100 Mile Market

I've read a couple of articles in the last few weeks about stores opening up with the idea of a market with products that have traveled a distance of less than 100 miles. Now, our grandparents would laugh at us and say that is how they grew up. Eating vegetables that were only in season, eating pickled and canned items that were from local neighbours or farmers and meat from farmers they knew. However, in our lifetime the larger grocery stores have been the norm and smaller producers have been priced out of business. With the idea of keeping our farm land in production (and our farmers with a liveable wage) the 100 Mile Market is starting to appear again. We in Lindsay are incredibly lucky that we are surrounded by rich land and a wonderful variety of vegetation and livestock. I moved here five years ago now, and always wondered why we didn't have a year-round farmer's market or co-op. Perhaps we did, but with our society becoming more aware of our ecological footprint and the miles that our food travels, it is becoming an idea that needs reviving. As well, we need to ensure that our local farming community have a decent living so they don't sell all this wonderful land for the next big housing development.

One of the articles I read was about this type of shop opened in Meaford. People were happily buying flour milled locally, cheeses, all types of apples. The other article was about grocery stores starting to listen to the public about sustainable food. Which means that it was produced in Ontario in a way that is gentle on the environment and strict on worker and animal rights.

For information on the 100 mile diet, go to the 100 Mile Diet site! Here they show you what 100 miles from the Kawartha Lakes is (we count Niagara's bountiful food belt within our area, so we can drink!) and in our area we are more than able to purchase all the food we could possibly need without buying from anywhere else. A great start would be to support our own Lindsay Farmers' Market. It is almost done for this year, but if we want to be able to buy things from them in future, then we have to continue to support them!

On a related note, this election the Green Party did much better overall than ever before. But what was interesting to note is that they did better in rural areas like our own. Why? Apparently, we can all see our farmland eaten away by housing developments and live with the farmers that have struggled for years. We know that we can't afford to lose more farmers, or farm land. Urban dwellers know we need to protect our planet too, but we live with it day to day on a different level.

Not a comment about politicians, but a hot air balloon the was floating around North Lindsay on the 4th October, 2007. What a great sight to see first thing in the morning.