Is it illegal to grow your own food?

That is a question that first came to me nearly 20 years ago, when I was the executive director of Our Place Community Ministries in West Central. At issue was whether Our Place could cultivate nearly 15,000 square feet of raw land adjacent to the center and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. I proposed the notion of urban agriculture as a remedy for three reasons: Buying food was getting more and more expensive for our food bank, with incomes stagnant; the food we could afford often only worsened obesity and diabetes concerns; and the land was vacant, unsightly and not a functioning resource for the ministry or neighborhood.

The question the board of directors came back with was: Isn’t it illegal to operate a farm within city limits?

Twenty-years ago that seemed like an odd question in Spokane. At least it seemed odd to me. I grew up on the South Hill in the 1950s. Family gardens and nearby farms dotted the upper South Hill prairie. Cows, horses, pigs, chickens, wheat, alfalfa, orchards and a wide assortment of fruits and vegetables could be found everywhere. Most neighbors easily remembered World War II victory gardens and kept a connection to the land through their expansive backyard gardens.

My grandfather had been a sole-income truck farmer until the land was urbanized into a subdivision.

Like my grandfather’s farm, most of Spokane’s fertile soil has been paved over in the name of progress. Food production first went regional, then global, and now travels an average 1,500 miles to our tables. In many neighborhoods like West Central, this kind of “food absent” progress means a menu of fast food and pop for area youth, or alcohol and cigarettes if you’re a bit older. More than 90 percent of the students at schools like Holmes qualify for free or reduced lunches.

Stores like 7-Eleven and local taverns dispense most meals. Too many within our food bank lines are obese and/or diabetic. Costly emergency room visits manage high blood pressure and heart disease. Calories are readily available, but good, healthy, affordable fresh fruits, vegetables and eggs – real food – are practically nonexistent. This is a crisis repeated nationwide as lower-income residents are forced from the means of growing food into convenience stores, while you and I pick up the exploding costs of health care and lower productivity caused by unhealthy neighbors.

Today, leaders from across Spokane are proposing we codify the legality of urban agriculture by ordinance. Accessible, affordable and healthy food seems a basic human right to me. Allowing and expressly making legal a property owner’s right to grow food, harvest eggs and sell fresh-cut flowers simply returns me to my childhood reality. Since then, I’ve had the privilege to travel between Oakland and Boston and many stops in between to visit and tour innovative urban ag projects as the co-founder and board member of Riverfront Farm and the West Central Farmers Market. (And yes, we now have a neighborhoodwide community garden on that former Our Place parcel.)

Spokane should be proud to join the growing number of metro areas that are acknowledging the food crisis in America and are warmly embracing urban food production.

 Like many great ideas, however, this one may need our help. Corporate interests to keep foreign food on our plates are likely to object. City elected officials will need our aggressive support to localize food options in Spokane. Please join me in contacting Mayor David Condon, City Council President Ben Stuckart and Spokane City Council members ( citycouncil2@spokanecity.org) and urge them to enact the necessary policy and program guidance to make urban agriculture legal in Spokane.