Portland is beating Seattle at something

As much as it pains us to say it, Portland has finally beat us at something. The city could, hypothetically, sustain itself entirely on local food.

Whereas Seattle &#8212 surrounded by water and mountains &#8212 wouldn’t be able to feed half its population, even if we all switched to a vegetarian diet.

However, Professor Elliott Campbell isn’t totally apocalyptic about it.

“If you brought in that food shed to a 100 miles, you could feed 100 percent of the people in Seattle with just local food,” he said.

Campbell, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California Merced, looked at different major U.S. cities with one question in mind: Can local food go from a niche market to a major one?

Not in Seattle. And it’s not just geography playing against us. It’s our success.

“Urban sprawl is a big issue,” Campbell said. “So as agriculture lands are abandoned around cities, we have less potential to feed those cities with local food. Atlanta, for example, was a hot spot in our results. It’s surrounded by land, but so much of that is now converted to residential use.”

And no one seems to be hitting the brakes on growth.

“Our coastal cities are going to keep growing,” he said. “The historical trend is the potential to support our cities with local food has decreased in time. An open question now is with the continued growth that we expect in the future, could our cities become too big to feed, locally?”

Campbell said there are things we can do to make our city more self-sustainable, like preserving existing farmland and eating less meat.

In the meantime, the residents of Portland can keep doing whatever it is they do down there.