Part One: Community Gardens: How People Take Land From the Rich to Feed Themselves

Margaret talks with Kat Abu about the history of community gardening in New York City and elsewhere.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Whole Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, the
only podcast I am currently recording. I tried multitasking this
and it turns out I can't, and I'm ashamed of myself,
but I'm not ashamed to have as my guest catbou Hi. Hey, Margaret,
how are you? Kataboo is known from the Internet. That's

(00:27):
what I currently have written down because everything is always
in transition.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
Yeah, I am known from the Internet. I would say
that I have a job, but as of today, I don't.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
The streamer should appear behind you on zoom every time
you say that.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Just like confetti pops out everywhere. But I'm really you know,
it's a great time to hear about cool people who
did cool stuff?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Well are you in luck? But partly because our producer
is Sophie Hi. Sophie Hi.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
It's me Sophie.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
And our audio engineers Daniel.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Hi, Daniel Hi, Danel Hi, Danel Our.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Theme musical was written forced by unwoman. Okay, so I
just finished more than a month, like five weeks of episodes,
ten episodes about the fucking Russian Civil War. And don't worry,
this has nothing to do with that, because that one
ended really tragically, right, the bad people took over in
the end of that one.

Speaker 4 (01:26):
And.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Doing all that research like kind of fucked me up.
It colored my daily interactions, having spent so long immersed
in that particular time and place in history, and I
wanted a break. I wanted to do something where people
win a little bit, uh or at least hold out
a little bit longer, because there's always it's always an

(01:49):
ebb and a flow between good guys in back. Obviously,
we shouldn't paint the world in blacka white morality, but
we do sometimes on this show. And I thought about
two things that have come up recently on this show.
At one point, well, Robert was a guest. We were
talking about how feeding people is generally speaking like just good.

(02:13):
Like if you're like, I don't know what else good
to do, you could probably just feed people. Although the
more you dig into any particular topic you'll find ways
people doing it badly but overall good. I like this
because you still have no idea what we're going to
be talking about. The Other thing is I usually like
match my I usually like look specifically at my guests interests,

(02:36):
and then I'm like pick something that vaguely ties into that.
I didn't do that this time. I just really wanted
to cover this particular topic. I'm like, let's do it. Yeah,
I think I think you'll like it. I think it
would take a person with no heart, like the Grinch.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Somebody we wouldn't book as a guest on this podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
That's true. Yeah, okay. So the other thing that led
me to what this topic is about or whatever. The
hero of one of our recent episodes was this anarchist
military commander woman named Maria Niki Farova. In the middle
of this pitched war, She's waiting to go on trial,
and she told a bunch of the other anarchists in
Russia basically like, Hey, what we should do is set

(03:19):
up a system of community gardens and just feed people,
and that's how we'll like defeat authoritarian propaganda. And I'm
going to talk about that. I'm not gonna talk about
in Russia much. I'm gonna talk about community gardens.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
I love that. I'm so excited.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Hell yeah, I'm gonna talk about the hundreds that still
exist in New York City today. I'm gonna talk about
where they came from and what people have done to
defend them. I have to be clear, I have never
community gardened. I've only regularly gardened, and not very well.
But I'm wondering if this is a thing you experience
or not.

Speaker 3 (03:54):
Yeah, Like I grew up, my mom has like the
greenest thumb, Like she has this cute little herb garden
on her balcony right now. She's always been like so
big on sustainable stuff and like local produce. Like I
don't know how to use a can opener because she
insisted on only fresh produce.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
So to be fair, apparently all of us use a
can opener. Wrong. I saw some video on TikTok and
I was.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
Like, oh, well, do you remember being dad. I felt
so bad for the little girl because I was like,
I am, you know, twenty five, and I'm not to
use a can opener.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Well, apparently nobody does.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
So nobody does except that one person on TikTok.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
Yeah, okay, see, but before we started recording, I was
telling a story that involved me being technically a hobo
and that I was riding a freight train and there's
this style of can opener that hoboes have that no
one excepts soldiers and hoboes, and how to use called
a P thirty eight. It's the size of like two
thumbnails like not like icons, but it's like as big

(04:56):
as like it's it's the size of the top joint.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
Of my okay, and it can open a can like
a penny.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah, a penny and a half's how does it work?
It hinges out and there's a tiny little blade on it,
and then there's a tiny little notch cut into the
metal of the handle, which is like an inch and
a half long or something like that. And it weighs nothing,
it costs nothing. I put them in all the like

(05:24):
first aid kits and emergency kits that they give out
to people. But then people have no idea how to
use it. But you just put it on the can
and then slowly move it around and cut it open.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
No, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Yeah, so I probably am using the regular ones wrong.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
I'd like to use that one. That sounds more fun. Actually,
the can openers were all thinking of they look difficult,
like there's nothing intuitive about them.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
No, two weird spinny discs and then like three things
that spin over there and right, do.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
You want me to slice a pizza with this?

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Like?

Speaker 3 (05:55):
What are you?

Speaker 1 (05:56):
What are you doing? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (06:00):
It does kind of look like a both a pizza
cutter and then also the stuff you use to cut
fabric when you do a lot of sewing, the full
circle cutters, you know, ye, yeah, I wouldn't want to
use a P thirty eight to cut fabric.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
I'm actually working on a quilt that relates to community gardening.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Wait, really tell me about that.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
I saw at the Union Square farmers Market in New
York like two weeks ago, there was this really cool graphic.
It was like a banner and it was their harvest
calendar and I'd like, you know, January and like all
the crops that they bring, And I was like, how
fun would that be to do that as a quilt.
I've never made a quilt, but I think it would

(06:39):
be a very fun quilt to have. But like all
of the crops that I like and all of the
produce that I like, and then embroider like the different
ones on different squares and cool have that. And so
that's my long term project.

