When Everyone Grew Healthy Food

Passion Fields Victory Gardens, Philadelphia 1943

Just one year ago, in answer to international lockdowns in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, there was a proactive response of a different kind that struck a chord. Co-op Gardens was just one part of a collective push toward mutual aid and community solidarity. To many, this felt like a revival of the move toward community-based resilience and self-sufficiency defined by the war gardens movement (which is also remembered with a lot of pain and trauma, as discussed in the next essay).

In 1943, at the height of the “Victory Gardens” era, it’s estimated there were some 20 million gardens, producing some 40% of all produce in the United States. Fresh healthy food was suddenly available on a hyper-local level. Canning and preserving food was often a matter of community pride and friendly competition. Recipes and favored preserves were traded and gifted.

In an effort to continue experiencing wartime profits from WWII, huge transnational corporations harnessed the wide-spread effectiveness of wartime propaganda and shifted from the detailed Model-T-style advertising to selling the empty promises of lifestyles of convenience. In the earliest efforts there was a strong push to devalue home-grown foods. Commodity crops became the convenient shelf stable products that people were encouraged to feel entitled to, in order to enjoy lives of leisure in the postwar era. That convenience masked dependence, as we were collectively disabused of the notion that gardening is good for us. Marketing efforts in print, on broadcast radio, and food packaging drew constant associations between poverty and robust vegetable gardens with some small livestock, indicating that only poor traumatized people grow their own food, or that our valued farmers were stationed in rolling fields of grains, corn and soybeans. 

One manipulative form of marketing came with the sale of instant cake mix. As a means to help women overcome guilt about not baking cakes from scratch, they were told (through product packaging and advertising) that they could add an egg to the mix to make the gift sincere. This was an early application of psychology in marketing, to alleviate a sense of pressure imposed on women of that era by introducing a manufactured commodity product to solve a problem placed upon them by patriarchal patterns pushing them back into kitchens after successfully managing wartime gardens, family, and filling in the gaps of industry!

We have had generations exposed to manipulated messaging of this kind. Instead of being told basic and honest information about the quality of things like homegrown vegetables, people have been tricked into buying and using products vs. growing and cultivating and enjoying nutrient-dense food.

Now, generations later, the US collectively follows the commodity model, relying on shelf-stable products and economies of scale. Unhealthy foods — and the systems of dependence they undergird — have been so widely broadcast, marketed, and propagandized, that they’re what most people grow up believing is food. They’re also the only products on the shelves that allow the food stamps to stretch from month to month. And today people wait in miles-long lines at food banks for expired versions of the same unhealthy food they can no longer afford.

That system last year was exposed for its frailty. It’s so brittle, billions of dollars couldn’t repair it. Yet marketing continues to push it, and the government continues to subsidize the industry. Billions, even trillions of dollars in emergency spending were consumed so quickly… which could have — should have — gone to investing in community-centered projects, resilience-based projects, projects that help us prepare for an uncertain future.

Policies need to change. Hard work needs to happen — blood, sweat, and tears. Joy is in it though, too, the joy that awaits in the budding of new seedlings.

Our generation is up against generations of social conditioning that re-enforced systems of exploitation, quick fixes, and entrenched thought processes.

We have hope, arriving with the Spring and each seedling sending its leaves up to the sky, roots anchoring firmly in the Earth.