December 1, 2010 | By Hannelore Sudermann | No Comments »
Categories: Agriculture, Food Science and Human Nutrition, Health sciences
Tags: Agriculture, food safety, food security, Seattle, Small Farms, Washington State University, WSU
When we think about food safety, we usually think about protecting ourselves from food-borne illnesses like salmonella and E.coli. But another type of food safety has caught the concern of community leaders in Seattle and around the Puget Sound – that of ensuring a safe and consistent food supply for a growing population.
This weekend (Dec. 4 and 5, 2010) a number of Northwest scientists and policy makers are meeting in Seattle to talk about how to grow and distribute enough food to sustain our population. The premise of the conference, titled “Cultivating Regional Food Security: Recent Research in Urban-Rural Food Systems,” is that our region’s food supply could be endangered by any number of factors including population growth and sprawl, climate change, damage to our transportation networks, and rising energy costs.
According to the agenda, “The urgency is to plan now for increased food production in our area, strengthened markets for producers, and conservation efforts to ensure safe food and a healthy environment.”
And the event, co-sponsored by Washington State University Extension and the University of Washington’s Botanic Gardens is riddled with WSU experts who have been thinking and working on just this subject. WSU’s Small Farms Program director Marcia Ostrom plans to talk about where our food is currently coming from. Chad Kruger, interim director of WSU’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, will examine climate-friendly food and whether locally-produced food is better than food from other regions in the United States and outside the country.
Realizing that the food available now is not an adequate supply for our region, the group will discuss changing land use policy so that high-yielding farmland isn’t converted into housing and industry, how others could follow Seattle’s efforts to adapt city codes and programs to promote food production in urban neighborhoods, and how to help local farmers bring their produce to local customers.
For more information about the conference, visit the website: http://depts.washington.edu/uwbg/news/food-security/