Speaker 2 (06:54):
Awesome, I love it. This is a combination of many
of my interests. I haven't started quil and yet I
see it like further down the line of where I'm going.
At one point, I got really into. When I first
started getting really into crafts, my friend was like, just
don't end up candle making. But I'm really oppositional. So
I started making candles like a month later.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Well, when you no longer have vands to fix, Magpie,
you can move on to quilting.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
That's true. I started making the candles as soon as
I moved out of my van and was living in
a barn. And it was great because I could always
tell people I may not have been raised in a barn,
but I live in one. And then people were like,
why did we invite you? You keep making the same joke.

Speaker 3 (07:33):
A barn must have smelled amazing, though it did.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
I made many candles there and sold them on Etsy.
That was my job for a while. By pad weird anyway.
Community gardens yay, community gardens. At that barn, I was
by far the worst at growing things. I was like,
I'm gonna start growing mushrooms because I don't know how to
grow things in the ground. I have to do like
darkness farming. I didn't do a very good job of

(07:57):
that either, but now I have many buckets of potatoes
growing on my porch. So community gardens the first community gardens,
I would argue, were gardening before the state and private
properties stuck their fucking nose in our business. We've talked
about this a ton on our show. The way that

(08:19):
communities all over the world fed themselves was through something
that looks a lot like modern community garden. We've talked about,
for example, how across Ireland, folks used to use a
land occupation system called rundale, in which land was divided
so everyone had equal access to both good and bad land,
and so everyone had You didn't split the food at

(08:40):
the end, You split access to the land to grow
the food across the entire town or community. This system
was destroyed by colonization and by early capitalism. Peasants held
onto it for centuries throughout those incursions, often which meant
that often they would basically have a little bit of
land from the landlord, and then they would still all

(09:01):
get together and pull it and run dale it out.
People fought like hell to defend this system. In Ireland.
They formed secret societies where they threw on dresses and
killed landlords and shit. I think that was cool, So
I did a whole episode about that. Is this is
gonna be a little bit We're gonna start off with
like one of those you know when you watch Saved
by the Bell and it's the end of the season
and they don't feel like making anything new, so they

(09:22):
do the clips episodes. Yeah, this is not a clips episode,
but I'm going to go but this is a thing
that has come up a lot, and so I'm going
to use my own research's context. The most famous of
these groups of cross dressing landlord killers defending primitive communism,
which is an economic turn. I'm not trying to actually
call them primitive. It's some bullshit marks was on, but whatever.

(09:45):
The most famous of these groups is called the Molly
Maguires if you want to look them up. We also
talked about across Europe you had the common field system
or the open field system. This is the commons that
if you ever here people talk about the enclosure of
the commons. This is what they're talking about. And this

(10:06):
wasn't always people who lived super free. Often these communes
were people who lived as first serfs who were owned
and attached to the property right, and then later as
peasants on land that they still didn't owned by a landlord.
The origin of that term is very literal in English,

(10:26):
usually this is royalty to the church amongst themselves. They
split the land into strips so everyone had access to
different shit like you had a and then a lot
of the woods and pastures were the commons that no
one had any ownership at all over except the landlords
who owned it all. But this was famously enclosed in
what's called the enclosure of the commons, where fences and

(10:48):
hedges and shit were put up so it couldn't be
used for the common good. I more or less trace
the origin of capitalism to the enclosure of the commons
in England and the resistance that grew up out of it,
as the first anti capitalist like resistance movements. Whole ass
peasant wars were fought over this stuff, and it is

(11:08):
related to the origin of the labor movement as well.
Most famously, this enclosure was fought by a group called
the Diggers, who were like, yeah, what if we just
illegally plant food anyway? And they're really fun. They actually
if you've ever been part of a squatted garden or
a community garden and you actually get any food out
of the ground, you have succeeded better than the famous

(11:30):
Diggers of history because they they got their asses kicked
before they pulled this so much as a single potato
out of the ground. You also have various indigenous groups,
and specifically the ones that I've covered on this show
is how you have in both Siberia and North America
you have different groups who are practicing communal agriculture, who

(11:51):
inspired a bunch of different later socialists and things like that.
I am sure they have been practiced elsewhere around the world.
Those are just the ones that have come up in
my own research for this show. I get really like
I started writing it out in the script where I
was like, look, this is pretty much what humans evolved
to do. But I hate writing that because whenever people

(12:12):
say that, they're lying or they're like picking some specific
version of humans in order to say, like, you know,
whenever like people are like, oh, humans just fight and
war and that's all humans do, or the opposite where
people are like humans just all get along. I don't
like when people do that. I think that humans are

(12:34):
capable of doing a lot of different things.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
It feel it's kind of like there are multiple things
that humans are capable of doing to each other and
thinking of weird, maybe that's a bit small. That's small minded, you.

Speaker 2 (12:48):
Know, yeah, no I And that's that's it. That is
the like. But among all of the different systems of
economy and land use and things like that that people
have tried, an awful lot of them were not capitalism,
and we're something closer to what it's called primitive communism,

(13:09):
the idea that people share things without Mars having told
them how to do it to begin with. But it's
not community gardening this stuff because I'm going to argue
that community gardening is something that exists in opposition to
food and land scarcity put upon us by economic and
governmental systems. Because when we try to then like get

(13:34):
this stuff back, we are creating something that is like
more oppositional. Like you didn't have to be in opposition
anything to have a Rundale system because no one was
telling you couldn't. I'm going to compare it to squatting,
another thing we've covered a lot on this show. Squatting
is when people take on used property and then use
it regardless of the property owners wishes. Squatting is an

(13:56):
affront to the very foundation of capitalist society, in which
property rights trump human rights, and that is why squatting
is so cool and you can also see like really easily.
And we're gonna get into this later with community gardens.
How there's this tension, like squatters in the US are
largely presented as people who show up like vermin and
destroy things. You know, that is the like, and so

(14:17):
it is like cleaning out a homeless encampment is like
seen as this like cleaning this like improvement. I'm totally
off script. I'm just really angry when I think about that.

