Trying to eat only food grown within 100 miles

SCHENECTADY — Dick Shave got a duck for dinner. It’s firm, fresh and — this is important when you’re only eating food grown within 100 miles — raised on a farm northeast of his family’s home. “We’re going to have it with local new potatoes from the farmers’ market and beans from outside our door,” Shave said. So goes a typical menu for a group in the Albany area that took support of local agriculture to an extreme. Shave and more than 55 other people involved in the “100 Mile Diet Challenge” pledged that through September they would stick to eating food produced within that distance of their kitchens (more or less). No barbecue chips. No Midwest beef. No bananas. No go for most of the stuff on supermarket shelves. They wanted to raise consciousness not only about how local meat and vegetables can be fresher and cleaner. The 100-milers wanted to show it’s possible to avoid food that requires a lot of fuel to ship from thousands of miles away. “The craziness of out-of-season lettuce flown in from California,” Shave said. “Nuts!” This was the second annual 100 Mile Diet Challenge, which was started by an energy-conscious molecular biologist from Schenectady, Cheryl Nechamen. She was inspired by Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, two Canadian writers who set out on their own “100-mile diet” for a year starting in the spring of 2005. Nechamen just shrunk the timeframe and invited her friends to join in. The challenge fit with the spirit of a time when “eat local” is a buzzword, new farmers’ markets crop up at a quick pace and more and more community-supported agriculture programs (CSAs) offer weekly farm deliveries for a fixed price. Participants in the challenge relied heavily on farmers’ markets and CSAs. On the Net: http://100milechallenge.com