STORIES

Friday, June 01, 2007

100-Mile Diet Excerpt: A Salmon Landscape

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Community: Fraser Valley

A few weeks ago I finished reading The 100-Mile Diet: a year of local eating and felt like a new world had opened up to me. Somewhere past halfway through the book I hit the following paragraph and knew we had to do something about the book on Think Salmon.

(For context, J. B. MacKinnon is writing about the big picture, ten-thousand-year perspective of life on the Pacific coast.)

Cover of the book The 100-Mile Diet: a year of eating locally. Image: Random House Canada

Until the salmon have been considered, nothing has been considered. The Pacific coast is a salmon landscape, salmon rivers and salmon forests, and in a “big year,” the peak of a four-year cycle, 50 million sockeye may once have moved upstream. I have seen today’s great salmon runs. Not only that, I have swum among the fish, their backs breaking the surface around me with a pleasing, constant rhythm, the way you wish shooting stars might appear in a meteor shower but never do. Yet a run of 50 million fish is astronomically greater, a glimpse into an era when a place could be named Catch ‘em With Your Hands Creek and settlers complained that the splashing of spawning salmon threatened to swamp their canoes. Every creature that eats flesh would have come to the rivers for the feast. Twenty-two forest mammals are known to eat salmon, more species than most people can name. The fish feed even the soil.

And I even think his claim of 22 forest mammals is conservative.

So for your reading pleasure, we’ve contact the publisher, Random House Canada, and they’ve generously agreed to have us post an excerpt of The 100-Mile Diet. So here it is.

• The 100-Mile Diet: a year of local eating (PDF file, 123 kb, pp. 132—143)

If you’re interested in learning more about the 100-Mile Diet in practice, visit the 100-Mile Diet website for easy ways to shift your food to local sources and the latest news on local eating.