Speaker 3 (14:28):
After months of listening to Fox talk about this, that's
like one of their favorite issues for twenty twenty four
is not even like discussing why squatting is happening, but
also pretending that it's people coming into your apartment that
you rent and staying there and there's now an epidemic.
This is happening all the time. Everyone knows about how

(14:50):
you know, people are coming into your apartment and saying
that you know they're going to vote for Joe Biden
and they're going to make you do it too, And
it's like, wow, you're just sick words so you can
just say things now, that's that's crazy.

Speaker 2 (15:03):
I think that would be called house piracy. I love
that and I'm not sure I'm opposed to it. I
probably am opposed to it.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
I mean, like the way I say it is like
you know, Jesse water is his favorite thing, and he's
said this not once but twice several years apart, is
that if there is a squatter in your house, you
should just set the house on fire and burn them
alive and then get the insurance money and blame the
fire on the squatter.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (15:29):
And you know my position is, you know, even if
you own the place, don't burn people alive, like for
any reason.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
That's a bold take.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
I know, I know I'm really brave for saying that.
But second, I don't think this situation it's like, you know,
these conservative men that dream about like being able to
shoot an intruder, It's just not happening that much.

Speaker 2 (15:51):
Sorry.

Speaker 3 (15:52):
I've had to hear a lot about squatting through my
job that I you know, no, no, don't have to
hear about it as much.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
It makes sense to me because it's like overall, where
squatting is a little bit more legalized and protected, where
the like private property rights don't trump the human rights
or whatever, squatting often has a very different vibe where
like you know, squatting in the Netherlands, like no matter

(16:20):
how short a time we were there, there was a
lot of pride taken in, like we will improve the
spaces that we're in.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
You know, correct me if I'm wrong. A lot of
times they're like vacant, like it's not going into Yeah,
it's not to be an piracy like you said.

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Yeah, no it is. I have never in my life,
and I spend a lot of time squatting in my
younger life. I've never in my life like seen someone
try to live in a place that someone already lives.
You know, it is absolutely about unused space, and often
it is a space where like people don't even know
who owns it. Because that's the sweet spot of squatting

(16:54):
is you find the thing where like they can't kick
you out because no one knows who's supposed to kick
you out, because no one knows who building it is.
Because the actual thing that causes urban decay is not squatters,
it's real estate prospecting and people leaving properties vacant and
then preventing people from making use of the property. I'm

(17:14):
getting ahead of myself. This is what we're going to
talk about today, and when we talk about it for housing,
people like, no, it's bad, Like squatting's bad when you
want to live somewhere, when you want to sleep somewhere, right,
when you do it for food and like growing food
and gardens and flowers and trees and things, people have
a much harder time demonizing you. And plenty of societies,

(17:39):
even capitalist societies, have realized that overall squatting is a
social good. We've talked extensively on the show before about
squatters in the Netherlands who righte revitalized city centers because
squatters kept property owners from leaving places vacant. Because once
squatting was legalized, if you left your place empty for
a year, someone could move in. And we actually had
like we had moments. I think I can tell the story,

(18:03):
like at one point the squatters moved in. We people
were trying to get into a building that they were
convinced was vacant. They would do a lot of work
to try and figure out if spaces were vacant. You
do like you'd put like a toothpick in the door,
and then you'd come back a week later and see
if the toothpick is still in the door, because if
it isn't, then it's fallen out because someone's opened the door.
And you spent a lot of time in the in
city hall looking at property records and things. At one point,

(18:26):
some squatters a long time ago broke into a building
and there was like an apartment and there was just
like a couple watching TV, and they were like, oh sorry,
and then they all ran away. And then the next
day a lot of these squatters are like locksmiths and things,
right because there's a synchronicity of interests. And so then
they showed back up and like we're like, I have

(18:47):
no idea why your door's broken. I'm just here to
fix your door. I have no relationship to anyone who
has committed a crime. And the squatters like came back
and cleaned up their mess, which is still like, look,
don't break into people's houses while they're there. I get it,
But like if you do, come back the next day
and clean up the.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
Door, you know this is the future the left wants.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Yeah, exactly. And so the community garden, i would argue,
is fundamentally a pro social squatting of vacant land, generally
in city centers. It's lineage I would argue has far
more to do with the diggers or even the molly
maguires than it does like suburban fake homesteading or whatever,

(19:29):
which is how it gets spun a lot. Now, at
the very end we'll talk about some of them ways
in which tech millionaires get to exploit all of this.
But in the US, it is easier for us to
imagine that people have a right to grow food on
vacant and unimproved land than it is for us to
imagine that people have a right to sleep there. So

(19:50):
vacant lot gardening is generally smiled upon, while squatting and
homeless encampments are generally frowned upon. I'm actually curious in
all of their stuff, watching all this stuff about s squatting,
do they ever do a thing where they're like good
homeless encampment, bad homeless encampment, or like these people tried
to build a garden and so they're good or anything
like that.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
So that's really interesting that you ask that, because, like,
you know, Tucker when he was on the air, he
you know, hates homeless people, not as much as Jesse.
Jesse was like deep Jesse Waters the most aggressive person
on Fox about that, like I could, there's probably over
ten hours of just like quotes like that. But like

(20:31):
the amount of work that goes into demonizing encampments is
like fucking nuts. You would have cameramen go in and
like no one's doing anything. I mean even like not
in terms of squatting bl Like even like the you
know GW encampment down here in DC, you had like
cameramen all over and it's like you know, college kids

(20:52):
being like do you need any sunscreen? Like, you know,
here's some food if you need it, Take whatever you need.
And so that's what they'd that's what they always do.
There's never really any they don't even try to be
like in some cases and then like show I don't know,
like some white homeless person and then compare it to like,
you know, a migrant, right. Yeah, it's the effort that
goes into it is honestly astonishing.

