Speaker 1: Whole Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the
Speaker 2: only podcast I am currently recording. I tried multitasking this
Speaker 2: and it turns out I can't, and I'm ashamed of myself,
Speaker 2: but I'm not ashamed to have as my guest catbou Hi. Hey, Margaret,
Speaker 2: how are you? Kataboo is known from the Internet. That's
Speaker 2: what I currently have written down because everything is always
Speaker 2: in transition.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I am known from the Internet. I would say
Speaker 3: that I have a job, but as of today, I don't.
Speaker 2: The streamer should appear behind you on zoom every time
Speaker 2: you say that.
Speaker 3: Just like confetti pops out everywhere. But I'm really you know,
Speaker 3: it's a great time to hear about cool people who
Speaker 3: did cool stuff?
Speaker 2: Well are you in luck? But partly because our producer
Speaker 2: is Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi.
Speaker 1: It's me Sophie.
Speaker 2: And our audio engineers Daniel.
Speaker 3: Hi, Daniel Hi, Danel Hi, Danel Our.
Speaker 2: Theme musical was written forced by unwoman. Okay, so I
Speaker 2: just finished more than a month, like five weeks of episodes,
Speaker 2: ten episodes about the fucking Russian Civil War. And don't worry,
Speaker 2: this has nothing to do with that, because that one
Speaker 2: ended really tragically, right, the bad people took over in
Speaker 2: the end of that one.
Speaker 4: And.
Speaker 2: Doing all that research like kind of fucked me up.
Speaker 2: It colored my daily interactions, having spent so long immersed
Speaker 2: in that particular time and place in history, and I
Speaker 2: wanted a break. I wanted to do something where people
Speaker 2: win a little bit, uh or at least hold out
Speaker 2: a little bit longer, because there's always it's always an
Speaker 2: ebb and a flow between good guys in back. Obviously,
Speaker 2: we shouldn't paint the world in blacka white morality, but
Speaker 2: we do sometimes on this show. And I thought about
Speaker 2: two things that have come up recently on this show.
Speaker 2: At one point, well, Robert was a guest. We were
Speaker 2: talking about how feeding people is generally speaking like just good.
Speaker 2: Like if you're like, I don't know what else good
Speaker 2: to do, you could probably just feed people. Although the
Speaker 2: more you dig into any particular topic you'll find ways
Speaker 2: people doing it badly but overall good. I like this
Speaker 2: because you still have no idea what we're going to
Speaker 2: be talking about. The Other thing is I usually like
Speaker 2: match my I usually like look specifically at my guests interests,
Speaker 2: and then I'm like pick something that vaguely ties into that.
Speaker 2: I didn't do that this time. I just really wanted
Speaker 2: to cover this particular topic. I'm like, let's do it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think I think you'll like it. I think it
Speaker 2: would take a person with no heart, like the Grinch.
Speaker 1: Somebody we wouldn't book as a guest on this podcast.
Speaker 2: That's true. Yeah, okay. So the other thing that led
Speaker 2: me to what this topic is about or whatever. The
Speaker 2: hero of one of our recent episodes was this anarchist
Speaker 2: military commander woman named Maria Niki Farova. In the middle
Speaker 2: of this pitched war, She's waiting to go on trial,
Speaker 2: and she told a bunch of the other anarchists in
Speaker 2: Russia basically like, Hey, what we should do is set
Speaker 2: up a system of community gardens and just feed people,
Speaker 2: and that's how we'll like defeat authoritarian propaganda. And I'm
Speaker 2: going to talk about that. I'm not gonna talk about
Speaker 2: in Russia much. I'm gonna talk about community gardens.
Speaker 3: I love that. I'm so excited.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, I'm gonna talk about the hundreds that still
Speaker 2: exist in New York City today. I'm gonna talk about
Speaker 2: where they came from and what people have done to
Speaker 2: defend them. I have to be clear, I have never
Speaker 2: community gardened. I've only regularly gardened, and not very well.
Speaker 2: But I'm wondering if this is a thing you experience
Speaker 2: or not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I grew up, my mom has like the
Speaker 3: greenest thumb, Like she has this cute little herb garden
Speaker 3: on her balcony right now. She's always been like so
Speaker 3: big on sustainable stuff and like local produce. Like I
Speaker 3: don't know how to use a can opener because she
Speaker 3: insisted on only fresh produce.
Speaker 1: So to be fair, apparently all of us use a
Speaker 1: can opener. Wrong. I saw some video on TikTok and
Speaker 1: I was.
Speaker 3: Like, oh, well, do you remember being dad. I felt
Speaker 3: so bad for the little girl because I was like,
Speaker 3: I am, you know, twenty five, and I'm not to
Speaker 3: use a can opener.
Speaker 1: Well, apparently nobody does.
Speaker 3: So nobody does except that one person on TikTok.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, see, but before we started recording, I was
Speaker 2: telling a story that involved me being technically a hobo
Speaker 2: and that I was riding a freight train and there's
Speaker 2: this style of can opener that hoboes have that no
Speaker 2: one excepts soldiers and hoboes, and how to use called
Speaker 2: a P thirty eight. It's the size of like two
Speaker 2: thumbnails like not like icons, but it's like as big
Speaker 2: as like it's it's the size of the top joint.
Speaker 3: Of my okay, and it can open a can like
Speaker 3: a penny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a penny and a half's how does it work?
Speaker 2: It hinges out and there's a tiny little blade on it,
Speaker 2: and then there's a tiny little notch cut into the
Speaker 2: metal of the handle, which is like an inch and
Speaker 2: a half long or something like that. And it weighs nothing,
Speaker 2: it costs nothing. I put them in all the like
Speaker 2: first aid kits and emergency kits that they give out
Speaker 2: to people. But then people have no idea how to
Speaker 2: use it. But you just put it on the can
Speaker 2: and then slowly move it around and cut it open.
Speaker 3: No, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I probably am using the regular ones wrong.
Speaker 3: I'd like to use that one. That sounds more fun. Actually,
Speaker 3: the can openers were all thinking of they look difficult,
Speaker 3: like there's nothing intuitive about them.
Speaker 2: No, two weird spinny discs and then like three things
Speaker 2: that spin over there and right, do.
Speaker 3: You want me to slice a pizza with this?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: What are you?
Speaker 1: What are you doing? Yeah?
Speaker 2: It does kind of look like a both a pizza
Speaker 2: cutter and then also the stuff you use to cut
Speaker 2: fabric when you do a lot of sewing, the full
Speaker 2: circle cutters, you know, ye, yeah, I wouldn't want to
Speaker 2: use a P thirty eight to cut fabric.
Speaker 3: I'm actually working on a quilt that relates to community gardening.
Speaker 2: Wait, really tell me about that.
Speaker 3: I saw at the Union Square farmers Market in New
Speaker 3: York like two weeks ago, there was this really cool graphic.
Speaker 3: It was like a banner and it was their harvest
Speaker 3: calendar and I'd like, you know, January and like all
Speaker 3: the crops that they bring, And I was like, how
Speaker 3: fun would that be to do that as a quilt.
Speaker 3: I've never made a quilt, but I think it would
Speaker 3: be a very fun quilt to have. But like all
Speaker 3: of the crops that I like and all of the
Speaker 3: produce that I like, and then embroider like the different
Speaker 3: ones on different squares and cool have that. And so
Speaker 3: that's my long term project.
Speaker 2: Awesome, I love it. This is a combination of many
Speaker 2: of my interests. I haven't started quil and yet I
Speaker 2: see it like further down the line of where I'm going.
