My thanks to "loradona" for providing the link to Northwestern University's WWII propaganda poster collection - 350 of them covering a broad range of war-related issues. I've embedded three of them above as reminders of the Victory garden programs that were popularized here and in Great Britain.
The purpose of victory gardens was to have the public grow some of their own food so that more food would be available for shipment to soldiers overseas. The government provided free books on gardening, canning food, and drying food. I can remember even into the 1950s my father received free literature on home gardening from the Department of Agriculture.
How times change. Even though this country has been continuously at war since... (how long has it been now?) there has never been a call for Americans to produce food for their own use to free up more food for the armed forces (which presumably buys its own food as MRE's from wartime contractors).
Even now with the "war on recession" heating up, I haven't heard even a hint of a suggestion that Americans should grow more food for themselves. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case; the propaganda nowadays is not to conserve, but to spend more and consume more in order to support our agribusiness industries and protect jobs.
It's funny how times change...
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