I think the isolation of rural Americans made their experience of food shortages much different than that of urban Americans. For urban Americans, the spectacle of the bread line was seen as the last, most pathetic stop before absolute starvation. The amount of shame attached to this practice or accepting any form of charity or government assistance no doubt added to the pain of food insecurity. For rural Americans, their isolation helped to somewhat shield them from the shame of taking handouts, and the fact that they could grow their own food in many locations helped to lessen the impact of food shortages. 

An unfortunate effect of falling agricultural prices was that farmers attempted to grow more food to make up the difference. More land was plowed up, especially in the already fragile ecosystem of the Panhandle, but all this did was drive the price of food down further. It's easy for us today to shake our heads at the farmers actions, but I have to wonder if they really had any other options. Many were in debt in order to buy the equipment and seed they needed to plant in the first place, and how many other jobs were available in their local communities, specifically in the Panhandle. It seems that without outside help, planting more crops was the only reasonable option for the farmers of the Great Plains. 

This is a wonderful and rich discussion and fantastic to see the continuation

1. How did urban and rural populations experience Depression food shortages differently?

In A Square Meal, the authors open by discussing what life and food (two very intertwined concepts) on farms and in rural areas.  In the rural areas there is both abundance and lack – an abundance in quantity of food coupled with a lack of options for variety of foods.  Conversely, the book then dives headlong into how urban populations pre-Depression era, specifically New York, had an abundance of options in terms of variety of food, but a lack in terms of ways to prepare their own food.  The two populations – urban and rural – could not have been more perfectly positioned as the others’ antithesis.  Rural housewives spent all day cooking, preparing, and preserving food, while urban women – many single professional women living in small apartments – had to suffice with kitchenettes, which were so small that many, even the ones who were married, turned to prepared meals at cafeterias and delicatessens.

While rural populations benefitted most from agricultural science – as seen in The Worst Hard Time, urban populations begin experience the end results of food and nutritional science – with this nutritional science being brought most to bear upon urban populations during the Great Depression years.

With these two very different worlds in mind, the Great Depression hits.  So far, A Square Meal has focused primarily on how the Great Depression impacted cities – underpinning what I have long believed true based on my grandmother’s experience:  Some in rural areas faced the same economic hardships they had pre-Depression, to the point that it was simply more of the same.  Certainly the market impacted what money they had, but they had many skills that better prepared them to weather the Depression as compared to urban populations – agricultural and preservation skills first and foremost.  I now believe urban populations were hit even harder precisely because they had relied so heavily on pre-made foods, delicatessens, and cafeterias instead of their own skills in a kitchen – heck, they didn’t even have much of a kitchen!  It makes sense now why breadlines and food distribution became so key – and why the focus on nutrition of the food instead of the quality or taste was such whiplash to those who had been surviving on specialty foods from food counters.  The beans and greens (and potatoes) described as being handed out by aid workers was precisely the kind of food rural populations had long consumed – especially in winter when the growing season was long over.  The world of variety and glut of pre-made options that required little to no work really was lightyears away from what was normal for rural populations – and was likely very hard for the urban populations to lose as convenience and amenities took a hit in failing markets of the depression.

Ultimately, while rural populations did experience a negative impact from the Great Depression, they were able to fall back on subsistence farming, preserving, bartering, and other 19^th century practices that had long been a part of the “backwards” rural areas that scientists were trying to study and modernize in the first chapter of A Square Meal – these outdated practices may have been precisely what allowed those who lived in rural areas to dig in and survive.  Meanwhile, urban populations had modernized to prefer convenience and access, focusing on working for others and the skills necessary to run businesses to the detriment of the skills necessary to survive.  When the Depression hit, those in urban areas were left without food access and in desperate need of someone – or something – to provide access to food now that their usual avenues were gone.  Breadlines, food handouts, and school cafeterias were, in many ways, the natural progression in urban areas where people had (and in some ways still very much have even in modern times) lost touch with the land and where the food they eat comes from.  Money was scarce in rural areas – just as it was in urban areas – but the natural progression in the absence of money was back to their roots, back to communal, subsistence living where bartering and preserving was the norm.

2. How did the fall of agricultural prices for farmers change the way people in the Great Plains grew food?

The inhabitants of the Great Plains were, in many ways, the authors of their own demise.  Areas settled at a time when modern practices were revolutionizing the agricultural industry, many Great Plains settlers were, in many ways, nomads – still engaged in the very traditional practice of farming, but with modern conveniences of tractors, single commodity crops (monocrops as we would say today), and agricultural driven not by subsistence and survival but by world markets.  Despite that, these people were still engaged in agricultural practices that could have been their salvation had their stubborn streak not been their predominant trait. 

In many ways, the same convenience, pre-made, easy, modern mindset that had infected urban populations seeped into agricultural practices in the Great Plains.  Tractors made plowing far easier than it had previously been, growing crops to sell at market versus to consume and survive off gave farmers more access to cash – cash that funded the conveniences these farmers came to rely upon.  No longer was a man’s wealth judged by his store, but by how much actual money was in his pocket – therefore, when money became nearly worthless, the farmers of the Great Plains had no wealth.  As we say where I’m from – you can’t eat paper money and you can’t eat gold.  When times get rough, we invest in our pantries, freezers, and preserves, no doubt a habit honed in the many hard times suffered by my Southern family that has been in these parts since Tennessee was still North Carolina Wilderness. 

