Andrea and Jeff Marshall try to follow “The 100 Mile Diet,” choosing food and drink produced within 100 miles of where they live. It’s not easy, but when they moved to Prince Edward County it got a whole lot easier. Andrea and Jeff run Picton’s Canadian Tire, and here they tell their 100 Mile Diet story:

“The County is a wonderful place to do it, especially in summer. We get a weekly delivery of fruit and vegetables from Vicki’s Veggies, our Christmas turkey comes from Carson Bay Farms, and the freezer is filled with local meat, poultry and produce.

Vicki sends a weekly email with recipes for what’s in the box, which is useful when you get something you’ve never seen before! It makes us more adventurous in the kitchen.

We have two small children, and buying and preparing local food lets them see what real food is and where it comes from. It forces you to chop and slice and spend time in the kitchen and demonstrates that food doesn’t have to come in a package. Hope, our daughter, is three and she eats anything.

We like to eat together as a family. We chose to buy a Canadian Tire franchise so we could work together, too, and the County was on our shortlist of places to be, but we were sent to Saskatchewan first. Now, we thought of Saskatchewan as Canada’s breadbasket, so we were surprised there was no farmers market or roadside stands where we were, and not much local food in the stores.

It’s almost impossible to be 100% on the 100 Mile Diet, but it’s easier here. I’d say we’re 80%. I pass Hagerman’s farm stand on my way to work, Sobeys and Pierson’s Foodland stock a lot of local produce, you can even get flour from Cherryvale farm, and our milk is from Reids Dairy.

I guess it’s always been like that for people who live here, and County produce is getting well known these days outside the County. When we first came we took a while deciding what things we would sponsor as a company. We chose TASTE! because it fits with what we believe in: supporting real food and local producers.

A couple of books changed our lives. “In Defense of Food” and “Fast Food Nation” in particular are about how much our food gets modified and processed and messed with these days. Why do we truck peaches from California when we grow peaches in Ontario? The message is reduce the carbon footprint of our food, be cautious of anything in a package that lists more than five ingredients, and if your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, leave it alone.