Quick:

• Can you name three crops grown commercially in King County?
• In what months are each of these crops harvested?

If you don’t know the answers, you’re not alone. In fact, I didn’t know either and had to call WSU’s King County Extension to find out. Right about now you may be asking,

• Who cares?
• Why does it matter what grows in King County?

Well, I’ll try and tell you why I think it matters and why I think we should care.

I am part of the 20% of the world’s population that uses 67% of the planet’s resources and generates 75% of its pollution. Chances are, you are, too. In addition, the people of the United States, comprising only 5% of the world’s population, use a full quarter of its fuels.

Now what on earth do these statistics have to do with King County agriculture? According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the two main areas where Americans take the biggest bite out of the world’s resources are transportation and, get this, food. The average food item in the U.S. travels 1300 miles to get from its source to your plate. Let’s say you eat, oh, 11 such items in a day. After a year, your food would have traveled more than five million miles! Multiply that by the 295 million people in the country and you can see why our food uses so much fuel.

God gave us the role of stewards of the creation He called “good.” As Christians, we need to take this role seriously—after all, it’s our God-given responsibility—and that means working toward minimizing the amount of pollution we produce and not being greedy gobblers of our earth’s finite resources.

Quite apart from overt environmental concerns are questions of social justice:

• Where did this food come from?
• What people grew or picked it and for what wages?
• What deadly pesticides were they exposed to?
• What child worked 12 hours in a field instead of going to school?
• What species was driven toward extinction, what people group displaced from their land so I could drink this coffee and eat this banana bread?

These are the questions, even more than the environmental ones, that make me uneasy about buying food whose origins I don’t know. I do not want to be one of the rich people the Apostle James excoriates:

“Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts….you have fattened yourselves in a day of slaughter.”

But knowing the answers to these questions is almost impossible—unless you know the grower.

Furthermore, supporting local food sustains a way of life that is as old as the dawn of agriculture—and is dying out. Over the past 50 years in this country, nearly half a million people per year have left their farms. In Washington alone, nearly 4200 family farms disappeared in the five years from 1997-2002. Every year more than 23,000 acres of farmland in Washington are converted to residential housing and their accompanying strip malls. Puget Sound is the country’s fifth most threatened region for farmland loss. Once we lose farmland, we don’t get it back, and that forces us to rely on food that comes from further and further away, thus perpetuating the thousands of miles per meal problem I spoke of earlier.

So, what are we to do about this sorry state of affairs? Eating locally grown, locally produced food enables us to use less fuel for its transportation; puts us in a more direct relationship with the farmers who grow what we eat and, especially if we eat organically grown local food, largely eliminates questions of slave wages, child labor, pesticide use, and resource exploitation; and supports local growers in their hard-working endeavor to preserve our area’s farmland for future generations. 

For the third year, Bethany will offer its members the opportunity to participate in a CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture. By paying a set fee up front, you get a whole summer’s worth of organic vegetables grown right here in the greater Puget Sound region. [learn more]

As great as I find the satisfaction of supporting local farmers, I must confess it’s the taste of their food that really keeps me invested. No store-bought produce can even come close to the flavor of food picked from the field in the morning and sitting on your table at dinnertime. Eating locally helps us remember what food is supposed to taste like!

Answers: Commercial crops in King County include rhubarb (ripens April-June), pumpkin (October-November), and lettuce (May-November). Farmers here also grow baby corn, celery, edamame, pea shoots, radishes, and lots more! There are also a significant number of dairy farms in the county.