March 10th, 2011 by Chris Eng

I love this more than words can say.

August 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating
Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon
(Vintage)
ISBN: 978-0679314837

At some point, my aunt asked me to review something happy in order to help assuage my cousin, who apparently is going through what I went through a year or so ago and is suffering a bit of the “PEAK OIL IS HAPPENING TO US AND CIVILIZATION IS GOING TO COLLAPSE AND WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE IN A ROAD WARRIOR-LIKE WASTELAND!” And my mom, after I handed her my copy of Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (because I thought she might appreciate the info therein), asked, “This isn’t going to make me depressed, is it?”

Yeah, I guess there’s a lot of gloom and depression mixed in with environmental books nowadays, because (depending on who the author is) it’s either too late or almost too late to fix things in the world, and while that may be the actual state of affairs, it’s not exceptionally heartening to have it repeatedly hammered into your skull. This review, then, is for my cousin, mother and anyone else who may want to read a book review of something inspiring a certain degree of hope.

The premise of The 100 Mile Diet is simple: a couple decide that all they’ll eat for a year are those things which can be produced within a 100 mile radius of where they live. The premise provides ample opportunity for elitism, snobbiness and hard-linery to proliferate in the book and could have easily turned into a proscription for Righteous Living, but it is miraculously devoid of more or less any of that, instead making its case as a sensible suggestion. This is a marked difference from the usual doomsaying environmental bestsellers who seem to think that telling you “IF YOU DON’T LIVE YOUR LIFE THIS WAY, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!” is a practical and non-alienating course of action. In fact, without trying to give too much away (SPOILER ALERT: they make it through the year), at the end of the book they go back to eating some of the things they weren’t allowed to. But that’s essentially Alisa Smith and JB McKinnon’s point: for all of us to move into an ethical future is for all of us to live as ethically as we can and do the best we can; not to embrace some unrealistic hairshirt environmental dogma which requires us to martyr ourselves for unattainable goals that nobody else cares about.

No, there is no coffee grown within a hundred miles of Vancouver (which, coincidentally, is where I’m from and where Smith and McKinnon are based). But there are free trade and ethical choices you can make in your coffee consumption. Or black tea. Or chocolate. Because again, no one is asking you to be a monk—just do what you can. What the book does encourage, though, is putting in the footwork and not giving up in your quest for viable alternatives. By putting themselves in a situation where they couldn’t bend the rules, they were forced to keep looking for things like wheat, which—despite the lack of grain farmers on BC’s coast—they eventually found. Yes, we who occupy the Vancouver/Victoria area tend to be a little spoiled in our options, because most things can be grown in our neck of the woods, but wherever there have been permanent settlements of humans, there have been the means to thrive locally. Of course, that equation has become pretty skewed with the rise of the metropoli—you can’t feed a city of 1,000,000+ on purely organic, locally raised food (not under our current structure, anyway)—but the general principle is sound.

But why, you wonder to yourself, would I want to eat locally in the first place—what’s the point? Well, there are a few of them.

- Locally grown food is more nutritious. It’s not that organic produce has a bigger selection of vitamins or nutrients than vegetables grown on industrial farms, but local produce is generally picked much closer to its sale date than the stuff in your supermarket. Since produce accumulates nutrients as it approaches ripeness, it only makes sense that a tomato picked the day before it’s sold will be more nutritious that one that’s picked and shipped when it’s still green.
- Locally grown food is likely to be more ecologically sound. Some small-scale farmers use toxic pesticides and chemically-laden fertilizer, but not all of them do, and if you’re buying from the grower personally, you can ask what their standards and practices are yourself. Plus, on a very basic level, locally grown food is good for the environment because growing things benefits the environment. I hope I don’t have to explain this point.
- Buying local is also good for the economy—your local economy. It will probably cost more to shop that way, yeah, but if and when post-peak oil becomes a reality, food prices will start to go through the roof regardless, and I’d rather pay higher prices and support someone I know on a first-hand basis because I buy from them all the time than funnel my hard-earned food dollars into a faceless corporation’s coffers in exchange for some comparatively bland food.
- Which brings us ’round to the last (and possibly most) compelling reason: locally-grown food tastes better. It does. Seriously. Vegetables are delicious enough to eat steamed with maybe a touch of butter. Dishes in general require very little seasoning due to their nearly overwhelming natural flavours. No, the stuff we’re used to eating in packages isn’t what food is supposed to taste like—it’s a “good enough” approximation of a home-cooked meal. Somewhere along the line, though, we forgot what scratch-cooked food was actually like and accepted the food corporations’ assertions that what they were giving us was the real deal—besides, it was faster and even if it wasn’t excellent it was still, well, good enough. But the thing you have to prepare yourself for is that once you start eating local food, “good enough” isn’t good enough. You may keep eating it, but you’ll likely come to view it as filler in between the meals made with organic veggies and meat.