Speaker 2: At one point, I got really into. When I first
Speaker 2: started getting really into crafts, my friend was like, just
Speaker 2: don't end up candle making. But I'm really oppositional. So
Speaker 2: I started making candles like a month later.
Speaker 1: Well, when you no longer have vands to fix, Magpie,
Speaker 1: you can move on to quilting.
Speaker 2: That's true. I started making the candles as soon as
Speaker 2: I moved out of my van and was living in
Speaker 2: a barn. And it was great because I could always
Speaker 2: tell people I may not have been raised in a barn,
Speaker 2: but I live in one. And then people were like,
Speaker 2: why did we invite you? You keep making the same joke.
Speaker 3: A barn must have smelled amazing, though it did.
Speaker 2: I made many candles there and sold them on Etsy.
Speaker 2: That was my job for a while. By pad weird anyway.
Speaker 2: Community gardens yay, community gardens. At that barn, I was
Speaker 2: by far the worst at growing things. I was like,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna start growing mushrooms because I don't know how to
Speaker 2: grow things in the ground. I have to do like
Speaker 2: darkness farming. I didn't do a very good job of
Speaker 2: that either, but now I have many buckets of potatoes
Speaker 2: growing on my porch. So community gardens the first community gardens,
Speaker 2: I would argue, were gardening before the state and private
Speaker 2: properties stuck their fucking nose in our business. We've talked
Speaker 2: about this a ton on our show. The way that
Speaker 2: communities all over the world fed themselves was through something
Speaker 2: that looks a lot like modern community garden. We've talked about,
Speaker 2: for example, how across Ireland, folks used to use a
Speaker 2: land occupation system called rundale, in which land was divided
Speaker 2: so everyone had equal access to both good and bad land,
Speaker 2: and so everyone had You didn't split the food at
Speaker 2: the end, You split access to the land to grow
Speaker 2: the food across the entire town or community. This system
Speaker 2: was destroyed by colonization and by early capitalism. Peasants held
Speaker 2: onto it for centuries throughout those incursions, often which meant
Speaker 2: that often they would basically have a little bit of
Speaker 2: land from the landlord, and then they would still all
Speaker 2: get together and pull it and run dale it out.
Speaker 2: People fought like hell to defend this system. In Ireland.
Speaker 2: They formed secret societies where they threw on dresses and
Speaker 2: killed landlords and shit. I think that was cool, So
Speaker 2: I did a whole episode about that. Is this is
Speaker 2: gonna be a little bit We're gonna start off with
Speaker 2: like one of those you know when you watch Saved
Speaker 2: by the Bell and it's the end of the season
Speaker 2: and they don't feel like making anything new, so they
Speaker 2: do the clips episodes. Yeah, this is not a clips episode,
Speaker 2: but I'm going to go but this is a thing
Speaker 2: that has come up a lot, and so I'm going
Speaker 2: to use my own research's context. The most famous of
Speaker 2: these groups of cross dressing landlord killers defending primitive communism,
Speaker 2: which is an economic turn. I'm not trying to actually
Speaker 2: call them primitive. It's some bullshit marks was on, but whatever.
Speaker 2: The most famous of these groups is called the Molly
Speaker 2: Maguires if you want to look them up. We also
Speaker 2: talked about across Europe you had the common field system
Speaker 2: or the open field system. This is the commons that
Speaker 2: if you ever here people talk about the enclosure of
Speaker 2: the commons. This is what they're talking about. And this
Speaker 2: wasn't always people who lived super free. Often these communes
Speaker 2: were people who lived as first serfs who were owned
Speaker 2: and attached to the property right, and then later as
Speaker 2: peasants on land that they still didn't owned by a landlord.
Speaker 2: The origin of that term is very literal in English,
Speaker 2: usually this is royalty to the church amongst themselves. They
Speaker 2: split the land into strips so everyone had access to
Speaker 2: different shit like you had a and then a lot
Speaker 2: of the woods and pastures were the commons that no
Speaker 2: one had any ownership at all over except the landlords
Speaker 2: who owned it all. But this was famously enclosed in
Speaker 2: what's called the enclosure of the commons, where fences and
Speaker 2: hedges and shit were put up so it couldn't be
Speaker 2: used for the common good. I more or less trace
Speaker 2: the origin of capitalism to the enclosure of the commons
Speaker 2: in England and the resistance that grew up out of it,
Speaker 2: as the first anti capitalist like resistance movements. Whole ass
Speaker 2: peasant wars were fought over this stuff, and it is
Speaker 2: related to the origin of the labor movement as well.
Speaker 2: Most famously, this enclosure was fought by a group called
Speaker 2: the Diggers, who were like, yeah, what if we just
Speaker 2: illegally plant food anyway? And they're really fun. They actually
Speaker 2: if you've ever been part of a squatted garden or
Speaker 2: a community garden and you actually get any food out
Speaker 2: of the ground, you have succeeded better than the famous
Speaker 2: Diggers of history because they they got their asses kicked
Speaker 2: before they pulled this so much as a single potato
Speaker 2: out of the ground. You also have various indigenous groups,
Speaker 2: and specifically the ones that I've covered on this show
Speaker 2: is how you have in both Siberia and North America
Speaker 2: you have different groups who are practicing communal agriculture, who
Speaker 2: inspired a bunch of different later socialists and things like that.
Speaker 2: I am sure they have been practiced elsewhere around the world.
Speaker 2: Those are just the ones that have come up in
Speaker 2: my own research for this show. I get really like
Speaker 2: I started writing it out in the script where I
Speaker 2: was like, look, this is pretty much what humans evolved
Speaker 2: to do. But I hate writing that because whenever people
Speaker 2: say that, they're lying or they're like picking some specific
Speaker 2: version of humans in order to say, like, you know,
Speaker 2: whenever like people are like, oh, humans just fight and
Speaker 2: war and that's all humans do, or the opposite where
Speaker 2: people are like humans just all get along. I don't
Speaker 2: like when people do that. I think that humans are
Speaker 2: capable of doing a lot of different things.
Speaker 3: It feel it's kind of like there are multiple things
Speaker 3: that humans are capable of doing to each other and
Speaker 3: thinking of weird, maybe that's a bit small. That's small minded, you.
Speaker 2: Know, yeah, no I And that's that's it. That is
Speaker 2: the like. But among all of the different systems of
Speaker 2: economy and land use and things like that that people
Speaker 2: have tried, an awful lot of them were not capitalism,
Speaker 2: and we're something closer to what it's called primitive communism,
Speaker 2: the idea that people share things without Mars having told
Speaker 2: them how to do it to begin with. But it's
Speaker 2: not community gardening this stuff because I'm going to argue
Speaker 2: that community gardening is something that exists in opposition to
Speaker 2: food and land scarcity put upon us by economic and
Speaker 2: governmental systems. Because when we try to then like get
Speaker 2: this stuff back, we are creating something that is like
Speaker 2: more oppositional. Like you didn't have to be in opposition
Speaker 2: anything to have a Rundale system because no one was
Speaker 2: telling you couldn't. I'm going to compare it to squatting,
Speaker 2: another thing we've covered a lot on this show. Squatting
Speaker 2: is when people take on used property and then use
Speaker 2: it regardless of the property owners wishes. Squatting is an
Speaker 2: affront to the very foundation of capitalist society, in which
Speaker 2: property rights trump human rights, and that is why squatting
Speaker 2: is so cool and you can also see like really easily.
