Food, Home and Style

Redux: Digging the Downturn

Looking back to the Great Depression to see the path ahead.

Can we garden our troubles away?

During the Great Depression, people turned back to the land, growing vegetables in small suburban yards and vacant city lots. These subsistence patches were dubbed “depression gardens” and helped feed the nation during hungry times. People ate what they picked from their gardens, bartered their produce at stores for luxury goods like coffee, and traded regularly with neighbors. Folks reminiscing about those difficult times recall how much food could be coaxed from a few hundred yards.

Some, like my mother, who grew up on a North Carolina tobacco farm in the 30s and 40s,  remember the days when sharing and preserving food by any possible means was the norm: “Bushel baskets of fruits went to others without charge. We would cut up apples, put them on cloths on a tin roof to dry for making apple pies the next winter.  Squirrels hiding nuts had nothing on farm women of that time. We picked cherries to pit and Mother would can them for making pies the next year.”

FDR’s Federal Emergency Relief Administration paid gardeners to grow and distribute produce to needy people. Individual gardening programs also blossomed in cities around the country. In New York City, a gardening campaign orchestrated by the welfare department and assisted by the Works Progress Administration turned over 5,000 vacant lots into flourishing gardens. These gardens generated $5 worth of vegetables for every dollar invested, resulting in $2.8 million worth of food by 1934. Ornamental gardens, culinary gardens, and medicinal gardens sprang up around the country as part of various civic projects. The Herb Garden in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden was created by WPA laborers, as were the exquisite Boerner Botanical Gardens near Milwaukee.

A gardening movement is once again sprouting across the country. The recession has converged with fears about food safety, climate change, and healthful diets to spark a renewed interest in backyard gardening. Vegetable seed sales are up double-digits at the nation’s largest seed vendors this year. The National Gardening Association predicts that the number of homes growing vegetables will grow more than 40% this year compared with just two years ago.

The gardening trend has spread its tendrils over the White House. A grassroots movement has urged President Obama to plant a “victory garden,” similar to that planted by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943. At a time when the war had made food scarce, the First Lady planted a garden over the objections of U.S.D.A. officials, who thought her efforts would be bad for the American food industry.  Despite the protests, it wasn’t long before 20 million Americans got out their spades, producing 40% of the nation’s vegetables by the war’s end. The new secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is gung-ho about gardening. He recently proclaimed that his department would create “The People’s Garden” outside their building. And that’s not all. Vilsack wants a community garden at each of the department’s offices around the globe. His plans are a shout out to the localvore movement, which encourages community gardens in urban areas.

The localvore movement, once the provenance of latter-day hippies and environmentalists, is likely go mainstream as the downturn continues. Americans may hear terms like hydroponics and green roofing tossed off in casual conversation as people strive to save money and enhance self-sufficiency.

Growing food gives people a feeling of control and productivity in the midst of uncertainty and loss. Producing delicious vegetables can be an important source of pride, and it may have the added benefit of mitigating the country’s obesity trend. Bonus: scientists have recently discovered that soil bacteria may activate a set of serotonin-releasing neurons in the brain, aiding not only economic depression, but the psychological kind, too.

In other words, getting dirty makes people happy.

But we knew that already.

Tags: depression, gardening, Great Depression, localvore, Redux, victory gardens, White House