And what if you’re in a position where you don’t have access to a farmer’s market or its equivalent? The 100 Mile Diet also has buckets of inspiration to go around. Thanks to the non-preachy, non-guilt laden approach, you may find yourself inclined to do some gardening by the time you’re done… or bee-keeping… or cheese-making… or salt-distilling… or, for that matter, any combination of the above. None of these are impossible, and not all of them are necessarily very hard. We (as a culture) had most of the skills it takes to do those things up until 100 years ago or so—we’ve just forgotten them in the meantime. Smith and McKinnon have written a book encouraging us to reacquire them, and I’d encourage you to do the same. Moreover, I encourage you to do it for purely selfish reasons (on your part) but toward an altruistic end. You may or may not contribute to the ultimate salvation of our world by buying local food, but you’ll certainly contribute to the betterment of your diet and palate by doing so. To paraphrase Buckley’s, it tastes awesome and it works.

July 12th, 2009 by Chris Eng

I managed to spend three consecutive days this week gaming. Tabletop gaming, by which I mean board games, card games and roleplaying games (or ‘RPGs’). You know—dice rolling, good times. What you may not have known is that by playing D&D and throwing those funny dice all those years (assuming you have been), you were contributing to the welfare of the planet. It’s true. There are several reasons why, but let’s start with the obvious one:

1) Tabletop games don’t use electricity. You don’t need to plug in your D&D books or your Monopoly board. You don’t need to hook them up to the TV (unless you’re playing Scene It or one of those other DVD games, but we’ll put those aside) and you don’t need to have anything in order to play them except for friends and enough light to see by. They are, in most regards, an environmentally sound choice. In comparison, computer video games suck power from the CPU and monitor, and console games need a TV and video game system. For that matter, consoles also often suck power even when they aren’t turned on (not a lot, but consider how many consoles are plugged in around the world right this minute). And what are you going to do if the power cuts out and you’re in the middle of an adventure? If you’re playing a console/PC game, probably curse loudly and start yelling about the fact that the last save point was over a half hour ago. If you’re playing tabletop, grab some candles and keep going.

2) Tabletop games are social. “But,” the Halo fans splutter, “video games are social!” Yes, some of them are. MMOs, in particular, lend themselves quite well to social events, like raids—but you’re still talking about voice chatting, not actual face-to-face interaction. And even when things get out of control in a D&D game (which I’ve seen happen), you generally don’t say things to people in front of you that you might to someone over your headset. For proof of this, please refer to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Having a 13 year-old boy yell “faggot” over and over at you during literally any given Xbox Live game isn’t socializing, no matter what you say. In the latest episode of THAC0 (a entertaining gaming and geek culture podcast to which I listen on a regular basis), they discussed their reasons for tabletop gaming and the most quoted reason was their social aspect. Roleplaying is collaborative storytelling—it’s necessarily social—and since the limits on what your character can do are literally the limits of your imagination, you are automatically assured of more options than any MMO out there.

3) Tabletop games encourage literacy. Roleplaying games sure do. What, you’re telling me you’re gonna play D&D without being able to read? You can’t—the two go hand-in-hand. For this reason, RPGs are great for kids with learning disabilities. They might not want to read generally because of the amount of work involved, but if you’re simultaneously encouraging their imagination through gaming, it gives them added incentive to push through the rulebooks. This, in turn, is imparting necessary skills to kids who might otherwise gloss over them.

