Terry speaker series: First up – the authors of “The 100-Mile Diet” (Friday, November 23rd, noon)

Details on obtaining tickets for this event can be found at the top by clicking home.

Clearly, food is a hot topic these days. You see it constantly in the cultural dominance of things like the Food Channel, Martha Stewart, or The Iron Chef. But more fittingly, thankfully even, you also see a boon of discussions that look closely (we’re talking maybe even academically) at our relationship to the food we eat. And a lot of this dialogue has been spurred on by the existence of well written and engaging books by respected writers such as Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life) (not too shabby!)

Locally, we’re fortunate to have a similarly buzz worthy bestseller. This one is called “The 100-Diet Mile” and is written by Vancouver journalists Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon. Basically, its premise is to see if one can subsist on a diet generated solely by the food produced within a 100-mile radius of your home. And along the way, let’s see if the narrative can be used to examine the sometimes heady, sometimes mind boggling realities of food politics, economics and culture.

Suffice to say, the book rocks! In fact, it double rocks for us at UBC, because a lot of the anecdotes involve familiar BC locales:

“On March 21, the first day of spring, we took a vow to live with the rhythms of the land as our ancestors did. For one year we would only buy food and drink for home consumption that was produced within 100 miles of our home, a circle that takes in all the fertile Fraser Valley, the southern Gulf Islands and some of Vancouver Island, and the ocean between these zones. This terrain well served the European settlers of a hundred years ago, and the First Nations population for thousands of years before.

“This may sound like a lunatic Luddite scheme, but we had our reasons…”

To get taste of more, you can also see the series presented at the always great, Tyee.

Anyway, James and Alisa are going to share their experiences with us, under the gorgeous roof of the UBC Chan Centre. Go get a ticket and check off your lunch hour on Friday November 23rd.