The Fife Diet: Mike Small started a revolution in his kitchen three years ago and he now has 1,200 dedicated followers

• Mike and Karen Small

A 39-year-old writer and politics lecturer, he was well aware of the carbon costs of buying air-freighted mangos and intensively produced beef on the supermarket run. But what could he do about it?

It took a prawn to stir him into action. More accurately, a container load of prawns, landed in Annan in the south of Scotland then shipped to an industrial estate in Thailand to be shelled and packed. The company, Young's, sacked 120 workers earning 6 an hour in Scotland and moved the work 30 miles west of Bangkok, where staff earn 31p an hour.

Outraged, Small decided the time for shouting at the telly had passed.

"It wasn't just that it was seen as the right thing to do," he recalls. "It was the company's response, that of course this was the right thing to do. They were quite aggressive about it. That was a watershed for me."

Around the same time, a group of green Canadians had started a local eating campaign, called The 100 Mile Diet. "They thought 100 miles was a good radius. I thought that was ridiculous, on a Canadian scale. Let's bring that into a Scottish scale. So I made it a regional framework around Fife."

Small's premise was a simple one. The system of food production whereby prawns are whizzed around the world to have their shells removed is contributing to climate change. So is our huge consumption of meat, and insistence on throwing away around a quarter of the food we buy. Around 30 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases are produced by agriculture. That does not include transport or processing. So he would opt out.

The Small family would, he decided, spend a year eating only food produced in Fife. They would be the genuine turnip Taleban, swapping Spanish strawberries and Kenyan mange touts for a regime of oats, barley and root vegetables their ancestors would recognise.

His wife Karen's initial reaction was that he was bonkers. They had a new baby, Alex, and a three-year-old, Sorley. "She said, 'You're insane, we've got enough stress in our lives. But then she said, 'OK, let's do it anyway'."

Fourteen hardy volunteers agreed to join in and the Fife Diet was launched in Falkland village hall in October 2007 to great national excitement. But not all the coverage was positive.

One journalist suggested that, if Small was so keen on eating locally, he should move to North Korea. Several found it an affront to the free market, perhaps recognising the theory that buying imported produce can help support farmers in developing countries.

Others suggested he was trying to shackle women to the cooker. A particularly affronted chap from Radio Five Live virtually accused him of child abuse. Where, he asked, would Small's children get their sweets?

The short answer was that, for their first year, Alex and Sorley would not be getting any sweets. Nor would their parents. Three years on, Small sees this initial phase as year zero, when all decadent fripperies from the world beyond were ruthlessly eliminated.

It has since been diluted to a more manageable ratio of 80 per cent from Fife, 20 per cent fair trade. But for the first year, it was hardcore. Mostly.

"I went a week without coffee then said, 'I can't do this'," Small recalls. "So we had tea and coffee and sugar." For the rest of the weekly shop, if it wasn't local it wasn't in the basket. And just being processed in Fife did not count.

"There are dairies, and I don't want to slag them off, but they are just appalling, producing rubbish food. Not all local food is good." Three years on, Small is still celebrating the arrival of Anster, an award-winning cow's milk cheese made near Anstruther.

Today, Small probably knows more about the minutiae of Fife's food economy than anyone else in the world. (And he is not even a native Fifer, he is an ex-pat Glaswegian.) Not that the Fife Diet is geographically exclusive. He draws a map that resembles a fried egg to illustrate that, with the region of Fife as the yolk, it was necessary to source food from the white part if the family was to eat more than brambles, parsnips and venison for 12 months.

So the boundaries were stretched to include beer from Clackmannanshire and wine from Perthshire. There is some organic wheat grown in the Howe of Fife but most of their supplies came from East Lothian.

It is shipped up the Tay then milled in Hutcheson's Mill in Kirkcaldy, four miles from the family home. When they heard about the Fife Diet they donated two 25kg bags. This, according to Small, happened quite a lot. "People liked it, they thought we were mad but said, 'Here you are."

In fact, sourcing local food was not the hard part. It was finding time, energy and ideas to cook it. Pasta and pesto becomes less of a ten-minute standby when you have to grind your own wheat and grow your own basil.

"We hadn't anticipated the time involved in cooking everything from scratch because we thought we cooked everything from scratch already. Then we realised, no we don't, we eat pizzas.

