It’s October 1 and the tallys are coming in

I know you are waiting with baited breath to get the results of this month of 10 mile eating. The tally is below (scroll down), and here’s some exegesis on the text:

I lost 6 pounds. My average calories a day were ~ 1600 so that accounts for some of it. I’ll bet that without grains I lost water weight – no swelling in hands and feet.

I had a blood draw yesterday and results will be on monday. My LDL (bad ooo bad cholesterol) was 168 at the beginning of August. If that is down significantly we know something… if only that I don’t have to take the statins docs put so many of my peers on. Fingers crossed.

Fifty percent of the calories came from Tricia (supplemented by my garden and some extras from friends). That’s good news bad news.

Good news is wow that’s a lot of food grown by the one little industrious Tricia.

The bad news is that without the extra milk, meat, honey, oil and a little cheese, I’d have been definitely underfed if not undernourished.

Ahh, but the good news is, ALL the food except for the oil, salt, caffeine and 30 little limes came from my 10 miles. That is very very hopeful in terms of our ability to feed ourselves.

Ahh, but the bad news is that everyone who wants to eat this way would need to grow a big kitchen garden with plenty of squash and potatoes, and would need to at least be part of a chicken and goat/cow coop OR form a relationship with a grower who can provide this. Our current CSA and ag production couldn’t feed us all. Yet.

The good new is that just beyond my 10 miles up on the prairie people are growing grains and beans and if there were more demand for such, I’m sure more land would be put into those crops. We do not need to do without bread! Or beans in our winter soups.

The bad news is that demographically we are an aging population and if we don’t find a way to attract and retain young farmers we will not be able to feed ourselves into our dotage.

And simply news is that the overall cost for this diet was 30 percent more than my normal smart shopper pays, though none of it is local and much isn’t organic. A lot of that saving, I’ll wager, is because the food system permits my purchasing from far away, industrial ag and produced in conditions I probably wouldn’t approve of, if I could see it.

The overall news is that we are actually on our way to at least partial food self sufficiency on the island if we would eat what we can grow here and not insist on what cannot grow here. And if we commit to support our producers by buying from them, especially during the transition when they may not have the full hang of it. And we are wise about what we need from 100 miles and 300 miles and 1000 miles – we actually can map our food system against our food needs (more on that in a future post).

The below may be too much information for most of you, but for those with a real fascination, here it is. And even though the month is over, even though I had toast with almond butter this morning, the blog is not over – and perhaps the book is just begun.