What's the difference between grandma's homegrown tomatoes and the ones you buy at a chain grocery store like Walmart? You know you taste it, but what is it that makes you long for your grandmother's talent with botany? Consider this: how would your skin taste if you rode fifteen hundred miles on the back of an eighteen wheel truck to your dinner table? You would stink like an exhaust pipe and road kill. Your lungs would be filled with the funk of every automobile that passed you. Food soaks in these chemicals and goes into your body every day when you are eating foods transported from states away or even nations away.

Berries
Credit: Tracy O. via Flickr
 
Eating locally grown produce is beneficial to your local economy, the environment, and your health.

This is what the 100 Mile Diet is about. On average, the food sold in many stores is grown fifteen hundred miles from the store it is sold in. The quality and safety of the food is just one reason to eat foods that were grown and produced within one hundred miles from your home. It is not just important, but urgent, to begin buying your food from stores that sell locally grown produce. The transportation of these food products is creating unnecessary damage to the environment. The less consumers support businesses that sell food transported long distances, the less damage that will be done. More stores may even be influenced to begin buying locally. 

Exponentially, these steps to buy food locally grown, help the environment, and your body. Grow food in your own back yard or in a community garden. Taking this step will give you a great way to save money, develop a new hobby, and will be even more beneficial to your health. The foods you eat that you grow yourself will be the purest, least exposed to harmful carcinogens. Traveling from your back yard, or down the block is a fraction of the distance grown in a farm ninety-nine miles away. It will cost less money for you eat. This is a simple reason to begin growing your own produce. 

The 100 mile diet is not just about produce. It includes meat, dairy, soaps, honey products, pet products, flowers, seeds, nuts, herbs, woolen products, and anything else that you can find in your community. Once you begin asking around at locally owned businesses, you will see that there are many ways to stop harming the environment. 

It is not just the environment that benefits from the 100 mile diet. Studies have shown that when money is spent in locally owned businesses, forty-five percent of the revenues go back into the same community. When each community is more and more supported by residents who are locavores, the entire world is more self-sustaining and strong. Independence from food and products that must travel fifteen hundred miles is a powerful idea. 

Times are hard, the mainstream food supply industry is suspect, and health care is so expensive that there are a number of reasons for us to find ourselves stressed over what we do with our bodies. Considering the recent changes in rising sea levels, melting glaciers, hurricanes destroying cities and states in ways not seen for decades in the United States, the idea of becoming a locavore, is one comforting option in a whirl wind of concern. 

To start living the life of a locavore, you must begin a journey. This journey begins with researching farmer's markets in your community. Ask questions and enjoy the conversations you have with people who are on the same path. It is not difficult to find information for your specific area. Search for locavores online, and you will be stepping in the right direction. You will be surprised at how much you will be able to buy within the 100 mile diet. Take the first step, and begin to change the world. Become a locavore. Enjoy the taste of your grandma's freshly grown tomatos again. Stop eating exhaust fumes.