Feeding Your Family, 100-Mile Diet Style – Podcast

Angela St. Cyr shares her tips and tricks to truly live your life on a local diet.



Host: Gloria Tsang, RD

Guest: Angela St. Cyr



Ever wondered what it would truly be like to feed your family only foods that are grown and produced within 100-mile radius of your home? The Food Network Canada featured a 100-Mile Challenge Series in which several families signed up for the challenge of eating only local foods for 100 days. Angela St. Cyr and her family was documented by the Food Network show and shares her tips and tricks to truly live your life on a local diet.







 

Transcript:

Gloria Tsang, RD: Welcome to the Nutrition Tidbits Podcast. This is Gloria Tsang, Editor-in-Chief for HealthCastle.com. Ever wondered what it would truly be like to feed your family only foods that are grown and produced within 100-mile radius of your home? The Food Network Canada featured a 100-Mile Challenge Series in April, in which several families signed up for the challenge of eating only local foods for 100 days. Joining me today is Angela St. Cyr, whose family was documented by the Food Network show. She is here today to share her experience and talk about tips and tricks to truly live your life on a local diet.Thank you for joining me Angela.



Angela St. Cyr: You're welcome, no problem.



Gloria Tsang, RD: Now, you stand out as one of the most creative and resourceful cook out of all the families featured on the show, how and from whom did you learn how to cook?



Angela St. Cyr: When we first got married, we couldn't afford to buy pre-packaged foods. So I just started figuring it out on my own and decided that I really enjoyed it and have stuck with it ever since.



Gloria Tsang, RD: So did you just purchase recipe books, follow them and kind of change it to your way or did you actually go for a cooking class?



Angela St. Cyr: No, I actually purchased a few cookbooks but I have a very short attention span when it comes to reading so I would adapt to the recipes as I saw fit. I would really use them mostly as inspiration and an absolute love of creating food came from that.



Gloria Tsang, RD: One of the biggest shock to the system for all the families and also for the viewers was that when you were asked to purge your kitchen of anything that isn't grown or produced within 100 miles radius of your home, what were some staples or ingredients in your house that was purged out?



Angela St. Cyr: The ones that people don't normally think of, to be honest with you I wasn't even thinking of how important they were and the fact that they weren't local were simple things like baking powder, baking soda, sugar, which is far less expensive than honey. Just some very simple things that you wouldn't normally connect as being pre-packaged foods which is what people immediately think of when they think of eating 100 miles. Well, all pre-packaged foods are gone. You are losing a lot of things that you require to bake also.



Gloria Tsang, RD: Yeah, like wheat and flour and instant noodles, things that we have taken for granted for a long time.



Angela St. Cyr: Yes, absolutely. I don't think we realized how much stuff we were actually purging until that very day.



Gloria Tsang, RD: How did you manage without these ingredients and what are some of the major substitutions you've made?



Angela St. Cyr: At first without the ingredients, it was very difficult and food was really redundant. Again, I love cooking and love creating so I couldn't leave it that way. We learn to adapt recipes to substitute the sugar for honey. Instead of making loaves of bread, which required lots of flour which I didn't have at the time, we started using pancakes for a multitude of things. We even had grilled cheese sandwiches made from pancakes because pancakes t...