Did anyone in the USA still grow their own food in the 1970s? (house)
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I keep hearing and reading that as recently as the 70s a lot of people in the UK no doubt as well as Canada and Australia and New Zealand grew their own vegetables/fruit, drank their own cows milk and made butter, cheese out of it. They also slaughtered their own animals for meat for use for the winter.
Just how common were these things amongst ordinary farmers and people (not the trendy hippies!) in America?
we had a garden in the 70s. not huge but just a variety of vegetables. i think with the advent of HOAs later, this became a lot less common. frankly I think people have become lazier too.
I keep hearing and reading that as recently as the 70s a lot of people in the UK no doubt as well as Canada and Australia and New Zealand grew their own vegetables/fruit, drank their own cows milk and made butter, cheese out of it. They also slaughtered their own animals for meat for use for the winter.
Just how common were these things amongst ordinary farmers and people (not the trendy hippies!) in America?
In some isolated rural areas like in the interior West, Great Plains, or Appalachia, yes, but mainstream America was well-established with supermarkets and fast-food joints by that time, with the postwar economic boom leading to a shift in rural America to more corporately-owned agriculture. You have to go back to WWII and earlier to find a more notable presence of this "grow your own food" culture, with the rationing brought about by the War likely the reasoning for that practice, along with the Great Depression prior to that. Despire this, there was a more active gardening scene back in the 1970s and especially earlier, though increasingly this became more of a hobby as opposed to a necessity as it was during troubled or primitive times, and tended to be dominated by the older generations who grew up with a less convenient lifestyle. Baby boomers wanted to get that microwave oven as soon as they started making a living and grew up with a trip to diners and a refrigerator in their home, so they couldn't appreciate the basics of growing food.
I'd imagine the same for most of the urban/suburban Commonwealth metropolitan areas, even though smaller independent stores dominated there (though Canada shares a lot of the supermarket/fast food culture with the US).
I know people who are doing it now. As far as the small farmer doing it for basic sustenance, probably some, but grocery stores had proliferated by then.
There have always been people in the US growing their own food, even in that insanely wonderful decade of the 1970s.
It's not a trendy or "hippie" thing; it's a practical and beneficial one. Whatever they've done more recently is of contemporary culture, not to be confused with traditional America.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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We bought our first house (California) in 1978, and I had a pretty good sized vegetable garden in the back yard. I also grafted several apple varieties onto the existing tree, and planted an Almond tree. Our reason was simply that home grown tastes better than store bought, and I enjoy gardening. We've had vegetable gardens in the other two homes since then too. Just last night ate the last of the tomatoes.
I know people who are doing it now. As far as the small farmer doing it for basic sustenance, probably some, but grocery stores had proliferated by then.
Yes people are certainly doing it now in America (now people are waking up to the benefits of Real foods) much more than in the 70s when spage age convenience foods were the norm. But in the UK in the seventies food was still seasonal, unprocessed, brought from separate shops as opposed to large supermarkets and grown on small farms. Nowadays people in Britain hardly grow their own (even less so than the USA) and this is so sad considering that just a few decades ago this was very different. Things have changed really fast there.
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