the 96 k way

When I had what I now refer to as “the Nightmare of 2007” and had to rein in all unnecessary spending (and even some necessary), I didn’t, of course, stop eating.

I did, though, re-orient my spending where it concerned food.

I grew things to eat, for even though I didn’t get back to Atlantic Canada until late June from “the Nightmare” it was still time enough to put some seed into the ground that I had already bought. Janet Wallace’s Japanese kuri squash, which had cost all of 60 cents or less at a Seedy Saturday event, kept me healthy all winter....13 huge beautiful, Vitamin A and anti-oxidant-rich beauties in the upstairs closet. I grew a few other things, potatoes, small patches of lettuce and spinach, and then sought to supplement whatever I couldn’t produce and preserve myself with what I could get locally.

While the focus has been on the “100 mile diet”[ http://100milediet.org/ ], I called mine the 96k diet because that’s as far as I could go on my bicycle in one day. For that was the other thing I did to recover from the Nightmare....I took off in cut-off jean shorts and t-shirt, a few clothes and a journal, and cycled a bit of Prince Edward Island (http://www.tourismpei.com). This journey, and the farmers and other residents from “The Gentle Island” whom I met, were so kind to me when I was so fragile. They helped me get back to myself again. The forced simplicity of only carrying what one can fit in two bike saddlebags also made me committed to scaling down my life to manageable proportions, and trying just to eat what I could produce myself or what my neighbours produced: to try and keep to mostly local, certainly regional, a select exclusions list of items fair traded from away, and the like. Over the coming winter months I’ll be explaining this journey.

So...when I got back from that cycling trip, I filled up the freezer with what I grew or my neighbours had grown, got a few home-canned things from the farmers’market, placed in the space between the cellar steps and the wall a sack of turnips...and, after provisioning thusly and in other ways for the winter, basically stopped buying all but the occasional dairy product (which, courtesy of Canada’s supply managed dairy sector, meant that I was buying something produced and processed within my province).

The first to go was fat.


More on that next time....and the promised recipe for muffins!

toujours,
Deborah