David MacKinnon's transition from vegan to moose hunter went about as well as could be expected for a yoga-practising environmentalist who hadn't touched a steak in 12 years.
His conscience suffered when he first killed an animal a year ago, and, as he ate it all winter, his lentil-accustomed stomach felt worse. "I still don't particularly enjoy red meat," he says.
Talk about taking one for the team. The 43-year-old conservation consultant opted to hunt as an alternative to shipping tofu more than 1,000 kilometres to his home in Whitehorse.
In doing so, he joined a growing number of northern residents who have committed to eating locally - in terrain where the growing season is three months and greenhouses are snow-covered most of the year.
Some, like Mr. MacKinnon and his partner, Tanis Davey, are troubled by the environmental costs of shipping their lemons and lettuce north.
Others want tastier and cheaper items than what they find wilting on supermarket shelves.
"It was tomatoes that convinced me to switch," says Anne Foster, a librarian from Fairbanks, Alaska, who started tip-sharing website Last Frontier Locavores a year ago. "It takes them so long to get here that they really don't have any flavour."
The trend is part of an eat-local movement that's reached a tipping point in large southern centres, where farmers' markets are usually available year-round and restaurants that source their ingredients locally are in high demand.
This week, Vancouver city council followed several major U.S. cities and approved a plan to allow urban dwellers to keep chickens in their own backyards. And next month, a new reality show by the Canadian authors of the hit book 100 Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating will premiere on the Food Network. It will follow residents of Mission, B.C. in their quest to eat locally for a year.
But growing herbs in British Columbia's fertile Lower Mainland is one thing. Doing it in Alaska or Labrador is quite another.
The summer growing season, for starters, is very short. Non-stop sun can produce monster cabbages - but the light can be so intense that greenhouse plants must be shielded or they'll burn.
Storage can also be a problem. In Alaska, Ms. Foster recently (and reluctantly) trolled her local supermarket's produce aisle for the first time since May after her stored onions "evaporated into dry spheres of papery skin." Her friend Robyn Russell is toughing it out on frozen kale.
Still, the high cost of shipping food by air, highway, ice road or boat, means northern residents are facing more than green pressure to source their food from where they live.
"We've had several times when the [store] shelves were pretty bare," says Annette Stapenhorst, who lives in North West River, a central Labrador community that depends largely on food trucked in from Quebec to feed its population of 500 people. "It doesn't make you feel that secure in your food supply."
Ms. Stapenhorst, a nutritionist working with the local aboriginal community, says people have a lot to learn from natives, who traditionally subsisted on caribou, fish, berries and tubers. But, like many, she's not willing to give up vegetables and dairy.
That's why she's among those northern residents who are lobbying for more systematic support, including government subsidies for local farmers and better storage systems, so it becomes feasible to sell produce year-round.
In the Yukon, such efforts resulted in the purchase of a mobile abattoir, so hunters and farmers can butcher their meat on the spot. In Iqaluit, the first community greenhouse opened two summers ago. In Antarctica, scientists have successfully developed a hydroponics system that grows crops including tomatoes, lettuces, cucumbers, capsicums, beans, zucchinis, spinach, snow peas, fennel, coriander and basil.
All these steps excite Andrew McCann, instructor of a new online course on sustainable local food production. "In many ways, marginal regions are sort of beacons, because those are the places where sustainable practices haven't been pushed off [for as long as urban centres]," says McCann, who's based at St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Ont.
Mr. MacKinnon and Ms. Davey will be among the first to hit Whitehorse's giant - and popular - farmers' market come spring, but they're also determined to grow as much as possible themselves.
Their snow-buried greenhouse will soon be packed with herbs and tomatoes and squash. Their 4-year-old son will enjoy raspberries and blueberries picked by his mom. They're hoping the two apple trees they planted will pay off. And they continue to celebrate when one of their neighbours comes up with an ingenious solution, such as a kiwi plant that grows in Siberia.
Mr. MacKinnon enjoys the salmon he catches, but the jury's still out on the moose.
"I'm not 100 per cent certain I would continue," he said of the hunting, noting he's still exploring ways of getting his protein while minimizing his carbon footprint. Such eco-consciousness is a family trait: He's the brother of James MacKinnon, who wrote 100-Mile Diet with his partner, Alisa Smith.
Ms. Davey jokes her family faces one more food hurdle: the dinner invitation.
"It's like, oh God, what do we say?" she says. "Well, we're vegan but we eat moose and caribou and organic, locally-grown free-range eggs?"