Speaker 2 (21:15):
They need to do a lot of work to try
and convince us to forget our class interests and like
side with the billionaires. But you know what is in
your class interest is being advertised to buy goods and services.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
I've heard the class interests of that.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah, here's dad's and we're back. Hopefully you just press
the forward fifteen seconds button until you heard the bumper
music again. So many many modern societies have access to

(21:59):
land for people and cities as part of their social structure,
where people don't even have to squat land in order
to grow food. Around Europe, for example, with the UK
being the example that I've run across the most, I'm
going to focus on it, you've got what's called the
allotments system. It's this little scrap of freedom that's left
over from the enclosure of the commons. And it started

(22:22):
in eighteen forty five with the General Enclosure Act, which
was like, look, we've enclosed almost everything, but here's a
little crumb for the pores. I guess. Even then, it
wasn't too much of anything until at the end of
World War One, when returning soldiers were given allotments and
the laws were solidified to protect the allotment system. And

(22:44):
basically what this is is like you're like, if you
enter a waiting list and you get chosen by the
allotment lottery or whatever, you get to go pay a
small amount of rent to a different landlord, but a
small amount of rent, and you get access to a
community garden, basically a little plot of land that you
can grow some vegetables in, which it turns out that

(23:05):
they can do in the UK. So I'm not I
always assume that they left their country to invade everywhere
because there was no sun there and so they had
to invade other places for food. But it turns out
you can grow food there, So I'm not sure why
they invented colonization.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
I mean, I really like how they were like, Wow,
this one thing, this potato, so amazing. We're gonna build
our entire culture about that and other cultures around that,
and then pretend we invented it.

Speaker 4 (23:36):
I know.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
I it's really fun to imagine Europe before the discovery
of like the New World and potatoes and tomatoes.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
You know.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
I constantly think about like the indigenous like scientists who
created all like crossbread, all of these different types of
you know, fruits and vegetables and you know shit like
that that like we're just claimed and no one ever
gives them credit. I mean I saw something a couple
of weeks ago that was like you don't see any
Michelin star you know, tribal restaurants.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
Yeah, and then you're like and I would love to
see that, which is interesting correct because they probably mean
it as like, oh, there's no indigenous food culture. They
probably mean it as like a these people.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
So it was like it was an Indo person saying, like,
you know, we provided all this food and we have
all these cultures and like you know, every food that
you love or like, you know, ninety percent of them
at least in America, like come from here, and yet
you have no idea how they were originally treated.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yeah you know, Okay, I see. I thought you were
doing the like because there's that thing where right wing
people are Zionist or whatever, will be like Palestinians never
invented anything or whatever, which is another incorrect statement that
people can make.

Speaker 3 (24:54):
No way, it's nuts.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
You haven't seen that one.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
No, I've seen that. Oh okay, I'm just shocked that
Palestinians are.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
People, yeah, and never invented anything actually, which is also
how you judge people's access to life. And also it's
just wrong on every level. It's like turtles all the
way down, but it's wrong anyway.

Speaker 3 (25:14):
Yeahstly, No, it's just I love like the amount of
assumptions that people have about Palestinians, and I see a
lot like, yeah, yeah, they're dirty, blah blah blah. And
then someone was like, they can't have blue eyes. But
I literally just was like, I I have blue eyes.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
There are literally so many.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Yeah, Like they.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
Can't invent anything, they don't have blue eyes, they can't
look at a Jew without killing them. That's These are
all things that we all know about Palestinians.

Speaker 2 (25:46):
In the USSR and other Soviet Bloc countries, there was
also something comparable in pre Soviet times, like with tzars
and shit. Nobles were given datchas, basically little country homes
just outside the city with like a cottage and a
place to garden, and so in the us ARE you'd
think they'd be like, oh, now they've all been communized
and everyone gets access to them. No, they went to
the new nobles, the Bolshevik party members. They got the dachas.

(26:10):
But in some of them, like every now and then,
some of them are given to some regular workers or whatever,
but an awful lot of them were left more or
less unused, and so squatters in the USSR just started
taking them over. And I think this was less like
people came out and lived in them, although I think
that happened a little bit too, and it was more

(26:30):
like people who lived in the city just started coming
out and using them and growing vegetables because this was
the only way that you could eat vegetables. Because this
one isn't the Bolshevik's fault. World War II was a fuck,
and people didn't have any vegetables, and so they were like,
we want to not die, so they went out and
squatted the dachas. In a pattern we see over and

(26:53):
over again, the people rushed to do something, and the
government had to rush to keep up once it realized
it wasn't able to stop people from doing the thing.
By nineteen fifty five, the USSR legalized what people were
already doing. Soon datches were all the rage, and modern
Russia apparently has the largest percentage of people who own
a summer home of anywhere in the world. The US,
of course, doesn't like giving people things for free, unless,

(27:17):
of course, you're a rich farmer or another capitalist who's
entitled to privatize public property. So we tend not to
have a system by which city dwellers can access land
to grow food, So people tend to do it anyway.
Community gardens EBB and flow. War or recession will drive
everyone to organize them. Then basically waves of gentrification will

(27:37):
shut them down. And I'm going to run through their
history in the US. This took a different turn than
I expected it to, not like a wild turn, but
like there's a politician who's a Republican who I like.
Now I know that republican meant the opposite thing in
the nineteen hundreds, eighteen hundreds, whatever, nineteenth century. I still

(27:58):
was kind of surprised by this.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
Sophia, have you read the script? Like do you know
what's happening?

Speaker 2 (28:03):
Okay?

Speaker 3 (28:04):
Because I was like, I think it'd be fun to have,
you know, establish our thoughts on community gardens ahead of time.
But I'm the only one that's out of it, out
of the loop, and I don't want to sound dumb
when my assumptions are wrong.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Well, what's your something now? And you could do it?

