It is always exciting to come across interesting writing about gardening, especially in unexpected places. I was reading a book by John Steinbeck entitled Once There Was A War, copies of dispatches he wrote as a correspondent during WWII for the New York Tribunal, when I came across a section entitled Growing Vegetables. It's only a short section and what follows are some extracts – not in order.
London July 15, 1943
Men that are homesick seem to take a mighty pleasure in working with the soil.
The value is in the doing of it. The morale value of the experiment is very high, so high that it is being suggested that supply offices should be equipped with an assortment of seeds as a matter of course.
It is fairly common now that a station furnishes a good part of its own vegetables and all of its own salad leaves.
In every unit there is usually some man who knows about such things who advises on the planting, but even such men are often at a loss because vegetables are different from the vegetables at home.
The first things that the men want to raise most, in order of choice are green corn, tomatoes and peppers. None of these do very well in England unless there is a glass house to build up sufficient heat.
The gardens usually start off ambitiously. Watermelons and cantaloupes are planted and they have practically no chance of maturing at this latitude, where even cucumbers are usually raised in a glass house, but gradually some order grows out of the confusion. Lettuce, peas, green beans, green onions, potatoes, do very well here, as do cabbages and turnips and beets and carrots. (Sound familiar? It takes everyone time to find out about their local micro conditions)!
There has never been any need to exert pressure to get the men to work in the gardens. They have taken it up with enthusiasm and in many cases men from the cities, who have never had a garden in their lives, have been enthusiastic. There is some contact with the normal about the garden, a kind of relationship with peace.
English pubs are not exciting, but there does seem to be constant excitement about the gardens and the produce that comes from them tastes much better than that purchased in the open market (As it was then, so it is now)
There is a great difference in the ordinary preparation of vegetables by the English and us (Americans). The English usually boil their vegetables to a submissive, sticky pulp, in which the shape and, as some say, the flavour have long since been overcome.
It is the English cooks conviction that the vegetable be dominated and thoroughly convinced that it must offer no nonsense.
It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.
In reading this section I felt a little flat thinking about how such small and simple things can provide and give us so much, where instead our world just focuses on shopping, buying and spending. And of course, now the US military uses its long and fruitful relationship with McDonalds to boost the solders wellbeing and morale!
Not for me, or you, I think.
Enjoy!
Peter