James MacKinnon

When the average North American sits down to a meal, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 carbon-fuelled miles. MacKinnon chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple experiment.

For one year, he and his partner bought or gathered their food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia.

His current book, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating (with co-author Alisa Smith), examines this adventure and probes the disconnection between the way we eat and the people and places that produce our food. Writing on a wide variety of topics, MacKinnon has won three National Magazine Awards and is a senior contributing editor at Explore. His first book, Dead Man in Paradise, won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction and looked at the life and controversial death of his uncle, a radical priest in the Dominican Republic. He is also a past editor of Adbusters and speaks regularly on the intersection between politics, travel and the storyteller’s craft.