Productive plots: nation, nature, and industry in the US World War II home front
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In 1943, the backyard plots, community gardens, industrial easements, and schoolyards cultivated as victory gardens produced 42 percent of the fresh produce US Americans consumed in that year. As much as two-thirds of the population participated in making this wartime effort the most successful local food movement in the nation’s history. Twenty-first-century popular memory cites victory gardens as a historic inspiration for sustainable, grassroots food activism, in contrast to contemporary corporate agribusiness and processed food industries. This dissertation undermines such narratives, centering on factory metaphors of industrial production used in promotional materials for the victory garden movement. I examine the role victory gardens played in midcentury foodways, how they affected industrial labor relations and public relations, and how they mediated relationships between citizens, the state, and nature through food. Ultimately, this dissertation explains what it meant to think of gardening as, in the words of one wartime pamphlet, “a manufacturing process in which you and Nature go into partnership.” This understanding provides an important lesson: in the victory garden tensions between nature and culture, the organic and the technologic, the local and the national, the individual and the state, and more were resolved by viewing the vegetable plot as a factory. This self-provisioning movement was not an atavistic aberration from historical trends. Rather, the victory garden was a product of an increasingly industrial, technocratic, and corporatized nation-state. This perspective contextualizes the political-economic and cultural trajectories of postwar United States as well as provides insight into possibilities for reorganizing the nation’s relationship with nature.
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Keywords
Environmental history, Food studies, History of capitalism, Victory gardens, World War II