The fourth-annual gathering of some dedicated UVA foodies.
By Andrew Jenner

To Dana Smith, the meal had all the appearances of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, and in most ways, it was just that—turkey, pies, sweet potatoes, and eggnog, spread across several tables. But this Thanksgiving meal satisfied on a deeper level: Nearly everything had been grown, made, brewed, or otherwise concocted within 100 miles of Charlottesville.

Filling a church fellowship hall were dozens of happily chatting students, faculty, friends, and family of the UVA department of urban and environmental planning. As the crowd worked its way down the buffet line, guests read and discussed the recipe cards that sat beside each dish, explaining where the ingredients had come from. Then, while seated to eat in smaller groups, they continued to parse the most adventuresome and tastiest of the 100-mile dishes, each of which was prepared by someone in attendance.

Tim Beatley, a renowned professor of sustainable communities, introduced the 100-mile Thanksgiving idea to his department in 2006, after meeting Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, writers from Vancouver who popularized the concept in their book The 100-mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating.

Fortunately, sourcing a 100-mile Thanksgiving dinner is relatively easy in Central Virginia. The famous Polyface Farm turkeys from Swoope take center stage each year. There have been apples from Carter Mountain Orchard and potatoes from the Cason Brothers Farm, both just outside Charlottesville. There’s been squash grown at Appalachia Star Farm in Roseland, breads and rolls made from flour milled at Wade’s Mill in Raphine, eggnog from Homestead Creamery in Wirtz (squeaking in at 97 miles from Charlottesville, as the crow flies), wines from, well, take your pick. And this year, some of the meal will come from the Charlottesville City Market, which is open later into the season than it has been in the past. Some ingredients will even be sourced from the new UVA oncampus community garden, which is entirely managed by students.

Sharing a Thanksgiving meal has been a tradition for more than a decade among the students and faculty in this department. And in the past three years, as local foods have enjoyed increasing prominence, this Thanksgiving celebration has become a practical expression of support for local food systems.

“Food is now very much on our agenda in a way that it didn’t used to be, even a decade ago,” says Beatley. “We are very concerned about planning communities that celebrate local food production.”

Smith, now a second-year graduate student in the department, made a salad for last year’s meal. She says one of the nicest side benefits of preparing her dish was the opportunity it gave her to find new stores that sell local food, and producers who grow it. She used lettuce grown at Walker Upper Elementary School, where she’d volunteered at an after-school garden club, and mixed it with other vegetables from Integral Yoga Natural Foods and Foods of All Nations.

“It’s really an opportunity to be creative with your dishes,” Smith says. Take the cranberry, a Thanksgiving staple that just doesn’t thrive in the area. After a failed attempt to grow some cranberries of his own, Beatley turned to raspberries from his own yard (picked and frozen beforehand) for a tasty substitute. He also drew on Native American food know-how for his trademark acorn bread, made with flour ground from acorns he gathered on campus and sweetened with Highland County maple syrup.

“With a few exceptions,” Beatley says, “there’s a substitute for almost anything that comes from thousands of miles away.”

Occasionally bending the rules, however, is an important part of the 100-mile Thanksgiving’s success. “We can’t be 100 percent purists,” says Tanya Denckla Cobb, associate director of UVA’s Institute for Environmental Negotiation.

Denckla Cobb, who is known for the bread she brings, says that the yeast, baking soda, and baking powder she uses probably don’t meet the 100-mile guidelines. Others also take a non-Puritan approach to ingredients like nutmeg or salt.

This year, Smith is working with classmates to organize the celebration for November 20. They hope that a number of pre-Thanksgiving activities—field trips to local farms, vineyards, and orchards, and workshops on canning and freezing—will build enthusiasm.

That excitement for local foods is a critical part of what the 100-mile Thanksgiving is meant to accomplish. “It’s ultimately about reconnecting to the places in which we live,” says Beatley, “and to the people and landscapes that sustain us.”