Speaker 3 (28:18):
I mean, I just I'm really interested to see like
where this started and now this started. And I think personally,
like I've heard the argument that like, you know, gentrified
community gardens are like a bad thing and you know,
none of us. But also I think that having access
to produce in anywhere is a good thing, and so

(28:40):
I'm really interested for that notion specifically to see if
that will be a thing that I am wrong about,
which I am about many things.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
I think that overall we're going to talk about a
little bit later about how but gentrification is the death
of community gardens over and over again, and in some
ways they are creating their own death right because they
improve an area and then people want to move in
and live there. But they are not started by gentrifying forces.

(29:12):
Again and again, they are started by people who want
decent standards of living, who want to beautify the areas
that they live in. And it is complicated, but that
the thing that gentrifies the neighborhood is not people wanting
to grow food. It is the landlords who come up
and buy property and raise rents.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
See.

Speaker 3 (29:32):
I was thinking of like after the fact, like especially
during COVID, where it was kind of trendy to like
start apply or like grow a bunch of herbs. And
then like I know so many buildings in like DC
where like here's some dirt, everyone can be a part
of it. And then everyone was like doing Instagram picture
and planting and stuff like that, and then everyone just

(29:53):
kind of forgot and there were a bunch of like
un harvested crops. But at the same time, some people
came in and just took even if they weren't theirs,
and net good, I guess. But now it's just concept dirt.

Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:05):
No, it's it's this thing where like some of the
stuff that rich people like is like nice stuff that
we should all get to have, you know. So I'm
going to start this story in Detroit. There's a city.
It's called Detroit. It's in Michigan. It's most famous for
being pretty abandoned.

Speaker 1 (30:23):
It's most famous for being the homeland of my parents.

Speaker 2 (30:26):
Oh well that too.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
It's up for were you born in Detroit?

Speaker 1 (30:30):
No?

Speaker 4 (30:30):
Born in la Oh yeah, like an American superstar story.
One of the few people actually born and raised in
Los Angeles.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
Yeah, so my parents are from the d.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
It is the city that is most interesting to me too.
In North America or in the US.

Speaker 5 (30:52):
It's really cool now.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
The only one I know it is like when I
was Ye, I've been to all fifty of the states. No, sorry,
I haven't been to all forty of the forty eight
of the lower States, And I've been to every city
that interests me back when I was like a full
time traveler except Detroit.

Speaker 1 (31:09):
Have you never been to Michigan? Where'd you go?

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Yeah? Yeah? I spent a month living in the bushes
outside of college and Lansing, Michigan, while waiting for my
friend to get out of jail and trying to organize
with activisty people to go to some demonstrations in DC.
And then I left to go hop freight trains to
get to the West coast, got my heartbroken and turned

(31:34):
around and drove to DC and then got mass arrested
the IMF demonstrations in two thousand and two or three,
So I spent I spent a while in Lansing, and
then I have like memories of getting yelled at by
cops in Battle Creek, Michigan, appropriately named I know.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
I love how everything you say it's like a person's
entire lifetime, but it's like a new one every time
you open your mouth, and it's aletely different person that's
had like a completely different path. Yeah, but they're all you. Margaret.

Speaker 1 (32:06):
Margaret's every character in a TV show.

Speaker 3 (32:09):
It's amazing. She is fifty pulp novels in one person.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Thanks. I think yeah, yeah, no, I I yeah, I
have enjoyed my life and I am glad to.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
Continue to a're you gonna tell me something good or
about it happened in Michigan.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Good, this is a good story about Detroit.

Speaker 5 (32:32):
We love that.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
So Detroit was founded by French colonists in seventeen oh
one on hodnah Land, sometimes called the Iroquois Federation.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
I'll tell you something good starts off bad, She's like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
The ended up being a major inspiration for Western democratic
practices and also heavily influenced a bunch of communists thought.
But Detroit started off as a fort actually to drive
out the British colonists. The Americans eventually stole it or
conquered it or whatever, and it became one of the
more important Western cities. It was the Paris of the

(33:08):
West for a little while. This is even before the
auto industry kicks in. Later, the auto industry is going
to make it this huge thing, and it's going to
be one of the biggest industrial centers in the country.
But we're going to start this garden story before it.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Very excited to go see my relatives who are still met,
going to go, you know, Detroit used to be the
Paris of the West. You know, yeah, it still is, baby,
and then they'll be like, oh geez, yeah, and then
they offer you.

Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yogurt and jello. I don't know anything about Midwest culture anymore,
especially because also Destroit it's like different from the rest
of Midwest culture. There's food cheese that's Wisconsin. Okay. So
the eighteen seventies and the eighteen eighties were like the
Gilded Age in America, which is important for people to
wrap their heads around because we're basically in another one

(34:00):
right now. The Gilded Age was when you had a
booming economy that only helps the rich and you've got
big materialistic and also, okay, to be fair, the eighteen
seventies also helped some of the middle class workers. It
kind of created the American middle class. And you've got
big materialistic excesses. People are like run around and they're
I was gonna say Rolls Royces, but we're fifty years
too early for that. It's a time of political corruption

(34:22):
and rich assholes. Basically, it's the rich got richer and
the poor got poorer. Period. Westward expansion and immigration are
fueling the whole thing, with like access to land and
then also access to cheap labor, exploitable labor. People start
getting mad about that and they start doing stuff about it,
and we've covered that a lot on this show. By

(34:43):
the eighteen nineties, a bunch of things are happening. First
of all, the labor movement is kicking some ass, and
both major parties are now seen as pretty boring and conservative.
Totally no reflection to the modern era is happening right now.
And so you've got what's called the People's Party or
sometimes it's called the Populist Party, and it was formed

(35:03):
in eighteen ninety two. These are the populists. They wanted
some basic progressive shit. They wanted workers' rights to collective bargaining,
they wanted federal regulation of capitalism. They wanted a shorter
work week. They also wanted something I didn't realize we
didn't already have back then. Did you know that until
nineteen thirteen, people who lived in a state didn't vote

(35:26):
in their senators in DC. Were they like appointed, They
were elected by the state legislature instead. Oh, so it's
like how Donald Trump tried to overthrow the election.