Speaker 2: And we're gonna get into this later with community gardens.
Speaker 2: How there's this tension, like squatters in the US are
Speaker 2: largely presented as people who show up like vermin and
Speaker 2: destroy things. You know, that is the like, and so
Speaker 2: it is like cleaning out a homeless encampment is like
Speaker 2: seen as this like cleaning this like improvement. I'm totally
Speaker 2: off script. I'm just really angry when I think about that.
Speaker 3: After months of listening to Fox talk about this, that's
Speaker 3: like one of their favorite issues for twenty twenty four
Speaker 3: is not even like discussing why squatting is happening, but
Speaker 3: also pretending that it's people coming into your apartment that
Speaker 3: you rent and staying there and there's now an epidemic.
Speaker 3: This is happening all the time. Everyone knows about how
Speaker 3: you know, people are coming into your apartment and saying
Speaker 3: that you know they're going to vote for Joe Biden
Speaker 3: and they're going to make you do it too, And
Speaker 3: it's like, wow, you're just sick words so you can
Speaker 3: just say things now, that's that's crazy.
Speaker 2: I think that would be called house piracy. I love
Speaker 2: that and I'm not sure I'm opposed to it. I
Speaker 2: probably am opposed to it.
Speaker 3: I mean, like the way I say it is like
Speaker 3: you know, Jesse water is his favorite thing, and he's
Speaker 3: said this not once but twice several years apart, is
Speaker 3: that if there is a squatter in your house, you
Speaker 3: should just set the house on fire and burn them
Speaker 3: alive and then get the insurance money and blame the
Speaker 3: fire on the squatter.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 3: And you know my position is, you know, even if
Speaker 3: you own the place, don't burn people alive, like for
Speaker 3: any reason.
Speaker 2: That's a bold take.
Speaker 3: I know, I know I'm really brave for saying that.
Speaker 3: But second, I don't think this situation it's like, you know,
Speaker 3: these conservative men that dream about like being able to
Speaker 3: shoot an intruder, It's just not happening that much.
Speaker 2: Sorry.
Speaker 3: I've had to hear a lot about squatting through my
Speaker 3: job that I you know, no, no, don't have to
Speaker 3: hear about it as much.
Speaker 2: It makes sense to me because it's like overall, where
Speaker 2: squatting is a little bit more legalized and protected, where
Speaker 2: the like private property rights don't trump the human rights
Speaker 2: or whatever, squatting often has a very different vibe where
Speaker 2: like you know, squatting in the Netherlands, like no matter
Speaker 2: how short a time we were there, there was a
Speaker 2: lot of pride taken in, like we will improve the
Speaker 2: spaces that we're in.
Speaker 3: You know, correct me if I'm wrong. A lot of
Speaker 3: times they're like vacant, like it's not going into Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's not to be an piracy like you said.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no it is. I have never in my life,
Speaker 2: and I spend a lot of time squatting in my
Speaker 2: younger life. I've never in my life like seen someone
Speaker 2: try to live in a place that someone already lives.
Speaker 2: You know, it is absolutely about unused space, and often
Speaker 2: it is a space where like people don't even know
Speaker 2: who owns it. Because that's the sweet spot of squatting
Speaker 2: is you find the thing where like they can't kick
Speaker 2: you out because no one knows who's supposed to kick
Speaker 2: you out, because no one knows who building it is.
Speaker 2: Because the actual thing that causes urban decay is not squatters,
Speaker 2: it's real estate prospecting and people leaving properties vacant and
Speaker 2: then preventing people from making use of the property. I'm
Speaker 2: getting ahead of myself. This is what we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about today, and when we talk about it for housing,
Speaker 2: people like, no, it's bad, Like squatting's bad when you
Speaker 2: want to live somewhere, when you want to sleep somewhere, right,
Speaker 2: when you do it for food and like growing food
Speaker 2: and gardens and flowers and trees and things, people have
Speaker 2: a much harder time demonizing you. And plenty of societies,
Speaker 2: even capitalist societies, have realized that overall squatting is a
Speaker 2: social good. We've talked extensively on the show before about
Speaker 2: squatters in the Netherlands who righte revitalized city centers because
Speaker 2: squatters kept property owners from leaving places vacant. Because once
Speaker 2: squatting was legalized, if you left your place empty for
Speaker 2: a year, someone could move in. And we actually had
Speaker 2: like we had moments. I think I can tell the story,
Speaker 2: like at one point the squatters moved in. We people
Speaker 2: were trying to get into a building that they were
Speaker 2: convinced was vacant. They would do a lot of work
Speaker 2: to try and figure out if spaces were vacant. You
Speaker 2: do like you'd put like a toothpick in the door,
Speaker 2: and then you'd come back a week later and see
Speaker 2: if the toothpick is still in the door, because if
Speaker 2: it isn't, then it's fallen out because someone's opened the door.
Speaker 2: And you spent a lot of time in the in
Speaker 2: city hall looking at property records and things. At one point,
Speaker 2: some squatters a long time ago broke into a building
Speaker 2: and there was like an apartment and there was just
Speaker 2: like a couple watching TV, and they were like, oh sorry,
Speaker 2: and then they all ran away. And then the next
Speaker 2: day a lot of these squatters are like locksmiths and things,
Speaker 2: right because there's a synchronicity of interests. And so then
Speaker 2: they showed back up and like we're like, I have
Speaker 2: no idea why your door's broken. I'm just here to
Speaker 2: fix your door. I have no relationship to anyone who
Speaker 2: has committed a crime. And the squatters like came back
Speaker 2: and cleaned up their mess, which is still like, look,
Speaker 2: don't break into people's houses while they're there. I get it,
Speaker 2: But like if you do, come back the next day
Speaker 2: and clean up the.
Speaker 3: Door, you know this is the future the left wants.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And so the community garden, i would argue,
Speaker 2: is fundamentally a pro social squatting of vacant land, generally
Speaker 2: in city centers. It's lineage I would argue has far
Speaker 2: more to do with the diggers or even the molly
Speaker 2: maguires than it does like suburban fake homesteading or whatever,
Speaker 2: which is how it gets spun a lot. Now, at
Speaker 2: the very end we'll talk about some of them ways
Speaker 2: in which tech millionaires get to exploit all of this.
Speaker 2: But in the US, it is easier for us to
Speaker 2: imagine that people have a right to grow food on
Speaker 2: vacant and unimproved land than it is for us to
Speaker 2: imagine that people have a right to sleep there. So
Speaker 2: vacant lot gardening is generally smiled upon, while squatting and
Speaker 2: homeless encampments are generally frowned upon. I'm actually curious in
Speaker 2: all of their stuff, watching all this stuff about s squatting,
Speaker 2: do they ever do a thing where they're like good
Speaker 2: homeless encampment, bad homeless encampment, or like these people tried
Speaker 2: to build a garden and so they're good or anything
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 3: So that's really interesting that you ask that, because, like,
Speaker 3: you know, Tucker when he was on the air, he
Speaker 3: you know, hates homeless people, not as much as Jesse.
Speaker 3: Jesse was like deep Jesse Waters the most aggressive person
Speaker 3: on Fox about that, like I could, there's probably over
Speaker 3: ten hours of just like quotes like that. But like
Speaker 3: the amount of work that goes into demonizing encampments is
Speaker 3: like fucking nuts. You would have cameramen go in and
Speaker 3: like no one's doing anything. I mean even like not
Speaker 3: in terms of squatting bl Like even like the you
Speaker 3: know GW encampment down here in DC, you had like
Speaker 3: cameramen all over and it's like you know, college kids
Speaker 3: being like do you need any sunscreen? Like, you know,
Speaker 3: here's some food if you need it, Take whatever you need.
