Blessing the Hands that Feed Us by Vicki Robin

popcorn had somehow rubbed my colon raw, I ate white rice for a week and did the test again. Same results. Next came the colonoscopy. Then came the news no one ever wants to hear: you have cancer.
    As it was colon cancer, you’d think I’d have made some link to diet, but I didn’t. I told whomever came at me with their latest theory of food and cancer, “I eat kale on my hands and knees in the garden. I eat broccoli. If I had to limit myself to one food group, it would be ‘green.’”
    Still, I became a magnet for cancer-curing diet recommendations. Brown rice. Seaweed. Wheat grass juice. Juicing in general (one friend had a juicer delivered to my home as soon as she heard the diagnosis). Carrots, celery, greens, beets, cucumbers, ginger—send it all down the neck of the juicer and drink your way to health. Blueberries, bananas, cranberries. Orange food. Yellow food. Red food. Stop drinking coffee—but take it as an enema.
    As I quietly assessed these diets for myself, I recognized in them the same mentality as in weight-loss diets: a pummeling of the flesh to fix a perceived problem.
    Of course I preferred life to death and being fit over being fat. But the “fixing” mind leaves no room for the quieter, more difficult work of going within to find what’s true. When you lose trust in yourself to know what is good for you and in your body as a self-healing, self-regulating miracle, you become the patsy for every quack cure and ersatz diet. So I thanked everyone for their concern and told them to keep their good ideas to themselves.
    Traditional peoples, I also reasoned, didn’t have to wonder about food choices. Some based their diets on corn, some on wheat, some on rice, some on whale blubber, and you know what? If any of those diets was wrong, none of us would be here today. Chew on that. One great wonder of the world is that our bodies can transform just about anything that isn’t poison into food for us—day in and day out.
    No, cancer didn’t change anything about my diet.
    Setting the Table for My 10-Mile Month
    As the cancer crisis receded, the triple crisis heaved up on the horizon, groaning like a distressed frigate about to come apart at the seams. I couldn’t ignore it.
    Transition Whidbey had mobilized a lot of energy. Hundreds attended our monthly events called Potlucks with a Purpose—a magic combination of eating, socializing, networking, and an open mike where people offered their surplus, asked for what they needed, celebrated their wins, and announced their events. A lecture would fill the minds once the body and heart were satisfied—most often with information that would jolt us into awareness and action. At the end, new or ongoing action groups had time to meet.
    Even so, these potlucks did not
fix
anything. My inner “Uh-oh, we’re in deep doodoo” meter was still in the red; we weren’t moving far enough or fast enough to make difference enough in time. To add insult to injury, I wasn’t doing it either. No longer my old paragon of sustainability virtue, I had allowed a complex and costly life to grow up around me. In my old community house, shared with half a dozen people, I had only a few hundred square feet to call my own. Now I owned a two-thousand-square-foot split-level people box—and lived here alone! Back then, my ecological footprint was four acres, on par with a Mexican.
    Now it was seventeen acres, which means if everyone lived as I do, it would take four planets to provide for us. I was far from integrity, given what I knew of overshoot. The pressure to either jettison my values or do something about them increased. Thanks to Tricia’s challenge I was now accountable to someone else—and a
very
generous person at that. I would finally make a
very
-good-faith effort to eat
very
locally. The 10-mile diet did what cancer could not: get me to engage enthusiastically with limiting my last