Eating locally

For several years, reading about living off grid, or spending money on nothing but food and transport for a year, or aiming for a zero carbon lifestyle, and watching films along similar lines, I've been wondering if I should try something. I can't give up flying while I'm working in Rwanda twice a year; I'm not even ready to sell my car, though I do use it only two or three times a week now. I do, however, have a reasonably productive allotment and an interest in food miles, food security and good nutrition.

For the last week – mostly in bed by the light of a remarkable solar torch that recharges itself even inside the house - I've been reading Animal, vegetable, miracle, Barbara Kingsolver's account of her family's year in Appalachian Virginia, eating only local produce and raising much of it themselves, both animal and vegetable. At home in suburban London I've been cutting down my supermarket visits, though some items – some cleaning cloths, luxury biscuits for my singing group hosts, interesting spices – are impossible to find in the reducing number of smaller local shops. Ealing has a farmers' market on Saturdays. Is it time to get beyond fantasising and try an experiment?

A year is too much for me. I'm too peripatetic, quite apart from probable failures of will. Could I manage a month, to start with, buying no fruit or veg and only locally raised free-range meat? (No, I'm not a vegetarian. I have spent many years wondering whether the call would come but it doesn't. I try to eat only ethically produced meat, fish and poultry; many of my friends would consider that an oxymoron but I am as I am)

Thinking through my calendar, I can identify four weeks from late June, and/or probably another four from early August, where my chance of success would be greatest. Would anybody like to join me? It would be for each individual to identify your own parameters. Mine would be buying no fruit or veg or prepared meals, but allowing bread from the farmers' market and the cooking ingredients already in my store cupboard – and fairtrade coffee! Yours might be no plastic packaging, or no supermarkets, or only foods identifiable as coming from your own country or region or locality, to give some examples.

Barbara Kingsolver writes at the end of her book, which I hadn't yet reached when I started writing this proposal, about the growing popularity in the USA of a hundred-mile challenge – to consume only food produced within that radius. She also deals robustly with the objection that whatever one does won't be enough. If your sedentary friend had been diagnosed with a heart condition, would you criticise them, she asks, for starting to exercise only three days a week instead of all seven?



Here in the Friends compound in Kagarama, four of us have enjoyed a delicious meal comprising two cooked dishes prepared using a combination of passive and conventional heating methods, three salads and one of the best pineapples I have ever eaten. On the other side of the room where I am sitting at my netbook, Rachel and Gaudance, leaders in women's and children's work in the Rwandan Friends Church, are starting to write a project proposal for spreading the information and experience they are getting from the Growing Together in Rwanda project. Country people live surrounded by plenty of vegetables, they say, but they don't know how to use them. In town there is little cultivable land but much could be done with sacks and other containers, once the benefits of eating the produce are understood.

I am fortunate enough to have both the land and the information. Integrity requires that I keep finding things to do, however modest, to help the world move in the right direction.