One evening, a Canadian couple, Alice Smith and James McKinnon, hosted uninvited guests in their cottage. In the fridge was empty, and they rushed to find food in the neighborhood. Their trophies were just trout that had just splashed in the river, forest mushrooms, freshly scraped potatoes, before their eyes torn off fragrant apples, cherries and even dandelion leaves.
Healthy food seemed so tasty to them that they involuntarily asked themselves the question: "Why do the products from supermarkets taste different?" On the experience the pair was convinced of the known fact: carrots, cabbage, a potato, arrived in shops from apart, on road lose many qualities. Smith and McKinnon decided to put the experiment - the year to eat "locally", that is, to buy food only from nearby farmers. So the 100-mile diet was developed.
Today, the movement of locals is becoming increasingly popular. The concept became so fashionable that a couple of years ago Oxford University called locavores the word of the year. In free translation, it means "local-eating", or "local-eating", in short - "local". These people will prefer to remain hungry, but they will not eat lunch if the latter did not graze a couple of days ago somewhere on the lawn within a radius of 100 miles (160.9 km) from their home or did not grow on the bed within the same reach.
Are you yourself "local"?
If to speak frankly, local healthy food is not new, especially for Ukraine, where about 70% of the population have dachas. It's just that no one in our head has come to turn the national habit of feeding from its 6 hectare and making supplies for the winter in a whole movement.
How to become one of the "local"? To do this, you need to spend a few extra minutes in the store, figuring out the origin of the products. Make sure that the ones you are going to buy and cook did not travel further than 160 km.
The "100 miles" diet will strengthen your health and improve your well-being. Food from afar loses valuable nutrients on the long journey to your dining table. Vegetables and fruits, as a rule, are collected still green, then they travel a few weeks, still for a while they lie in warehouses. Inside them, processes in fermentation have inevitably begun, and they retained their vigorous appearance only through special chemical treatment. Does your body need an additional "dose" of chemicals?
Followers of a healthy diet of "100 miles" willy-nilly become more inventive in making up the menu. Restricting yourself exclusively to local food, you will be forced to try new things (or invent new combinations of "old acquaintances"). For example, find that on your table, instead of overseas products, undeservedly forgotten, but certainly "native" and useful pumpkin, honeysuckle, viburnum, elder, rhubarb, dishes of oatmeal appeared on your table ... Such a meager diet can not be called!
But what, say, local (and, most importantly, useful and tasty!) You can buy in winter, for example, in Kiev or Dnepropetrovsk? It's easy to decide that local food is not a quirk for a big city, around which a zone of risky farming is also stretched. But in season local products can be procured for future use: salted, dried, preserved or frozen. Collected and in the next few hours, the frozen vegetables and fruits retain much more useful substances than the overseas pilgrims who came to our table.
Before the harmony is at hand
The easiest way to stick to a local diet for a healthy lifestyle is to grow your own foods. Seeds with spicy herbs on the windowsill or "onion" on the balcony in the West no one surprises - there it is fashionable. No time, desire or opportunity to engage in gardening and gardening? Go to the nearest markets: becoming a regular customer of rural grandmothers, soon you can not only improve the diet, but also significantly save on products.
Having mastered the "local" diet, you will be able to abandon impulsive grocery shopping and buying overseas delicacies that are contrary to the healthy lifestyle of a person.
For example , in order to make the simplest spaghetti sauce, we need a whole list of imported ingredients that are not at all cheap.
Fashionable healthy movement is positively reflected not only on health and the bag, but also on the figure. In the diet, many fresh products are introduced, fast food, semi-finished products are excluded. As a consequence, the amount of fats, salt, sugar, and chemical weight is significantly reduced to 8 kg in a couple of months. In this case, the "100 miles" diet, perhaps, is one of the most psychologically justified. Ah, as prskih food additives, slowing down, and even breaking the metabolism. And soon there is a significant loss of superfluous loss, knowing that thereby saving the world! After all, for transportation of healthy products over long distances a huge amount of fuel is consumed, which pollutes the environment and leads to irreversible climate changes.