Speaker 3: And so that's what they'd that's what they always do.
Speaker 3: There's never really any they don't even try to be
Speaker 3: like in some cases and then like show I don't know,
Speaker 3: like some white homeless person and then compare it to like,
Speaker 3: you know, a migrant, right. Yeah, it's the effort that
Speaker 3: goes into it is honestly astonishing.
Speaker 2: They need to do a lot of work to try
Speaker 2: and convince us to forget our class interests and like
Speaker 2: side with the billionaires. But you know what is in
Speaker 2: your class interest is being advertised to buy goods and services.
Speaker 3: I've heard the class interests of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's dad's and we're back. Hopefully you just press
Speaker 2: the forward fifteen seconds button until you heard the bumper
Speaker 2: music again. So many many modern societies have access to
Speaker 2: land for people and cities as part of their social structure,
Speaker 2: where people don't even have to squat land in order
Speaker 2: to grow food. Around Europe, for example, with the UK
Speaker 2: being the example that I've run across the most, I'm
Speaker 2: going to focus on it, you've got what's called the
Speaker 2: allotments system. It's this little scrap of freedom that's left
Speaker 2: over from the enclosure of the commons. And it started
Speaker 2: in eighteen forty five with the General Enclosure Act, which
Speaker 2: was like, look, we've enclosed almost everything, but here's a
Speaker 2: little crumb for the pores. I guess. Even then, it
Speaker 2: wasn't too much of anything until at the end of
Speaker 2: World War One, when returning soldiers were given allotments and
Speaker 2: the laws were solidified to protect the allotment system. And
Speaker 2: basically what this is is like you're like, if you
Speaker 2: enter a waiting list and you get chosen by the
Speaker 2: allotment lottery or whatever, you get to go pay a
Speaker 2: small amount of rent to a different landlord, but a
Speaker 2: small amount of rent, and you get access to a
Speaker 2: community garden, basically a little plot of land that you
Speaker 2: can grow some vegetables in, which it turns out that
Speaker 2: they can do in the UK. So I'm not I
Speaker 2: always assume that they left their country to invade everywhere
Speaker 2: because there was no sun there and so they had
Speaker 2: to invade other places for food. But it turns out
Speaker 2: you can grow food there, So I'm not sure why
Speaker 2: they invented colonization.
Speaker 3: I mean, I really like how they were like, Wow,
Speaker 3: this one thing, this potato, so amazing. We're gonna build
Speaker 3: our entire culture about that and other cultures around that,
Speaker 3: and then pretend we invented it.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 2: I it's really fun to imagine Europe before the discovery
Speaker 2: of like the New World and potatoes and tomatoes.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I constantly think about like the indigenous like scientists who
Speaker 3: created all like crossbread, all of these different types of
Speaker 3: you know, fruits and vegetables and you know shit like
Speaker 3: that that like we're just claimed and no one ever
Speaker 3: gives them credit. I mean I saw something a couple
Speaker 3: of weeks ago that was like you don't see any
Speaker 3: Michelin star you know, tribal restaurants.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then you're like and I would love to
Speaker 2: see that, which is interesting correct because they probably mean
Speaker 2: it as like, oh, there's no indigenous food culture. They
Speaker 2: probably mean it as like a these people.
Speaker 3: So it was like it was an Indo person saying, like,
Speaker 3: you know, we provided all this food and we have
Speaker 3: all these cultures and like you know, every food that
Speaker 3: you love or like, you know, ninety percent of them
Speaker 3: at least in America, like come from here, and yet
Speaker 3: you have no idea how they were originally treated.
Speaker 2: Yeah you know, Okay, I see. I thought you were
Speaker 2: doing the like because there's that thing where right wing
Speaker 2: people are Zionist or whatever, will be like Palestinians never
Speaker 2: invented anything or whatever, which is another incorrect statement that
Speaker 2: people can make.
Speaker 3: No way, it's nuts.
Speaker 2: You haven't seen that one.
Speaker 3: No, I've seen that. Oh okay, I'm just shocked that
Speaker 3: Palestinians are.
Speaker 2: People, yeah, and never invented anything actually, which is also
Speaker 2: how you judge people's access to life. And also it's
Speaker 2: just wrong on every level. It's like turtles all the
Speaker 2: way down, but it's wrong anyway.
Speaker 3: Yeahstly, No, it's just I love like the amount of
Speaker 3: assumptions that people have about Palestinians, and I see a
Speaker 3: lot like, yeah, yeah, they're dirty, blah blah blah. And
Speaker 3: then someone was like, they can't have blue eyes. But
Speaker 3: I literally just was like, I I have blue eyes.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: There are literally so many.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like they.
Speaker 3: Can't invent anything, they don't have blue eyes, they can't
Speaker 3: look at a Jew without killing them. That's These are
Speaker 3: all things that we all know about Palestinians.
Speaker 2: In the USSR and other Soviet Bloc countries, there was
Speaker 2: also something comparable in pre Soviet times, like with tzars
Speaker 2: and shit. Nobles were given datchas, basically little country homes
Speaker 2: just outside the city with like a cottage and a
Speaker 2: place to garden, and so in the us ARE you'd
Speaker 2: think they'd be like, oh, now they've all been communized
Speaker 2: and everyone gets access to them. No, they went to
Speaker 2: the new nobles, the Bolshevik party members. They got the dachas.
Speaker 2: But in some of them, like every now and then,
Speaker 2: some of them are given to some regular workers or whatever,
Speaker 2: but an awful lot of them were left more or
Speaker 2: less unused, and so squatters in the USSR just started
Speaker 2: taking them over. And I think this was less like
Speaker 2: people came out and lived in them, although I think
Speaker 2: that happened a little bit too, and it was more
Speaker 2: like people who lived in the city just started coming
Speaker 2: out and using them and growing vegetables because this was
Speaker 2: the only way that you could eat vegetables. Because this
Speaker 2: one isn't the Bolshevik's fault. World War II was a fuck,
Speaker 2: and people didn't have any vegetables, and so they were like,
Speaker 2: we want to not die, so they went out and
Speaker 2: squatted the dachas. In a pattern we see over and
Speaker 2: over again, the people rushed to do something, and the
Speaker 2: government had to rush to keep up once it realized
Speaker 2: it wasn't able to stop people from doing the thing.
Speaker 2: By nineteen fifty five, the USSR legalized what people were
Speaker 2: already doing. Soon datches were all the rage, and modern
Speaker 2: Russia apparently has the largest percentage of people who own
Speaker 2: a summer home of anywhere in the world. The US,
Speaker 2: of course, doesn't like giving people things for free, unless,
Speaker 2: of course, you're a rich farmer or another capitalist who's
Speaker 2: entitled to privatize public property. So we tend not to
Speaker 2: have a system by which city dwellers can access land
Speaker 2: to grow food, So people tend to do it anyway.
Speaker 2: Community gardens EBB and flow. War or recession will drive
Speaker 2: everyone to organize them. Then basically waves of gentrification will
Speaker 2: shut them down. And I'm going to run through their
Speaker 2: history in the US. This took a different turn than
Speaker 2: I expected it to, not like a wild turn, but
Speaker 2: like there's a politician who's a Republican who I like.
