100-Mile Diet nominated for 2 B.C. book awards

The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating, a book by Vancouver authors J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith that has kick-started a national debate about locally grown food, has been nominated for two British Columbia book awards.

The 100-Mile Diet has been nominated for both the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize and the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize.

For one year, the couple only ate food that came from within a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver home, an experiment that helped raise significant questions about wherefood comes from and why it's so difficult to find foods grown locally.

Grassroots interest in the experiment has spanned the country and the world, with local farmers' markets seeing a surge of interest after the publication.

The shortlists for B.C. book prizes were announced Thursday in Vancouver.

In the non-fiction category, The 100-Mile Diet is competing with an ecologist's exploration of gardening, Interwoven Wild: An Ecologist Loose in the Garden by Don Gayton.

Also nominated are a history of treatment of Chinese and Japanese in B.C., The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941-67 by Patricia E. Roy, a book of philosophy, Everywhere Being Is Dancing by Robert Bringhurst, and a book of essays about travel and the natural world, Phantom Limb by Theresa Kishkan.

David Chariandy's Governor General's Award-nominated novel Soucouyant, about a Caribbean upbringing in Ontario, is nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Other nominees for the fiction award are:

• Adam's Peakby Heather Burt.
• Conceit by Mary Novik.
• Radiance by Shaena Lambert.
• The Reckoning of Boston Jim by Claire Mulligan.

For the regional writing prize, The 100-Mile Diet is competing with a book that is a lament for the lost wild salmon culture of B.C., The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture by Tim Bowling.

Also nominated in that category are:

• Fortune's a River: The Collision of Empires in the Pacific Northwest by Barry Gough.
• The Last Wild Wolves: Ghosts of the Rain Forest by Ian McAllister.
• Spirit in the Grass: The Cariboo-Chilcotin's Forgotten Landscape by Chris Harris

Harris's book, about an endangered grasslands ecosystem, and McAllister's study of two packs of wolves who live on the B.C. coast each earned a second nomination for the B.C. Bookseller's Choice Award.

Also up for that award are A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah's memoir of being a boy soldier in Sierra Leone; Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographsand The Blue Flames That Keep Us Warm: Mike McCardell's Favourite Stories.

The nominees for the award for literature for older children were:

• The Alchemist's Dream by John Wilson.
• Baboon: A Novel by David Jones.
• The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane by Polly Horvath.
• For Now by Gayle Friesen.
• Porcupine by Meg Tilly.

In the picture book category the nominees are:

• The Day It All Blew Away by Lisa Cinar.
• Elf the Eagle by Ron Smith.
• Jeffrey and Sloth by Kari-Lynn Winters.
• Pink by Nan Gregory.
• A Sea-Wishing Day by Robert Heidbreder.

The winners will be announced April 26 at the lieutenant-governor's B.C. Book Prize gala.