Category: Local and Regional Food

Wonder Bread or Wonderful Bread?

Chances are your family’s daily bread is just another item on your list when you shop at your favorite supermarket. Let’s take a closer look at what you’re bringing home; your bread may be “in disguise.” It’s pretty clear that fluffy loaves of mass-produced soft, damp, nutritionally deficient, chemical-laced bread made in large industrial “bread factories” and sold in tightly sealed plastic bags contain additives and preservatives to make them easy to process and to give them a long shelf life. But what about the rest of those loaves lined up just asking to be dropped into your shopping cart?

This Much and No More – Jubilee Biodynamic Farm: Small is Beautiful

Erick and Wendy Haakenson, and their son David and his wife Kristin, are farming in a floodplain skirted by the Snoqualmie River. An active farm nearly for 25 years, Jubilee Biodynamic Farm is home to one of the largest and oldest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs in the state. Jubilee is an intensively managed, diversified farm comprised of 14 acres of fruits, vegetables, and grains and around 35 acres devoted to beef cattle, pigs, sheep, chickens, and ducks.

What Can We Do With the Color Green?

I wish by some miraculous turn of events, I could say “Abracadabra”… and poof… America would fall in love with vegetables as I did – decades ago. I resist owning how much of an anomaly I really am (because I LOVE VEGETABLES).

Thinking About Going WWOOFing?

Kate and Ian are WWOOFing in the North East; their advice for others wanting to try it: “It’s likely you’ll also come out of it with a couple of good stories, some delicious recipes, a few great friends, and at least one place you’ll always remember.”

Keep Farmland for Farmers

We have a real problem now in Washington state; especially close to cities where bankers and real estate hacks are turning protected farm easements into horse ranches for the wealthy. There is nothing strong to protect valuable farm soils in critical service areas, to insure that the resource will be used to grow good food for local markets.

Buy local? Why local? Time for the REAL story!

Getting our food from the farm to the consumer – the “supply chain” – is certainly not as simple as it was the past. Once upon a time, the consumer, his/her family, and the local community WERE the growers and a supply chain didn’t exist. Transportation from the field and barn to the kitchen was a matter of feet or yards, not miles. What once was a simple connection with one or two stops along the way, has become a spaghetti-like tangle of connections, links, and cross-links to get fresh fruits and vegetables to your plate.

Preserving Our Farmland: PCC Farmland Trust and Jubilee Biodynamic Farm

What does farmland protection have to do with what’s on your dinner table? Or maybe it should be put this way: What does what’s on your dinner table have to do with farmland protection? Think about it… Today, the typical American prepared meal contains, on average, ingredients from at least five countries outside the US. What if we had to grow our food “back home?”

Can Western Washington Feed Itself?

Studies providing real information about food production and consumption, especially incorporating local and regional data from the private sector, are increasingly important yet difficult to obtain. Those people involved in food policy and urban planning are hard pressed for both the funding and access to accurate data to prepare adequate studies. Nonetheless, an accurate view of the amount of perishable food that is produced or comes into a region and is being consumed or disposed is critical to the improvement of the food system. The Western Washington Foodshed Study is one of those reports.