Speaker 2: Now I know that republican meant the opposite thing in
Speaker 2: the nineteen hundreds, eighteen hundreds, whatever, nineteenth century. I still
Speaker 2: was kind of surprised by this.
Speaker 3: Sophia, have you read the script? Like do you know
Speaker 3: what's happening?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 3: Because I was like, I think it'd be fun to have,
Speaker 3: you know, establish our thoughts on community gardens ahead of time.
Speaker 3: But I'm the only one that's out of it, out
Speaker 3: of the loop, and I don't want to sound dumb
Speaker 3: when my assumptions are wrong.
Speaker 2: Well, what's your something now? And you could do it?
Speaker 3: I mean, I just I'm really interested to see like
Speaker 3: where this started and now this started. And I think personally,
Speaker 3: like I've heard the argument that like, you know, gentrified
Speaker 3: community gardens are like a bad thing and you know,
Speaker 3: none of us. But also I think that having access
Speaker 3: to produce in anywhere is a good thing, and so
Speaker 3: I'm really interested for that notion specifically to see if
Speaker 3: that will be a thing that I am wrong about,
Speaker 3: which I am about many things.
Speaker 2: I think that overall we're going to talk about a
Speaker 2: little bit later about how but gentrification is the death
Speaker 2: of community gardens over and over again, and in some
Speaker 2: ways they are creating their own death right because they
Speaker 2: improve an area and then people want to move in
Speaker 2: and live there. But they are not started by gentrifying forces.
Speaker 2: Again and again, they are started by people who want
Speaker 2: decent standards of living, who want to beautify the areas
Speaker 2: that they live in. And it is complicated, but that
Speaker 2: the thing that gentrifies the neighborhood is not people wanting
Speaker 2: to grow food. It is the landlords who come up
Speaker 2: and buy property and raise rents.
Speaker 1: See.
Speaker 3: I was thinking of like after the fact, like especially
Speaker 3: during COVID, where it was kind of trendy to like
Speaker 3: start apply or like grow a bunch of herbs. And
Speaker 3: then like I know so many buildings in like DC
Speaker 3: where like here's some dirt, everyone can be a part
Speaker 3: of it. And then everyone was like doing Instagram picture
Speaker 3: and planting and stuff like that, and then everyone just
Speaker 3: kind of forgot and there were a bunch of like
Speaker 3: un harvested crops. But at the same time, some people
Speaker 3: came in and just took even if they weren't theirs,
Speaker 3: and net good, I guess. But now it's just concept dirt.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, it's it's this thing where like some of the
Speaker 2: stuff that rich people like is like nice stuff that
Speaker 2: we should all get to have, you know. So I'm
Speaker 2: going to start this story in Detroit. There's a city.
Speaker 2: It's called Detroit. It's in Michigan. It's most famous for
Speaker 2: being pretty abandoned.
Speaker 1: It's most famous for being the homeland of my parents.
Speaker 2: Oh well that too.
Speaker 3: It's up for were you born in Detroit?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: Born in la Oh yeah, like an American superstar story.
Speaker 4: One of the few people actually born and raised in
Speaker 4: Los Angeles.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so my parents are from the d.
Speaker 2: It is the city that is most interesting to me too.
Speaker 2: In North America or in the US.
Speaker 5: It's really cool now.
Speaker 2: The only one I know it is like when I
Speaker 2: was Ye, I've been to all fifty of the states. No, sorry,
Speaker 2: I haven't been to all forty of the forty eight
Speaker 2: of the lower States, And I've been to every city
Speaker 2: that interests me back when I was like a full
Speaker 2: time traveler except Detroit.
Speaker 1: Have you never been to Michigan? Where'd you go?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah? I spent a month living in the bushes
Speaker 2: outside of college and Lansing, Michigan, while waiting for my
Speaker 2: friend to get out of jail and trying to organize
Speaker 2: with activisty people to go to some demonstrations in DC.
Speaker 2: And then I left to go hop freight trains to
Speaker 2: get to the West coast, got my heartbroken and turned
Speaker 2: around and drove to DC and then got mass arrested
Speaker 2: the IMF demonstrations in two thousand and two or three,
Speaker 2: So I spent I spent a while in Lansing, and
Speaker 2: then I have like memories of getting yelled at by
Speaker 2: cops in Battle Creek, Michigan, appropriately named I know.
Speaker 3: I love how everything you say it's like a person's
Speaker 3: entire lifetime, but it's like a new one every time
Speaker 3: you open your mouth, and it's aletely different person that's
Speaker 3: had like a completely different path. Yeah, but they're all you. Margaret.
Speaker 1: Margaret's every character in a TV show.
Speaker 3: It's amazing. She is fifty pulp novels in one person.
Speaker 2: Thanks. I think yeah, yeah, no, I I yeah, I
Speaker 2: have enjoyed my life and I am glad to.
Speaker 1: Continue to a're you gonna tell me something good or
Speaker 1: about it happened in Michigan.
Speaker 2: Good, this is a good story about Detroit.
Speaker 5: We love that.
Speaker 2: So Detroit was founded by French colonists in seventeen oh
Speaker 2: one on hodnah Land, sometimes called the Iroquois Federation.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you something good starts off bad, She's like, yeah.
Speaker 2: The ended up being a major inspiration for Western democratic
Speaker 2: practices and also heavily influenced a bunch of communists thought.
Speaker 2: But Detroit started off as a fort actually to drive
Speaker 2: out the British colonists. The Americans eventually stole it or
Speaker 2: conquered it or whatever, and it became one of the
Speaker 2: more important Western cities. It was the Paris of the
Speaker 2: West for a little while. This is even before the
Speaker 2: auto industry kicks in. Later, the auto industry is going
Speaker 2: to make it this huge thing, and it's going to
Speaker 2: be one of the biggest industrial centers in the country.
Speaker 2: But we're going to start this garden story before it.
Speaker 1: Very excited to go see my relatives who are still met,
Speaker 1: going to go, you know, Detroit used to be the
Speaker 1: Paris of the West. You know, yeah, it still is, baby,
Speaker 1: and then they'll be like, oh geez, yeah, and then
Speaker 1: they offer you.
Speaker 2: Yogurt and jello. I don't know anything about Midwest culture anymore,
Speaker 2: especially because also Destroit it's like different from the rest
Speaker 2: of Midwest culture. There's food cheese that's Wisconsin. Okay. So
Speaker 2: the eighteen seventies and the eighteen eighties were like the
Speaker 2: Gilded Age in America, which is important for people to
Speaker 2: wrap their heads around because we're basically in another one
Speaker 2: right now. The Gilded Age was when you had a
Speaker 2: booming economy that only helps the rich and you've got
Speaker 2: big materialistic and also, okay, to be fair, the eighteen
Speaker 2: seventies also helped some of the middle class workers. It
Speaker 2: kind of created the American middle class. And you've got
Speaker 2: big materialistic excesses. People are like run around and they're
Speaker 2: I was gonna say Rolls Royces, but we're fifty years
Speaker 2: too early for that. It's a time of political corruption
Speaker 2: and rich assholes. Basically, it's the rich got richer and
Speaker 2: the poor got poorer. Period. Westward expansion and immigration are
Speaker 2: fueling the whole thing, with like access to land and
Speaker 2: then also access to cheap labor, exploitable labor. People start
Speaker 2: getting mad about that and they start doing stuff about it,
Speaker 2: and we've covered that a lot on this show. By
Speaker 2: the eighteen nineties, a bunch of things are happening. First
Speaker 2: of all, the labor movement is kicking some ass, and
Speaker 2: both major parties are now seen as pretty boring and conservative.