Speaker 3 (35:39):
Yeah, kind of probably because it's like you have like this,
they can technically just ignore everything in a point whoever.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Yeah, yeah, And so that's how those state senators were decided.
And the Populist Party was like, we don't like that.
We prefer democracy. And it wasn't until the Seventeenth Amendment
in nineteen thirty that people started voting for their senators.
The Populist Party did not win any major elections, but

(36:08):
they were popular enough. Get it, They're popular because they're populists.
Thank you, I appreciate it. Forced the Republican Party, which
was the vaguely left of the two parties at the time,
the modern the equivalent of the modern Democrats. It forced
them to shift further to the left in order to
keep up because the Populist Party was doing really well
and they were like, fuck, we want some of that

(36:29):
good old fashioned votes. One of these progressive Republicans was
a man named Hazen Pingree, and he was the mayor
of Detroit. Later he becomes Michigan's mayor. I thought I
was gonna hate him. When you read a like one,
I just hate politicians. I'm an asshole and an anarchist.
When you read like a one sentence version of the

(36:51):
history of community gardens they were like, and then they
were invented by this Republican named Hazen Pingree, who was
the mayor of Detroit. And I'm like, the fuck he did.
He probably just was mayor while some other people did
some shit, because that's almost always how it goes. This
guy seems legit until I find other evidence. He was

(37:15):
a businessman whose political life was spent trying to stop
monopolies and increase public ownership of utilities and railroads and shit.
He was also self made. He grew up a worker,
like he started at fourteen in a cotton factory, I
think in Maine, and he worked for years as a
cutter in the shoe factory. Then when the Civil War

(37:36):
broke out, he fought on the front lines of the
Civil War. He got captured, taken prisoner by the Confederates,
so he broke out. And how to be clear, when
I imagined me being like, I'm a good noble fighting
against slavery. Once I've broken out of prison, I could
kind of see myself being like, I have done my
work here, I'm going to go home.

Speaker 4 (37:57):
No.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
He he broke out of prison, rejoined his redgment, and
fought in even more battles. He then started a shoe business.
He moved to Detroit because heard it was a good
place to go booming. And he starts just as like
a shoe guy and a factory. And then the shoe
guy factory that was like shoe guy guy, Yeah, it

(38:20):
goes out of business, and so him and his friend
pull up their money and buy the machinery and start
their own shoe business and it becomes the second biggest
shoe business in the country. He becomes the mayor. He
takes the city from the right leaning Democrats, and he
gets into fights with all the other businessmen, including all
of the other Republicans, because he wants to keep street

(38:43):
car fares accessible in shit and like forces like fair
hikes to not go up.

Speaker 3 (38:48):
Is this eighteen seventies, Jesse Ventura.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
I know more about eighteen nineties. Is we're in the
eighteen nineties now.

Speaker 3 (38:55):
But ohey, no, no, it's okay.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
I know more about the eighteen nineties in the modern era.

Speaker 5 (39:01):
You're spot on, kat you thank you.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
Here we go. Yeah, I'm here to translate.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
I'm here to translate.

Speaker 2 (39:06):
No, I appreciate it. No, I live in history books
right now. This is the very end of my life
where I know only the things that happened hundred years so.

Speaker 3 (39:13):
The parallels are like incredible.

Speaker 5 (39:15):
One of my favorite.

Speaker 1 (39:16):
Things to do is to tell both you and Sarah
Marshall things that are happening in real time, because both
of your historians, and then I get to tell you
things and then you're like whow and sometimes you have
the exact same reaction, and it's beautiful. It's very beautiful
to me.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Hell yeah. And so he fought corruption, He fought his
own political party. He wrote a book in eighteen ninety
five about how people suffer under monopoly and corruption. And now, like,
the one thing he's not a radical, right his book
about like people suffering is like, but don't go and
do anything violent or destructive. That's bad and it makes

(39:54):
us look bad. Right, But he took his His eighteen
ninety five book is dedicated to the people of Detroit,
and the dedication is like handwritten on a photo of
a potato or like an it's a weird image.

Speaker 3 (40:08):
That's how we should do every dedication.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Now I agree, Otherwise you got one upped by a
Republican in eighteen ninety five. Is that really what you
want to go down being remembered as he tried to
unify urban workers and farmers. His book had like political
cartoons showing them in the same boat rowing against monopoly.
If there is a nineteenth century rich asshole politician who

(40:31):
I don't hate, it's this guy Pingree. When he dies
at sixty, the Detroit News wrote about him. Other men
had opinions, He had convictions.

Speaker 3 (40:41):
That's a good way to be remembered.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
Holy shit, right. He was in charge of Detroit when
the Panic of eighteen ninety three hit. It is never
a good time to live through a year that is
remembered as the Panic of Basically, this was yet again
a great depression. Before the Great Depression, a bunch of
complicated economic stuff happened where the rich assholes created a bubble,

(41:03):
and then the bubble burst. People ran on the banks.
Five hundred banks closed. Michigan had a forty three percent
unemployment rate at this time. Everyone is starving and out
of work, and they wanted to grow their own food,
and they wanted potatoes. The sponsor of today's show the
concept of the potato.

Speaker 5 (41:23):
Oh we're back, baby, I love this.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
If any other ads sneak in, they are a mistake.

Speaker 5 (41:30):
Hahaha.

Speaker 1 (41:31):
Potatoes for everyone unless you're allergic than I'm so sorry.

Speaker 3 (41:35):
Yeah, no, can you potatoes?

