Planting and Eating From Your Garden
Courtesy of the New York Public Library, Circa 1935
While on family trip to Vermont we stopped at a small village cafe that served a tomato dish I had never had before, tomato pie. It may sound strange to some, but it was awesome! The pie reminded me of the ingenuity that people employed in the kitchen to survive using garden vegetables during the Great Depression. In 1933 the Federal National Relief Agency (NRA) distributed food to families which many used to supplement their diets during the Depression. Singer and song writer Nina Simone’s father worked as a NRA truck-driver in North Carolina delivering food. Drivers received extra food to take home and built a network in which they could trade NRA food and what they raised in abundance in their subsistence gardens at home including “collard greens, string beans, tomatoes” with drivers who had “more sugar or flour than they needed” recalls Simone.