Speaker 2: Totally no reflection to the modern era is happening right now.
Speaker 2: And so you've got what's called the People's Party or
Speaker 2: sometimes it's called the Populist Party, and it was formed
Speaker 2: in eighteen ninety two. These are the populists. They wanted
Speaker 2: some basic progressive shit. They wanted workers' rights to collective bargaining,
Speaker 2: they wanted federal regulation of capitalism. They wanted a shorter
Speaker 2: work week. They also wanted something I didn't realize we
Speaker 2: didn't already have back then. Did you know that until
Speaker 2: nineteen thirteen, people who lived in a state didn't vote
Speaker 2: in their senators in DC. Were they like appointed, They
Speaker 2: were elected by the state legislature instead. Oh, so it's
Speaker 2: like how Donald Trump tried to overthrow the election.
Speaker 3: Yeah, kind of probably because it's like you have like this,
Speaker 3: they can technically just ignore everything in a point whoever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And so that's how those state senators were decided.
Speaker 2: And the Populist Party was like, we don't like that.
Speaker 2: We prefer democracy. And it wasn't until the Seventeenth Amendment
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty that people started voting for their senators.
Speaker 2: The Populist Party did not win any major elections, but
Speaker 2: they were popular enough. Get it, They're popular because they're populists.
Speaker 2: Thank you, I appreciate it. Forced the Republican Party, which
Speaker 2: was the vaguely left of the two parties at the time,
Speaker 2: the modern the equivalent of the modern Democrats. It forced
Speaker 2: them to shift further to the left in order to
Speaker 2: keep up because the Populist Party was doing really well
Speaker 2: and they were like, fuck, we want some of that
Speaker 2: good old fashioned votes. One of these progressive Republicans was
Speaker 2: a man named Hazen Pingree, and he was the mayor
Speaker 2: of Detroit. Later he becomes Michigan's mayor. I thought I
Speaker 2: was gonna hate him. When you read a like one,
Speaker 2: I just hate politicians. I'm an asshole and an anarchist.
Speaker 2: When you read like a one sentence version of the
Speaker 2: history of community gardens they were like, and then they
Speaker 2: were invented by this Republican named Hazen Pingree, who was
Speaker 2: the mayor of Detroit. And I'm like, the fuck he did.
Speaker 2: He probably just was mayor while some other people did
Speaker 2: some shit, because that's almost always how it goes. This
Speaker 2: guy seems legit until I find other evidence. He was
Speaker 2: a businessman whose political life was spent trying to stop
Speaker 2: monopolies and increase public ownership of utilities and railroads and shit.
Speaker 2: He was also self made. He grew up a worker,
Speaker 2: like he started at fourteen in a cotton factory, I
Speaker 2: think in Maine, and he worked for years as a
Speaker 2: cutter in the shoe factory. Then when the Civil War
Speaker 2: broke out, he fought on the front lines of the
Speaker 2: Civil War. He got captured, taken prisoner by the Confederates,
Speaker 2: so he broke out. And how to be clear, when
Speaker 2: I imagined me being like, I'm a good noble fighting
Speaker 2: against slavery. Once I've broken out of prison, I could
Speaker 2: kind of see myself being like, I have done my
Speaker 2: work here, I'm going to go home.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: He he broke out of prison, rejoined his redgment, and
Speaker 2: fought in even more battles. He then started a shoe business.
Speaker 2: He moved to Detroit because heard it was a good
Speaker 2: place to go booming. And he starts just as like
Speaker 2: a shoe guy and a factory. And then the shoe
Speaker 2: guy factory that was like shoe guy guy, Yeah, it
Speaker 2: goes out of business, and so him and his friend
Speaker 2: pull up their money and buy the machinery and start
Speaker 2: their own shoe business and it becomes the second biggest
Speaker 2: shoe business in the country. He becomes the mayor. He
Speaker 2: takes the city from the right leaning Democrats, and he
Speaker 2: gets into fights with all the other businessmen, including all
Speaker 2: of the other Republicans, because he wants to keep street
Speaker 2: car fares accessible in shit and like forces like fair
Speaker 2: hikes to not go up.
Speaker 3: Is this eighteen seventies, Jesse Ventura.
Speaker 2: I know more about eighteen nineties. Is we're in the
Speaker 2: eighteen nineties now.
Speaker 3: But ohey, no, no, it's okay.
Speaker 2: I know more about the eighteen nineties in the modern era.
Speaker 5: You're spot on, kat you thank you.
Speaker 2: Here we go. Yeah, I'm here to translate.
Speaker 1: I'm here to translate.
Speaker 2: No, I appreciate it. No, I live in history books
Speaker 2: right now. This is the very end of my life
Speaker 2: where I know only the things that happened hundred years so.
Speaker 3: The parallels are like incredible.
Speaker 5: One of my favorite.
Speaker 1: Things to do is to tell both you and Sarah
Speaker 1: Marshall things that are happening in real time, because both
Speaker 1: of your historians, and then I get to tell you
Speaker 1: things and then you're like whow and sometimes you have
Speaker 1: the exact same reaction, and it's beautiful. It's very beautiful
Speaker 1: to me.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah. And so he fought corruption, He fought his
Speaker 2: own political party. He wrote a book in eighteen ninety
Speaker 2: five about how people suffer under monopoly and corruption. And now, like,
Speaker 2: the one thing he's not a radical, right his book
Speaker 2: about like people suffering is like, but don't go and
Speaker 2: do anything violent or destructive. That's bad and it makes
Speaker 2: us look bad. Right, But he took his His eighteen
Speaker 2: ninety five book is dedicated to the people of Detroit,
Speaker 2: and the dedication is like handwritten on a photo of
Speaker 2: a potato or like an it's a weird image.
Speaker 3: That's how we should do every dedication.
Speaker 2: Now I agree, Otherwise you got one upped by a
Speaker 2: Republican in eighteen ninety five. Is that really what you
Speaker 2: want to go down being remembered as he tried to
Speaker 2: unify urban workers and farmers. His book had like political
Speaker 2: cartoons showing them in the same boat rowing against monopoly.
Speaker 2: If there is a nineteenth century rich asshole politician who
Speaker 2: I don't hate, it's this guy Pingree. When he dies
Speaker 2: at sixty, the Detroit News wrote about him. Other men
Speaker 2: had opinions, He had convictions.
Speaker 3: That's a good way to be remembered.
Speaker 2: Holy shit, right. He was in charge of Detroit when
Speaker 2: the Panic of eighteen ninety three hit. It is never
Speaker 2: a good time to live through a year that is
Speaker 2: remembered as the Panic of Basically, this was yet again
Speaker 2: a great depression. Before the Great Depression, a bunch of
Speaker 2: complicated economic stuff happened where the rich assholes created a bubble,
Speaker 2: and then the bubble burst. People ran on the banks.
Speaker 2: Five hundred banks closed. Michigan had a forty three percent
Speaker 2: unemployment rate at this time. Everyone is starving and out
Speaker 2: of work, and they wanted to grow their own food,
Speaker 2: and they wanted potatoes. The sponsor of today's show the
Speaker 2: concept of the potato.
Speaker 5: Oh we're back, baby, I love this.
Speaker 2: If any other ads sneak in, they are a mistake.
Speaker 5: Hahaha.
Speaker 1: Potatoes for everyone unless you're allergic than I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, can you potatoes?