Speaker 1 (41:37):
You can. And it's one of the common things on
like a like an hour and like a food HOLLURGI
just test someone try and you know, take this with
a grit salt. But one time I tested positive for
a potato allergy and I was like, I'm irish as
fuck and no I'm not, and then they like readid

(41:58):
it three times? And I was like total, told you, I.

Speaker 3 (42:04):
Mean, look at your face. Com on, I know.

Speaker 5 (42:08):
You're absolutely correct, like really really.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Like I don't know how to describe Sophie's face except
like irish yeaeah, not allergic to potatoes.

Speaker 5 (42:21):
Not allergic potatoes, and we're back.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
People wanted their potatoes, and Pingree wanted to give them potatoes,
or rather, he wanted to help them grow their own
potatoes because he's a potato guy. Panic kits and he
starts I love an alliteration. Ping Gree's potato patch plan.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
That's a whimsical.

Speaker 2 (42:51):
I know. Four hundred and thirty three acres of vacant
city land were set aside for people to grow food
as part of funding it. He sold his favorite horse, and.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
We know the horses name.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
I don't. I don't. I read a fair amount about
this man, but not as much as there could be
known about him. I think I saw a photo of it, though,
but he was like, I mean, he's still a politician, right,
so he's like posing. I saw a lot of photos
of him like posing with Like here I am at
the plow and he's like pushing the plow. That's following
ping Grea's Potato patch plan or whatever. I would totally

(43:23):
watch a movie about this man. And there's not a
lot of elected officials. I always say that about instructions
for gardening were printed up in three languages my guess
is English, Polish, and German. Based on the immigrant makeup
of the city at the time. People were given lots
seeds and tools and basically helped to feed themselves. This

(43:46):
which was called Pingrea's Potato patch Plan, but it was
also called the Detroit Plan by people who hate fun
a sorry, yeah, thank you. It's spread around the country. Boston,
San Francisco, and Philly started similar pro probably more places
than that, but those are the ones that I found
specifically named. The depression was over by the turn of

(44:07):
the twentieth century, and for the most part, the gardens stopped.
It's kind of like what you're saying about the COVID gardens.
Everyone ran out and COVID gardened, and then they were like,
just kidding, I can go to the store. Fuck that,
you know, fuck my tomato plant. Philly's Vacant Lots Cultivation
Association the fun named PVLCA. It kept going until the

(44:29):
nineteen twenties. At the turn of the twentieth century, social
reformers started pushing for school gardens, especially in schools for
working class and immigrant kids. A social reformer named Fanny
Parsons was a big part of this in New York City.
And so these are the first New York City gardens
that I read about. I'm sure there was more, but
you know, whatever the ones I read about. She worked

(44:52):
with the National Plant, Flower and Fruit Guild, which I
hope was Venture Brothers themed, and they all were just
weird villains dressed as tomatoes. In nineteen oh two, she
founded the Children's School Farm in Hell's Kitchen in New York.
They converted a trashed lot into four hundred and fifty
plots that three thousand different kids ended up like using

(45:15):
in proper social reformer style. It was all very like,
I'm not doing this so kids have food. I'm doing
it so kids can be good and regimented and disciplined,
because like in the country kids are naturally good, and
the cities they're like sketchy and bad because they'd not
in touch with nature or whatever.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
We all know that this is true. It's like real America,
real children. They're fake children in the same.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Yeah, exactly. And she wanted to help the fake children
become real children like Pinocchio.

Speaker 3 (45:44):
Oh, Pinocchio.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Yeah. She said that she didn't do it so kids
could grow some veggies, but instead that the garden could
be quote used as a means to show how willing
and anxious children are to work, and to teach them
in their work some necessary civic virtues, private care of public,
proper economy, honesty, application, concentration, self government, civic pride, justice,

(46:06):
the dignity of labor, and the love of nature. By
opening to their minds, the little we know of her
mysteries more wonderful than any fairy tale. So the kids
long for work. I like, don't hate everything in that,
but it's just so fucking Protestant.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
My god, it's the most Protestant thing I've ever heard.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Yeah, the dignity of labor. This idea spread and by
nineteen oh six there were seven five hundred school farms
across the country. Hers lasted until nineteen thirty one. US
interesting gardening kept on the up and up for the
next several decades. First, because of World War One, Europe
was for some weird reason not exporting much food, and

(46:48):
by the time the US got involved in nineteen seventeen,
there was a campaign to recruit soldiers of the soil
and planned liberty gardens, which were also called patriotic gardens
and war gardens. Victory gardens comes later World War Two.

Speaker 1 (47:00):
I immediately when he said soldiers of the soil, I
went earthworms.

Speaker 3 (47:06):
When you said soldiers of the soil, I thought it
was like a Nazi group. For like a second, because
my brain is just soup and I like Sophie's way better.

Speaker 1 (47:14):
I was like, either way, worms, you know, I would
I would love.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
Don't insult earthworms like that.

Speaker 5 (47:21):
Holy shit.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
Sorry, I like earthworms as the real soldiers of the soil,
and they will eventually eat all of the dead Nazis.
So this is true, they're anti fascist. Three point five
million gardens produced three hundred and fifty million pounds of
crops during World War One. After the war, black folks

(47:44):
kept the garden movement going as a way to beautify
parts of the city that the government was neglecting because
of racism. And I want to find out more about
this part of history, but I wasn't able to yet,
and I'm annoyed. Then you've got another big old oppression,
the the Great one. I think that each time. It's
like when World War one hit comes, they didn't call

(48:04):
it World War One, it was the Great War, and
then World War two is like, yeah, fuck you.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
It's like one of my favorite like historical sketch bits
is like people in World War One say in world
War one, and then I wait, what do you mean,
Like I never get sick of that joke.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Yeah, no, I mean too honestly. So then you have
a big old depression. And these subsistence gardens, which were
called thrift gardens, were created in partnership between local governments
and community organizations. And the thrift gardens were like a
highly planned for efficiency and maximum yield. There's all these
like charts that they would hand out about like exactly,

(48:39):
plant three of this at such and such date and whatever.
World War two, you've got victory gardens. And actually, at
first the US government didn't want to do it. They
were like, no, we're going to centralize all food production
and highly regimen it. Fuck all this decentralization shit. This
is like the period of you know, how how efficient

(49:00):
can we fucking be? And then they realized that the
like I'm doing my part vibe was really good for
the overall morale of the country during a time in
which Americans were being drafted to go die overseas. To
be clear, one of the only good things that US
has ever done, despite the Nazis. But I see why
it was. They had to work to make it popular.

