Perhaps if I was more up on current diet fads I’d get this.
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I had never heard of it, either, but the reference is to the book “The 100-Mile Diet“, and means eating only foods grown and/or produced within a 100-mile radius of where you live.
P.S. I always hated textbooks that left corollaries as an “excercise for the alert student“, even when the solution was obvious. In this case, since he’s more than a thousand miles away from the source of everything in his suitcase, he’s tossing it all overboard. The “humor” is simply the vicarious satisfaction of witnessing his moronic dedication to an artificial standard.
I guess he’ll need to try fishing.
I’ve never understood the mentality that, in order to comply with whatever current thinking and do the “good” thing, insists on throwing away perfectly good things that just don’t happen to conform to the current thinking; for example, food that had to be transported over 100 miles to get to you is “bad”, so you throw out any food that had to travel more than 100 miles. The goal might even be laudable, but how stupid is it to add further insult to the injury by not even consuming the offending product in the end?
I read a book once by some columnist who was going to try various “good for you” fads, and invariably started said fad by going through their pantry, medicine cabinet, toiletries, and throwing out whatever didn’t conform to the new paradigm. I think it was supposed to be knowingly sardonically humorous, but to me it just highlighted the bad-faith with which they were approaching the whole project.
That diet never caught on here in Wisconsin because it would mean no coffee any time, especially in winter. We’d have to take up hibernation.
@ larK – I wouldn’t require that the “Marie Kondo” dieter has to consume the newly “treif” items, but it would seem sensible to donate them to another individual who has less resources and also fewer philisophical hangups.
You hit it on the head with the “treif” comment: what I object to are the people who ostensibly claim to be doing it for the good of the environment, or whatever, but by their actions betray that they are actually doing it merely for signaling their piety. (And my cynical book author is betrays their bad faith by never even considering there might be virtue to whatever fad by assuming a priori that it is merely about the posturing, which they “cleverly” highlight by their pretend strict adherence ad absurdum…)
Thanks to Kilby, I now understand the comic. The diet, on the other hand, is DIDU. I guess the idea is eating local, thus fresher. But does eating at the McDonalds down the street count as “produced within a 100-mile radius”?
@ Mark M – My apologies, the word “produced” was my interpolation; the description of the book actually says only “grown”. The “local-vore” movement is only partially about freshness, but more about resisting mass-market economics and unreasonable transportation expenditures.
larK – Perhaps you can visualize why people would do this if you think of a vice instead of just locally sourced food. Someone swearing off a vice (sweets, sugar, chocolate, alcohol, tobacco) and tossing whatever supply is still in the house probably makes sense to you in that case, yet? Sure, they could consume it and say they are starting when the current supply runs out, but that would seem strange for things they say they will never use again.
Kilby,
Those ‘left as an exercise’ problems were either completely obvious or completely inscrutable. On of my profs said authors who used that were just too lazy to write out the proof.
The ones I hated were the ones who wrote, ‘…and so it is obvious that..’. My response was frequently, ‘No. No it isn’t. It’s really, really not.’
I wonder what people who live in the middle of Nevada are supposed to do?
Eating local is good (during the summer we eat a lot produced 100 feet from our kitchen) but this seems to go a bit far. Anyhow, if they believed in this 600 years ago, Columbus never would have discovered America, since the spices he was looking for were produced a tad more than 100 miles from European capitals.
We’ll, where I live, if you stuck strictly to the 100 mile limit, you couldn’t even eat stuff grown in the next county. On the plus side, we have a 12 month growing season, and if you are not a vegetarian, fish and cattle abound (as well as chickens). We had a dairy, but it went tits up. On the negative side, almost all of the agricultural land is owned by the corporate descendants of sugar and pineapple companies, and they are just sitting on it as real estate investments, so the only farms are either small (i.e. less than 5 acres) specializing in crops they can sell directly to restaurants, like arugula, turmeric, etc. or grazing cattle. There is of course, a plethora of papayas, mangoes and apple bananas. We also produce over a third of Hawai’ian Taro. AND we have coffee and chocolate! There’s a movement to make the island self-sustaining, but unless you go full fruitarian or full carnivore with a side of poi, I’m not seeing that happen any time soon, especially as long as tourism is something like 80% of the economy.
Start making local Spam?
All things in moderation. We like to eat locally produced food as we can, but still buy and eat packaged goods that we like.
Pretty sure little of what we eat is produced here (don’t even have a decent farmer’s market especially for an area which still has some farms) – and since the pandemic started, we are happy just to find food we want to buy and meets the “rules” for what we can eat due to various medical conditions (low carb due to Diabetes, low fats due to high bp, and assorted limitations – including what can eat while dealing with these 2 conditions – such as broccoli, cabbage… due to low thyroid – basically I can eat as much as I want of mushrooms and green beans 🙂 ) and we tried to stay within the parameters of what we should eat straight through as much as we can.
Have I mentioned the frozen carrot shortage? Early in the pandemic we saw on TV news that “young people” were going around coughing on fresh produce and then putting it back. So we have bought frozen vegetables with a very limited amount of canned vegetables since then. Over the past several months we have had a problem finding frozen carrots – a month ago we finally found some at the Walmart Neighborhood Market (separate chain owned by WM which is supermarket/pharmacy & related only and ours is the highest grossing one they have) and bought same – I saw a woman taking bags with pictures of orange vegs on from a box on the top shelf of the freezer case, Robert managed to climb up and get a few of the bags – and they were the more expensive, smaller bags which are made in the microwave to cook – not what I would normally buy. He finally looked this up – yes, compared to other vegetables there is a shortage of frozen carrots and carrots in general.
@ Meryl – Don’t believe everything you see on TV (nor in the Internet). Besides, cooking the vegetables denatures the proteins and renders any viral particles inert.