Speaker 1: You can. And it's one of the common things on
Speaker 1: like a like an hour and like a food HOLLURGI
Speaker 1: just test someone try and you know, take this with
Speaker 1: a grit salt. But one time I tested positive for
Speaker 1: a potato allergy and I was like, I'm irish as
Speaker 1: fuck and no I'm not, and then they like readid
Speaker 1: it three times? And I was like total, told you, I.
Speaker 3: Mean, look at your face. Com on, I know.
Speaker 5: You're absolutely correct, like really really.
Speaker 3: Like I don't know how to describe Sophie's face except
Speaker 3: like irish yeaeah, not allergic to potatoes.
Speaker 5: Not allergic potatoes, and we're back.
Speaker 2: People wanted their potatoes, and Pingree wanted to give them potatoes,
Speaker 2: or rather, he wanted to help them grow their own
Speaker 2: potatoes because he's a potato guy. Panic kits and he
Speaker 2: starts I love an alliteration. Ping Gree's potato patch plan.
Speaker 3: That's a whimsical.
Speaker 2: I know. Four hundred and thirty three acres of vacant
Speaker 2: city land were set aside for people to grow food
Speaker 2: as part of funding it. He sold his favorite horse, and.
Speaker 3: We know the horses name.
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't. I read a fair amount about
Speaker 2: this man, but not as much as there could be
Speaker 2: known about him. I think I saw a photo of it, though,
Speaker 2: but he was like, I mean, he's still a politician, right,
Speaker 2: so he's like posing. I saw a lot of photos
Speaker 2: of him like posing with Like here I am at
Speaker 2: the plow and he's like pushing the plow. That's following
Speaker 2: ping Grea's Potato patch plan or whatever. I would totally
Speaker 2: watch a movie about this man. And there's not a
Speaker 2: lot of elected officials. I always say that about instructions
Speaker 2: for gardening were printed up in three languages my guess
Speaker 2: is English, Polish, and German. Based on the immigrant makeup
Speaker 2: of the city at the time. People were given lots
Speaker 2: seeds and tools and basically helped to feed themselves. This
Speaker 2: which was called Pingrea's Potato patch Plan, but it was
Speaker 2: also called the Detroit Plan by people who hate fun
Speaker 2: a sorry, yeah, thank you. It's spread around the country. Boston,
Speaker 2: San Francisco, and Philly started similar pro probably more places
Speaker 2: than that, but those are the ones that I found
Speaker 2: specifically named. The depression was over by the turn of
Speaker 2: the twentieth century, and for the most part, the gardens stopped.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like what you're saying about the COVID gardens.
Speaker 2: Everyone ran out and COVID gardened, and then they were like,
Speaker 2: just kidding, I can go to the store. Fuck that,
Speaker 2: you know, fuck my tomato plant. Philly's Vacant Lots Cultivation
Speaker 2: Association the fun named PVLCA. It kept going until the
Speaker 2: nineteen twenties. At the turn of the twentieth century, social
Speaker 2: reformers started pushing for school gardens, especially in schools for
Speaker 2: working class and immigrant kids. A social reformer named Fanny
Speaker 2: Parsons was a big part of this in New York City.
Speaker 2: And so these are the first New York City gardens
Speaker 2: that I read about. I'm sure there was more, but
Speaker 2: you know, whatever the ones I read about. She worked
Speaker 2: with the National Plant, Flower and Fruit Guild, which I
Speaker 2: hope was Venture Brothers themed, and they all were just
Speaker 2: weird villains dressed as tomatoes. In nineteen oh two, she
Speaker 2: founded the Children's School Farm in Hell's Kitchen in New York.
Speaker 2: They converted a trashed lot into four hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: plots that three thousand different kids ended up like using
Speaker 2: in proper social reformer style. It was all very like,
Speaker 2: I'm not doing this so kids have food. I'm doing
Speaker 2: it so kids can be good and regimented and disciplined,
Speaker 2: because like in the country kids are naturally good, and
Speaker 2: the cities they're like sketchy and bad because they'd not
Speaker 2: in touch with nature or whatever.
Speaker 3: We all know that this is true. It's like real America,
Speaker 3: real children. They're fake children in the same.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And she wanted to help the fake children
Speaker 2: become real children like Pinocchio.
Speaker 3: Oh, Pinocchio.
Speaker 2: Yeah. She said that she didn't do it so kids
Speaker 2: could grow some veggies, but instead that the garden could
Speaker 2: be quote used as a means to show how willing
Speaker 2: and anxious children are to work, and to teach them
Speaker 2: in their work some necessary civic virtues, private care of public,
Speaker 2: proper economy, honesty, application, concentration, self government, civic pride, justice,
Speaker 2: the dignity of labor, and the love of nature. By
Speaker 2: opening to their minds, the little we know of her
Speaker 2: mysteries more wonderful than any fairy tale. So the kids
Speaker 2: long for work. I like, don't hate everything in that,
Speaker 2: but it's just so fucking Protestant.
Speaker 3: My god, it's the most Protestant thing I've ever heard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the dignity of labor. This idea spread and by
Speaker 2: nineteen oh six there were seven five hundred school farms
Speaker 2: across the country. Hers lasted until nineteen thirty one. US
Speaker 2: interesting gardening kept on the up and up for the
Speaker 2: next several decades. First, because of World War One, Europe
Speaker 2: was for some weird reason not exporting much food, and
Speaker 2: by the time the US got involved in nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 2: there was a campaign to recruit soldiers of the soil
Speaker 2: and planned liberty gardens, which were also called patriotic gardens
Speaker 2: and war gardens. Victory gardens comes later World War Two.
Speaker 1: I immediately when he said soldiers of the soil, I
Speaker 1: went earthworms.
Speaker 3: When you said soldiers of the soil, I thought it
Speaker 3: was like a Nazi group. For like a second, because
Speaker 3: my brain is just soup and I like Sophie's way better.
Speaker 1: I was like, either way, worms, you know, I would
Speaker 1: I would love.
Speaker 3: Don't insult earthworms like that.
Speaker 5: Holy shit.
Speaker 2: Sorry, I like earthworms as the real soldiers of the soil,
Speaker 2: and they will eventually eat all of the dead Nazis.
Speaker 2: So this is true, they're anti fascist. Three point five
Speaker 2: million gardens produced three hundred and fifty million pounds of
Speaker 2: crops during World War One. After the war, black folks
Speaker 2: kept the garden movement going as a way to beautify
Speaker 2: parts of the city that the government was neglecting because
Speaker 2: of racism. And I want to find out more about
Speaker 2: this part of history, but I wasn't able to yet,
Speaker 2: and I'm annoyed. Then you've got another big old oppression,
Speaker 2: the the Great one. I think that each time. It's
Speaker 2: like when World War one hit comes, they didn't call
Speaker 2: it World War One, it was the Great War, and
Speaker 2: then World War two is like, yeah, fuck you.
Speaker 3: It's like one of my favorite like historical sketch bits
Speaker 3: is like people in World War One say in world
Speaker 3: War one, and then I wait, what do you mean,
Speaker 3: Like I never get sick of that joke.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I mean too honestly. So then you have
Speaker 2: a big old depression. And these subsistence gardens, which were
Speaker 2: called thrift gardens, were created in partnership between local governments
Speaker 2: and community organizations. And the thrift gardens were like a
Speaker 2: highly planned for efficiency and maximum yield. There's all these
Speaker 2: like charts that they would hand out about like exactly,
Speaker 2: plant three of this at such and such date and whatever.