4) Tabletop gaming encourages cognitive thinking. Strategy is a huge part of board games. C’mon—chess? It’s nothing but strategy. People spend their entire lives focused on developing that one new chess strategy nobody else has ever thought of. I’m not sure doing that is particularly healthy, but strategic thought, problem solving and thinking outside the box are more skills that can’t necessarily be taught but can certainly be fostered via gaming. RPGs also teach those skills, but in a less-structured way. While chess has very rigidly defined rules about how any of the pieces might move in a given situation, RPGs don’t—you solve a problem with the equipment your character has on-hand and whatever plan seems most likely for them to follow. Group strategizing in RPGs can actually be pretty time-consuming overall, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun—taking time to plan and then watching how your plan simultaneously comes together and goes awry is one of the principal pleasures of the hobby.

5) Tabletop gaming encourages concentration. I learned how to paint lead miniatures this week. Somehow, over the years, this became one of those quintessentially geeky areas of expertise that I never managed to pick up. To be fair, when I was a kid, I tried it, but since I didn’t have anyone to teach me even the most basic steps, my minis ended up looking like glazed shite and I stopped shortly after I started. This time around, I had an awesome instructor in my friend Neil, who paints regularly. As you can see, the results were much more satisfactory:

Yeah, the picture is kind of washed out, but you get a sense of it. This particular mini took me five hours to paint. Most professional painters (or ones who seriously pursue it as a hobby, anyway) will spend much longer than that on a single figure. It’s a long time committment on a tiny scale and it forces you to both look at the details and to pull back to see how it looks from a distance. It definitely promotes concentration and (maybe surprisingly) is quite relaxing.

6) Dollar for dollar, tabletop games give better value. A copy of Arkham Horror may cost the same as one of Prototype (for any given system), but I pretty much guarantee you’ll get better value from Arkham. Assuming you enjoy the game and treat the pieces with respect, it will last you quite possibly the rest of your life. Your new video game will last you until one of a few things happens: maybe you’ll get bored of it, maybe you’ll plough through it in epic time and not look at it again, maybe your system will become obsolete. Yes, you can absolutely get bored of tabletop games, but the well-designed ones stand the test of time. If I asked you to play a hit video game from twenty years ago and tell me how it stacks up to a next gen console release, what do you think you’d say? Sure, I play old video games, but I’m ancient (in video gaming terms) so I have nostalgia for Wizard of Wor and Infocom. But when gaming nostalgia requires that you either save every single console system you’ve ever owned (which can take up a ludicrous amount of space) or, in the case of computer games, that you continue to download patches so that you can play older games on newer OSes, it becomes a chore and starts requiring an outlay or either time or storage space. Even downloading ROMs for your favourite games requires that you update your software on a semi-regular basis. Scrabble, on the other hand, takes up exactly the same amount of space it always has and is maintenance-free.

Yeah, tabletop games have their drawbacks. Board game boards are made from carboard and many of them contain an ASSLOAD of plastic pieces; roleplaying books are made from paper (and hence dead trees). But nothing is cost-free. I mean, if you want a gaming experience with no environmental drawbacks, you could sit around with your friends in the dark and play “What Number Am I Thinking Of?”, but the replay value is poor and the next time Gaming Night rolls around your friends will just conveniently forget to invite you. If you are genuinely concerned about the pieces and packaging, though, I recommend you check out Cheapass Games. Hell, listen to their production strategy:

“Cheapass Games come with the bare essentials: boards, cards, and rulebooks. If you need anything else, we’ll tell you. And it’s probably something you can scrounge from a game you already own, or buy at a hobby store for less than “they” are charging you for it. Heck, if you need to, you can even buy the parts from us. And once you’ve assembled your collection of generic small parts, you can use them for every new Cheapass Game. We’ve standardized our designs so your gaming toolbox will last.”

And their games are fun. ‘Kill Dr. Lucky’, their flagship game, has easily as much replay value as anything in the $30+ price range, yet comes to around $10. Like their name says: cheapass, and hence better value.

I’m not going to tell you which tabletop games are the best—everyone out there has different tastes and there are games to cater to all of them—but I will encourage you to go down to your local games shop (most of which keep playable demo copies of the most popular and fun games) and try out something new. Because if we all work together, tabletop gaming will be on its way to saving the world… one die roll at a time.