Comics I Don't Understand 
I had never heard of it, either, but the reference is to the book “The 100-Mile Diet“, and means eating only foods grown and/or produced within a 100-mile radius of where you live.
P.S. I always hated textbooks that left corollaries as an “excercise for the alert student“, even when the solution was obvious. In this case, since he’s more than a thousand miles away from the source of everything in his suitcase, he’s tossing it all overboard. The “humor” is simply the vicarious satisfaction of witnessing his moronic dedication to an artificial standard.
I guess he’ll need to try fishing.
I’ve never understood the mentality that, in order to comply with whatever current thinking and do the “good” thing, insists on throwing away perfectly good things that just don’t happen to conform to the current thinking; for example, food that had to be transported over 100 miles to get to you is “bad”, so you throw out any food that had to travel more than 100 miles. The goal might even be laudable, but how stupid is it to add further insult to the injury by not even consuming the offending product in the end?
I read a book once by some columnist who was going to try various “good for you” fads, and invariably started said fad by going through their pantry, medicine cabinet, toiletries, and throwing out whatever didn’t conform to the new paradigm. I think it was supposed to be knowingly sardonically humorous, but to me it just highlighted the bad-faith with which they were approaching the whole project.
That diet never caught on here in Wisconsin because it would mean no coffee any time, especially in winter. We’d have to take up hibernation.
@ larK – I wouldn’t require that the “Marie Kondo” dieter has to consume the newly “treif” items, but it would seem sensible to donate them to another individual who has less resources and also fewer philisophical hangups.
You hit it on the head with the “treif” comment: what I object to are the people who ostensibly claim to be doing it for the good of the environment, or whatever, but by their actions betray that they are actually doing it merely for signaling their piety. (And my cynical book author is betrays their bad faith by never even considering there might be virtue to whatever fad by assuming a priori that it is merely about the posturing, which they “cleverly” highlight by their pretend strict adherence ad absurdum…)
Thanks to Kilby, I now understand the comic. The diet, on the other hand, is DIDU. I guess the idea is eating local, thus fresher. But does eating at the McDonalds down the street count as “produced within a 100-mile radius”?
@ Mark M – My apologies, the word “produced” was my interpolation; the description of the book actually says only “grown”. The “local-vore” movement is only partially about freshness, but more about resisting mass-market economics and unreasonable transportation expenditures.
larK – Perhaps you can visualize why people would do this if you think of a vice instead of just locally sourced food. Someone swearing off a vice (sweets, sugar, chocolate, alcohol, tobacco) and tossing whatever supply is still in the house probably makes sense to you in that case, yet? Sure, they could consume it and say they are starting when the current supply runs out, but that would seem strange for things they say they will never use again.
Kilby,
Those ‘left as an exercise’ problems were either completely obvious or completely inscrutable. On of my profs said authors who used that were just too lazy to write out the proof.
The ones I hated were the ones who wrote, ‘…and so it is obvious that..’. My response was frequently, ‘No. No it isn’t. It’s really, really not.’
I wonder what people who live in the middle of Nevada are supposed to do?
Eating local is good (during the summer we eat a lot produced 100 feet from our kitchen) but this seems to go a bit far. Anyhow, if they believed in this 600 years ago, Columbus never would have discovered America, since the spices he was looking for were produced a tad more than 100 miles from European capitals.
We’ll, where I live, if you stuck strictly to the 100 mile limit, you couldn’t even eat stuff grown in the next county. On the plus side, we have a 12 month growing season, and if you are not a vegetarian, fish and cattle abound (as well as chickens). We had a dairy, but it went tits up. On the negative side, almost all of the agricultural land is owned by the corporate descendants of sugar and pineapple companies, and they are just sitting on it as real estate investments, so the only farms are either small (i.e. less than 5 acres) specializing in crops they can sell directly to restaurants, like arugula, turmeric, etc. or grazing cattle. There is of course, a plethora of papayas, mangoes and apple bananas. We also produce over a third of Hawai’ian Taro. AND we have coffee and chocolate! There’s a movement to make the island self-sustaining, but unless you go full fruitarian or full carnivore with a side of poi, I’m not seeing that happen any time soon, especially as long as tourism is something like 80% of the economy.
Start making local Spam?
All things in moderation. We like to eat locally produced food as we can, but still buy and eat packaged goods that we like.
Pretty sure little of what we eat is produced here (don’t even have a decent farmer’s market especially for an area which still has some farms) – and since the pandemic started, we are happy just to find food we want to buy and meets the “rules” for what we can eat due to various medical conditions (low carb due to Diabetes, low fats due to high bp, and assorted limitations – including what can eat while dealing with these 2 conditions – such as broccoli, cabbage… due to low thyroid – basically I can eat as much as I want of mushrooms and green beans 🙂 ) and we tried to stay within the parameters of what we should eat straight through as much as we can.
Have I mentioned the frozen carrot shortage? Early in the pandemic we saw on TV news that “young people” were going around coughing on fresh produce and then putting it back. So we have bought frozen vegetables with a very limited amount of canned vegetables since then. Over the past several months we have had a problem finding frozen carrots – a month ago we finally found some at the Walmart Neighborhood Market (separate chain owned by WM which is supermarket/pharmacy & related only and ours is the highest grossing one they have) and bought same – I saw a woman taking bags with pictures of orange vegs on from a box on the top shelf of the freezer case, Robert managed to climb up and get a few of the bags – and they were the more expensive, smaller bags which are made in the microwave to cook – not what I would normally buy. He finally looked this up – yes, compared to other vegetables there is a shortage of frozen carrots and carrots in general.
@ Meryl – Don’t believe everything you see on TV (nor in the Internet). Besides, cooking the vegetables denatures the proteins and renders any viral particles inert.