(49:24):
Eighteen to twenty million families with victory gardens produced forty
percent of the US vegetables in nineteen forty four. Wow,
I know, but hear me out. I love vegetables. But
the thing that's worth understanding about all these gardens, Americans
don't get their caloric needs from gardens, and we get

(49:47):
our caloric needs from grain or for the meat eaters,
grain that's fed to livestock and an environmentally expensive and
inefficient transfer. I remember once I asked a friend of
mine who's environmental land use engineer who specializes in the
embedded goological impact of various methods of feeding populations. I
asked her story to write. This is like post apocalypse books.
Post apocalypse books at New York City is a long

(50:08):
time ago. I was like, how much land for gardens
would you need to feed all of New York City?
And she gave me an answer with like spreadsheets and shit,
and the answer was if you gardened basically every rooftop
and then turned the entire bronx into fields of grain,
and then expanded it north of the bronx, you might

(50:30):
have a chance. Look, I love urban gardening and vertical
farming and all that shit as much as the next
weird eco person. It is not how people feed themselves currently,
and we would have to change the American diet dramatically
to accommodate a different way of living. So Victory Gardens

(50:51):
produced forty percent of yous vegetables in nineteen forty four.
That is not forty percent of the food needs. It
is way way less than that. Still cool, it's still
impressive thing for people to do, and diet variety is
good and I am very pro garden. There's this whole
thing where people are like, oh, I'm just going to

(51:11):
homestead and then I'll meet all of my needs in
my homestead. And it's just like, honey, that is not
I hate. I hate the like how humans evolved is
not how humans involved. We we like complex societies. They
don't have to be centralized. They can be weird as shit,
they can be all kinds of different things. But we
like aren't going to homestead or a way out of

(51:33):
any particular problem.

Speaker 3 (51:35):
And I mean, like it's you know, it's just there
are a lot of things that people don't want to
give up, or if they do, they pretend that they
I'm thinking of a lot of like these fucking Republicans
that or conservatives that act like they live off the
land and it's their wife doing all the work and
then actually they're buying all their mrs online.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
Yeah, totally no it. And then like, eating meat is
a ridiculously complicated endeavor in the United States. If you
like hunt, it's a completely different thing. But we cannot
sustain anything anywhere close to the population that we have
through hunting. But yeah, no, it one day, Oh, I

(52:18):
do a podcast about good people. I was like, one day,
I'll do a whole thing about how and agriculture is
a trap. But on the other hand, one of the
things that I would have to give up if I
wanted to homesteads, I probably have to give a veganism.
Like if I wanted to meet all my caloric needs
where I live, I would be keeping chickens and eating
their eggs, you know, and like because whatever, okay, anyway,

(52:42):
in Britain, now I'm gonna have a whole bunch of
omnivores and vegans mad at me, and I'm really excited
about that.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
So weird, reality is more complicated than you would think.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Who I know who. I always wanted to get a
little pin that said I don't care your opinions about veganism,
and it was like just as much to the v
bigans as the non vegans. I was like, no, I
just don't want to So anyhow, in Britain they had
dig for Victory, which is a very It's the British
way of saying victory gardens and I like it, in
which people use the allotment system to grow one point

(53:13):
three million tons of food which is even more tons
there than it is here because their tons has more
letters in it and is bigger.

Speaker 3 (53:23):
Wait how much bigger are their tons?

Speaker 2 (53:25):
American ton I think is two thousand pounds and a
British ton is like twenty two It's like twenty two
hundred something pounds.

Speaker 3 (53:33):
Look, I know I need like metric is obviously more efficient,
but like, come on.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
British ton is forty pounds.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
After the war, all the middle class white people were like, man,
fuck gardening anyhow, and they all moved to the suburbs
and started growing the truly decentralized crop that defines America.
The manicured lawn and commune gardening. Seem to have disappeared
for a while, but it will come back and be
even cooler on Wednesday or in the nineteen seventies, one

(54:09):
or the other.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
Yay.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
But before we go to break, do you have anything
that you want to tell people about you and the
things that you do and where people can see like
your YouTube video? Well, I guess people YouTube would be
the place to see YouTube videos, but you any clucks?

Speaker 3 (54:26):
Yeah, I have a YouTube channel and a TikTok account.
They're both kat and a boo. I have all the
other social accounts because there are way too many now
you can just look me up my link trees on
all of them. I do long form videos and short
form about conservative media. I was recently laid off, so

(54:46):
I'm working on getting my resources together to be able
to continue that. Yeah, and follow me and stay in
the loop.

Speaker 1 (54:54):
And not just you, but a bunch of your colleagues
will also let go from recently. Is there a way
that people can see how to support them? Is there
anything that you can direct people to.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
Yeah, So a bunch of my other media matters colleagues
were laid off today as well. I have a running
thread that's continually updated, especially if there are any more
layoffs on Twitter or x. It's unfortunate that we have
to use that, but you know, that's where a lot
of job offers will be. If we come up with

(55:30):
a fund or anything, I will absolutely advertise that on there.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
Awesome, awesome, All right, Well, we will see you all
Wednesday when we talk more about community gardens and people
are going to start stealing stuff from the government. But
it's good, well, it's usually a good way unless it's whatever.
Wait till Wednesday. I'll tell you about it.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
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