With adjustment, and a lot of pancakes, they soon got the hang of it. "The main skill," says Small thoughtfully, "is learning to live within some kinds of limits. What's available now is what we're going to eat. We get an organic vegetable box and we had to work out how we make that feed ourselves for a week. We get eggs from them as well, then top it up with bacon or sausages, a chicken, maybe a fish. That was basically what our diet was, and is: how do we cook with whatever is in the box?"

Judging from their first official recipe booklet, there is more to the Fife Diet than swede surprise and root vegetable braise (although this is the summer edition, when eating local is relatively luxurious). No one would need to wear a hair shirt to dine on chocolate beetroot cupcakes, broad bean and caramelised onion pesto or grilled tomatoes with sage butter. The ingredients might be the same ones their ancestors ate, but their treatment owes much to Delia, Nigella and Jamie Oliver.

As the first year went on, it soon dawned that starting in October was not a brilliant idea, as they had missed the opportunity to stockpile summer produce and fill their freezer with tomato sauce and raspberries for the dreary days of March. But the excitement of the project kept them going, with new Fife Dieters signing up. By the time October came around again, 230 people had joined the crusade.

It's hardly a mass movement. But year zero was essential, says Small, to see exactly what was possible. "After that we wanted to be much more populist and get more people involved. If you say only eat food from Fife, 95 per cent of people are going to say no."

That is a conservative estimate. Which is where the 80-20 ratio comes in. It is Small's way of spinning the Fife Diet from a scary regime of oats and potatoes into a manageable-sounding menu of delicious local produce supplemented with the odd 21st-century "essential".

"When we asked people what they would miss, they said red wine, chocolate, bananas, coffee, citrus fruit. After that they slowed down. When we asked, could you go a year without a mango, most people agreed that we could. So you add to that rice, spices, which have a very low carbon footprint so don't really matter, and maybe some pulses. All that can be in your 20 per cent goods from elsewhere.

"Then we say, could you think about the other 80 per cent of your food being sourced locally? And when you represent it like that, the number of people saying that this is impossible goes right down. Instead they say, well, we could try that. And we have people on a scale that starts at trying one meal a week, right through to the ones who are super enthusiastic and want to go 100 per cent."

Whatever their level, Fife Dieters take five pledges: to buy local, eat less meat, eat more organic, reduce food waste and compost more. They are, unsurprisingly, a healthy bunch. We are meant to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. The Scottish average is three but Fife Dieters, now numbering 1,200 members, manage seven.

Moreover, by cutting out the mindless purchase of unnecessary processed food, as well as making their other pledges, Fife dieters saw their carbon 'foodprint' drop to 27 per cent below the national average. They also saved money: the Smalls reckon their food bill has fallen by at least 20 a week.

Yet what this three-year experiment has shown Small is that there is a limit to what any individual can do. "Food localisation is part of a far wider movement that's saying, we need to restructure our society quickly. The government is still giving planning permission to Tesco and Asda, government policy is still to export food."

Small, in his role as an ambassador, talks to everyone from school children to world-class chefs, and finds little to cheer him in the general population. "I went to a high school in Dundee, right at the beginning. We told them, this is what we're going to do. They all just laughed. Then they were worried about us.

"I asked them, what's your favourite food. One group liked Asda food, the other group liked Tesco food. They didn't think anything grew in their area.

"There's Andrew Fairlie, with two Michelin stars, preparing a dinner for the champagne company Krug at Gleneagles. They wanted seven courses to accompany seven wines, and it was all sourced in Perthshire: lamb, raspberries, venison.

"Then there is Annie Anderson from the Centre for Public Health Nutrition Research in Dundee. She talks about health implications of what we're eating, for children in particular: diabetes, heart diseases, teeth records.

"So there's this gap, the Krug people come to eat food from here, and we don't even get to eat half of it." It is this rage that has got Small through three winters without an orange. But it is working, and the idea of eating locally has taken root in all kinds of places.

Scottish Food and Drink Fortnight is asking people to eat Scottish until 19 September. There is now the Cornish Diet, the Suffolk Diet and the Norfolk Diet, all following a similar menu. Tweedgreen has a 50:50 scheme, asking people to eat food produced within a 50-mile radius of Peebles. Fife Dieters in Dunfermline have started an artisan bakery, the Steamie Bakehouse and several restaurants in the region have started marking locally sourced dishes on their menus.

Is it enough? Not for Small. "We can make significant changes to our own lifestyle but if nothing changes about the system it will still be difficult. We should be making it easy for people."

Or as a certain supermarket might put it, every little helps. n

www.fifediet.co.uk

www.scottishfoodanddrinkfortnight.co.uk

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on Sunday, 5 September, 2010