But the sodbusters had been sold a dream – and that dream made them stubborn, so rather than cut losses and turn toward self-preservation, they responded to falling agricultural prices by doubling down and tearing up even more of the grasslands that held the dust down.  The Worst Hard Time mentioned that in order to turn a profit, many farmers had to quite literally double down – doubling the amount they planted from the previous year.  This, in turn, destroyed more of the natural ecosystem of the Plains, and led to their demise in the Dust Bowl.  Because they relied on crops for money and not for food, they were ill-prepared to weather the storm of falling market prices – many without the traditional knowledge of many well-established, older rural communities further East.  They were also, undoubtedly, stubborn and unwilling to give up – evidenced by the fact that they stuck it out to begin with and made a go of it at a time when the market favored what they could grow.  Monocropping based on the markets ultimately hurt their ability to grow anything else – not only in how it damaged the soil and natural ecosystem, but also in how it damaged their ability to have a versatile growing knowledge, and their ability to market other necessities.

The greatest irony of all is that what was being grown in the Great Plains – wheat – was desperately needed to help feed the rest of America, and it was left to rot by the railway stations because the market price was not enough for a monetary profit.  I think out of both books The Worst Hard Time is the hardest to stomach – I see so many things being done that I know will lead to disaster in their time, and so many things that are still being done to this day that I fear will lead to a modern disaster.  We truly never learn.

Urban and rural populations experienced food shortages differently due to their differing resource availability and economies. It is easy to think that rural populations had a much easier time during the Depression, and in some cases that was true; many families could be self-sufficient in that they could grow their own food. Lots of families turned to subsistence farming, eating what they grew, trading with neighbors, and learning to make or “remake” the things they needed. However, successful subsistence farming relies on a couple of things: good soil, proper weather conditions, neighbors to barter with, and owning your land and farming tools. In households where those requirements were met, people got on well enough. Farmers may not have been turning a profit from their farms, but they were able to survive the worst of the Depression. A Square Meal describes the role of rural extension agencies in helping rural households make ends meet; programs would promote “budget-friendly” recipes to housewives and teach them how to make at home some of the things they would have bought before the Depression hit. One newer challenge faced by these families was protecting their property and livestock from starving thieves. I was surprised to learn, for example, just how bad chicken thievery was at the time.

Other rural families were not so lucky, and tenant farmers and sharecroppers suffered the most. These families tended to be located in areas where agriculture was big business and on plantations that focused on one crop, and in the south that was usually cotton. These farmers already were not paid well enough to ever break the cycle of poverty, so adding in the loss of profit for the plantation led to even less food and money for the tenant families. A Square Meal describes the average daily meals (two of them each day) for these farmers to be a combination of salt pork, black-eyed peas, rice, cornbread, and coffee (101-102). The loss of nutrients led to malnutrition and the diseases that accompany it, such as rickets and “pellagra.” Family stories on my mother’s side support the privations these farming families experienced. Her parents and grandparents were very poor and sharecroppers, and though my mother was born in ’45, years after the Depression, they had still not been able to claw their way out of the farming poverty. My grandparents would go without eating so that their children, my mother and aunts and uncles, would have something. Still, “pellagra” is listed as the cause of death of a family member who died around the Depression, and my mother had rickets at an early age. As the Depression worsened, many rural families were either denied relief (because starving people work…harder(?!?)…according to some plantation owners) or wouldn’t accept it as a point of pride. It wasn’t until a combination of the Depression, drought, malnutrition, and winter drove the federal government to expand Red Cross relief efforts that many rural folk saw some type of relief. Even then, plantation owners and local politicians would withhold food from those who needed it most.  

In urban areas, the Depression saw many jobless men and women experiencing homelessness and food insecurity. While rural families could grow some food, families in urban areas had to buy theirs. As jobs were lost, and money got tighter, bread lines were formed. It was treated almost as a novelty or attraction at first, which is pretty awful: as starving men lined up to get a handout (late, after midnight, to cover their shame), spectators would watch them hoping for some indecent behavior. As the Depression worsened, the breadlines and charity groups spread throughout New York. Absent from these lines were women and children. They weren’t NOT starving; instead, they were “barred from the lines by force of social convention” (67). To maintain propriety and keep a woman’s character above reproach, women could take charity from a women’s only organization; most single women, however, refused and would instead tighten their belts. As the breadlines closed up and the need for food was found to be more widespread, social workers, teachers, police officers, and others who work in public service jobs would hand out rations of “plain” food (with cooking instructions). Schools in New York were tasked with identifying families who needed relief, and the School Lunch Movement was born.

In the Great Plains, where people had flocked to farm the land just a few years prior, the fall of agricultural prices greatly affected the way they lived. As the prices on grains dropped, farmers had to choose to either plant even more to attempt to approach the same levels of profit, shift away from cash crops to grow crops for consumption, bootleg alcohol, or give up and flee the Plains. In The Worst Hard Time, Fred Folkers, for example, had expected to make $1.50-$2.00 a bushel for his wheat (74); by the time he threshed it, the price was down to twenty-four cents a bushel. On 80 acres, that was $400 a year--to maintain “equipment, seed, gas, paying hired hands, and interest on loans, not to mention food, shelter, and clothes” for the same amount of wheat that would have brought $4,000 in 1921 (79). Grain sat in piles at the train station because there was no one to purchase it. In fact, a combination of hard-working farmers and agricultural advancements led to record production of  “way too much wheat, corn, beef, pork, and milk, even when half a dozen or more states were crippled by drought” (87). To avoid losing everything, many farmers increased how much land they plowed and planted, which ultimately had a very real, very negative impact on the environment and subsequent drought and dust bowl. How might things have played out differently had President Hoover acted earlier and bought the surplus to feed the hungry as farmers demanded at the time? In both books, Hoover’s lack of outreach, his late approval of relief efforts, and his stubborn push for independently solving problems made life harder for the majority of Americans whether they were urban, rural, or Plains folk.