Speaker 2: World War two, you've got victory gardens. And actually, at
Speaker 2: first the US government didn't want to do it. They
Speaker 2: were like, no, we're going to centralize all food production
Speaker 2: and highly regimen it. Fuck all this decentralization shit. This
Speaker 2: is like the period of you know, how how efficient
Speaker 2: can we fucking be? And then they realized that the
Speaker 2: like I'm doing my part vibe was really good for
Speaker 2: the overall morale of the country during a time in
Speaker 2: which Americans were being drafted to go die overseas. To
Speaker 2: be clear, one of the only good things that US
Speaker 2: has ever done, despite the Nazis. But I see why
Speaker 2: it was. They had to work to make it popular.
Speaker 2: Eighteen to twenty million families with victory gardens produced forty
Speaker 2: percent of the US vegetables in nineteen forty four. Wow,
Speaker 2: I know, but hear me out. I love vegetables. But
Speaker 2: the thing that's worth understanding about all these gardens, Americans
Speaker 2: don't get their caloric needs from gardens, and we get
Speaker 2: our caloric needs from grain or for the meat eaters,
Speaker 2: grain that's fed to livestock and an environmentally expensive and
Speaker 2: inefficient transfer. I remember once I asked a friend of
Speaker 2: mine who's environmental land use engineer who specializes in the
Speaker 2: embedded goological impact of various methods of feeding populations. I
Speaker 2: asked her story to write. This is like post apocalypse books.
Speaker 2: Post apocalypse books at New York City is a long
Speaker 2: time ago. I was like, how much land for gardens
Speaker 2: would you need to feed all of New York City?
Speaker 2: And she gave me an answer with like spreadsheets and shit,
Speaker 2: and the answer was if you gardened basically every rooftop
Speaker 2: and then turned the entire bronx into fields of grain,
Speaker 2: and then expanded it north of the bronx, you might
Speaker 2: have a chance. Look, I love urban gardening and vertical
Speaker 2: farming and all that shit as much as the next
Speaker 2: weird eco person. It is not how people feed themselves currently,
Speaker 2: and we would have to change the American diet dramatically
Speaker 2: to accommodate a different way of living. So Victory Gardens
Speaker 2: produced forty percent of yous vegetables in nineteen forty four.
Speaker 2: That is not forty percent of the food needs. It
Speaker 2: is way way less than that. Still cool, it's still
Speaker 2: impressive thing for people to do, and diet variety is
Speaker 2: good and I am very pro garden. There's this whole
Speaker 2: thing where people are like, oh, I'm just going to
Speaker 2: homestead and then I'll meet all of my needs in
Speaker 2: my homestead. And it's just like, honey, that is not
Speaker 2: I hate. I hate the like how humans evolved is
Speaker 2: not how humans involved. We we like complex societies. They
Speaker 2: don't have to be centralized. They can be weird as shit,
Speaker 2: they can be all kinds of different things. But we
Speaker 2: like aren't going to homestead or a way out of
Speaker 2: any particular problem.
Speaker 3: And I mean, like it's you know, it's just there
Speaker 3: are a lot of things that people don't want to
Speaker 3: give up, or if they do, they pretend that they
Speaker 3: I'm thinking of a lot of like these fucking Republicans
Speaker 3: that or conservatives that act like they live off the
Speaker 3: land and it's their wife doing all the work and
Speaker 3: then actually they're buying all their mrs online.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally no it. And then like, eating meat is
Speaker 2: a ridiculously complicated endeavor in the United States. If you
Speaker 2: like hunt, it's a completely different thing. But we cannot
Speaker 2: sustain anything anywhere close to the population that we have
Speaker 2: through hunting. But yeah, no, it one day, Oh, I
Speaker 2: do a podcast about good people. I was like, one day,
Speaker 2: I'll do a whole thing about how and agriculture is
Speaker 2: a trap. But on the other hand, one of the
Speaker 2: things that I would have to give up if I
Speaker 2: wanted to homesteads, I probably have to give a veganism.
Speaker 2: Like if I wanted to meet all my caloric needs
Speaker 2: where I live, I would be keeping chickens and eating
Speaker 2: their eggs, you know, and like because whatever, okay, anyway,
Speaker 2: in Britain, now I'm gonna have a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: omnivores and vegans mad at me, and I'm really excited
Speaker 2: about that.
Speaker 3: So weird, reality is more complicated than you would think.
Speaker 2: Who I know who. I always wanted to get a
Speaker 2: little pin that said I don't care your opinions about veganism,
Speaker 2: and it was like just as much to the v
Speaker 2: bigans as the non vegans. I was like, no, I
Speaker 2: just don't want to So anyhow, in Britain they had
Speaker 2: dig for Victory, which is a very It's the British
Speaker 2: way of saying victory gardens and I like it, in
Speaker 2: which people use the allotment system to grow one point
Speaker 2: three million tons of food which is even more tons
Speaker 2: there than it is here because their tons has more
Speaker 2: letters in it and is bigger.
Speaker 3: Wait how much bigger are their tons?
Speaker 2: American ton I think is two thousand pounds and a
Speaker 2: British ton is like twenty two It's like twenty two
Speaker 2: hundred something pounds.
Speaker 3: Look, I know I need like metric is obviously more efficient,
Speaker 3: but like, come on.
Speaker 1: British ton is forty pounds.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 2: After the war, all the middle class white people were like, man,
Speaker 2: fuck gardening anyhow, and they all moved to the suburbs
Speaker 2: and started growing the truly decentralized crop that defines America.
Speaker 2: The manicured lawn and commune gardening. Seem to have disappeared
Speaker 2: for a while, but it will come back and be
Speaker 2: even cooler on Wednesday or in the nineteen seventies, one
Speaker 2: or the other.
Speaker 1: Yay.
Speaker 2: But before we go to break, do you have anything
Speaker 2: that you want to tell people about you and the
Speaker 2: things that you do and where people can see like
Speaker 2: your YouTube video? Well, I guess people YouTube would be
Speaker 2: the place to see YouTube videos, but you any clucks?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have a YouTube channel and a TikTok account.
Speaker 3: They're both kat and a boo. I have all the
Speaker 3: other social accounts because there are way too many now
Speaker 3: you can just look me up my link trees on
Speaker 3: all of them. I do long form videos and short
Speaker 3: form about conservative media. I was recently laid off, so
Speaker 3: I'm working on getting my resources together to be able
Speaker 3: to continue that. Yeah, and follow me and stay in
Speaker 3: the loop.
Speaker 1: And not just you, but a bunch of your colleagues
Speaker 1: will also let go from recently. Is there a way
Speaker 1: that people can see how to support them? Is there
Speaker 1: anything that you can direct people to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So a bunch of my other media matters colleagues
Speaker 3: were laid off today as well. I have a running
Speaker 3: thread that's continually updated, especially if there are any more
Speaker 3: layoffs on Twitter or x. It's unfortunate that we have
Speaker 3: to use that, but you know, that's where a lot
Speaker 3: of job offers will be. If we come up with
Speaker 3: a fund or anything, I will absolutely advertise that on there.
Speaker 2: Awesome, awesome, All right, Well, we will see you all
Speaker 2: Wednesday when we talk more about community gardens and people
Speaker 2: are going to start stealing stuff from the government. But
Speaker 2: it's good, well, it's usually a good way unless it's whatever.
Speaker 2: Wait till Wednesday. I'll tell you about it.
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