If it started in Canada why do they call it the 100 mile challenge? Should it not be the 100km challenge? Or if you want to keep the distance the same, why not call it the 160.93 km challenge?

My wife was flipping the channels the other day and came across the 100 mile challenge on the food network. For those of you who don’t know what this is, participants are challenged to go 100 days eating ONLY food originating from within 100 miles of where they live. This includes everything right down to raw goods such as flour, sugar, and salt. If the food you eat has preservatives, all those preservatives must have come from within that 100 mile radius.

My wife has decided that she wants to try this for the month of July. I am not sure what I will do without bread – no wheat is grown around there parts – or sugar, or salt! Yikes! They say you can extract salt from sea water, but I dunno…

I get the concept from an environmental standpoint – the less distance food has to travel, the less the carbon foot print, it all makes good ecological sense – I just don’t know if I can go without all those great foods I have learned to love. At least it’s only for a month.

I started to also think about this challenge from a different perspective, the financial one. With all this economic turmoil and crashing economy, it kind of makes sense to keep as much as, if not all, food purchases local. Not only does it help the environment, but it helps the local economy, which is always a good thing.

Up here in Canada we are certainly feeling the economic crunch – perhaps not as badly as our neighbors to the south, but its still impacting things around here. I don’t want to further damage the US economy, but it seems to me that if more Canadians started buying 100% local, or at least 100% Canadian, it would help all of us Canadians out in the end.

So start small, try eating locally. I think after July is over, I will go back to my ways and start consuming imported products again, but I do plan on purchasing more stuff locally where I can.

Have you ever given much thought about the safety of sharks? I know the first thing that comes to my mind when someone says “shark” is Jaws and the idea that these creatures are nothing but dangerous predators who wouldnt give a second thought about gobbling me up for dinner (I suspect I would be quite tasty). In reality though, sharks, just like all other creatures, are a vital part of the food chain, and they in great danger due to over-fishing (if you can call it that) by some of our human counter-parts.

The practice of “shark-finning” is one that I was totally unaware of until a good friend introduced me to his personal activism website, AntiSharkFinning.com. Fisherman are catching sharks in great numbers, cutting off their fins for delicacies such as shark fin soup, and throwing the sharks back in the oceans, fin-less, to drown.

Not only is this incredibly in-humane, it has driven the shark population down by an estimated 90%, and this trickles through the food-chain to cause other issues in our oceans.

Please take a moment and visit AntiSharkFinning.com to learn more and find out what you can do to help.