"There was a time when the home garden was seen as an essential part of subsistence rather than the hobby that it has become today."
to borrow a phrase from Eric, excuse me while I vomit.
the idiocy of all of is twofold. first, as an article from Eat the View pointed out there's a long history of gardening at the white house. it is "hidden" only in so far as it was so fucking ordinary that no one thought it important enough to remark on!
second, with the statement above i was laffing my ass off wondering what this wet dream was all about. when did this subsistence *gardening* exist? I remember pouring over antique Burpee seed catalogs and promotional literature from the late 1800s and early 1900s. They had a massive marketing campaign going on to get people to have kitchen gardens so they could open up their seed market.
so, subsistence gardening? rilly? Like, when would that have been normal if she's talking about Western history?
And then a guy at work pointed out that the victory garden movement goes back to WWI so I was reading this, among other choice bits, where we learn about the massive educational campaign that was required because, zoot alauraz! (tm), people had never encountered a hoe befo'! (sorry. i amuse myself! somebody has to!)
because we were such a fucking nation of subsistence gardeners in 1918! whee!
"The creation of an army of soldiers of the soil presented much the same difficulties presented by the creation of any other army. First of all there was the matter of recruiting. This was a purely volunteer movement and all recruits must come through voluntary enlistment. Then it was necessary to point out the importance of the work and to create enthusiasm for gardening. Next, it was necessary to train the recruits. Intelligent instruction had to be furnished, for many of these new soldiers of the soil had never before handled a hoe or a garden fork. As the campaign progressed it was found that the best results could be obtained by organizing communities. Hence it became necessary to outline methods for community organization. So unexpectedly great was the response to the campaign that it proved essential to turn attention to the matter of food conservation, to the preservation of surplus products which the garden campaign had brought into being. The function of the Commission, therefore, was to awaken interest in both food production and food conservation and to provide instruction along each line of endeavor."
it will so totally rock when this fad is over and people just starting playing in their dirt and shut the fuck up about it already. it hasn't been this annoying since the voluntary simplicity movement!
btw, the whole section leading up to that paragraph blasts a big gun through pollan's crap about food security and nation states!
http://www.earthlypursuits.com/WarGarV/WarGard1.htm
"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."
-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08
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