelids open from the bottom? Freaky!
Finally, in non-blog-related coverage of the urban farming/foraging movement, In These Times has an in-depth piece about the community urban agriculture movement in the United States. According to In These Times, the Community Food Security Coalition--an umbrella organization for food-policy groups--defines urban agriculture as “the growing, processing, and distribution of food and other products through intensive plant cultivation and animal husbandry in and around cities"--particularly blighted inner cities, where access to fresh, affordable food is most limited. Such areas are popularly known as "food deserts"--places like West Oakland, where liquor stores outnumber grocery stores 40 to 1. To combat problems of access, urban farming brings food into the community, in the form of micro-farms on just a few square meters or acres of land. Many urban gardens are in residents' backyards; others are community gardens whose produce farmers sell in the neighborhood.
