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This idealization in the imagination of what homes in America 'should' look like can be demonstrated through the advertising strategies that have historically informed the lawn with cultural meaning to signify good 'American-ness'.

“About Us: Wild Ones.” Wild Ones: Native Plants Natural Landscapes, Wild Ones, 12 Jan. 2015, www.wildones.org/.

Flores, Heather Jo. “Food Not Lawns, Turning Yards into Gardens and Neighborhoods into Communities.” Food Not Lawns, Weebly, www.foodnotlawns.com/.

Fusfeld, Daniel Roland, and Timothy Mason Bates. “Ghetto and the City” The Political Economy of the Urban Ghetto. SIU Press, 1984.

Ikerd, John E. “Why We Should Stop Promoting Industrial Agriculture.” Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture, University of Nebraska Press, 2008, pp. 23–32.

Lohr, Virginia I. and Kaufman, Andrew J. "Where the lawn mower stops: The social construction of alternative front yard ideologies." Interaction by design: bringing people and plants together for health and wellbeing, Iowa State Press, Iowa (2002).

McIlvaine-Newsad, Heather, and Rob Porter. "How does your garden grow? Environmental justice aspects of community gardens." Journal of Ecological Anthropology 16.1 (2013): 69.

Neuhaus, Jessamyn. "Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America." Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, vol. 7, no. 2, 2004, pp. 165-168.

Patron-Cano, Gerardo. Modern Capitalism and Food Commoditization: The Limitations of Industrial Agriculture and the Challenges of Sustainable Alternatives. Diss. University of Denver, 2015. http://ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1701628817?accountid=14656

Vileisis, Ann. Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back. Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2008.

Weigert, Andrew J. "Lawns of weeds: Status in opposition to life." The American Sociologist 25.1 (1994): 80-96.

Welsch, Catherine. “An All-Volunteer Squad of Farmers is Turning Florida Lawns into Food.” All Things Considered, NPR, 15 May. 2016. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/15/477036910/an-all-volunteer-squad-of-farmers-is-turning-florida-lawns-into-food

How Did the Lawn Become A Cultural Object?: Signification of Class, Status, Race

Lawn as a Cultural Object

Deconstructing the lawn through status theory allows the lawn to be understood as a signifier of “wealth, education, property values, and the personal and moral characteristics assumed to go along with such resources" (Weigert 89).

How Cultural Forms Get Reproduced

By inculcating a signification of high class, wealth, and whiteness into the idealized lawn form, which further connotes good neighborliness and cleanliness illustrates the process of state-sponsored and developed cultural norms as a way to ultimately support the state capitalist economy.

A famous sociologist Emile Durkheim posited that cultural norms can be best felt when they are broken, shown by the extreme responses to 'lawn non-conformists' that Lohr researchers, all of whom have been subject to external pressures (social and legal) to make their lawn conform to the American ideal.

Viewing the lawn as a cultural object entails it to be an objectively 'irrational' practice that through generations of acculturation has come to border the homes of most Americans. This process has entailed the reinforcement of a strong social taboo to follow the idealized form of the lawn, which other anthropologists have implicated as color (green), tactility (soft), density (lush), and height (short) (Weigert 50)..

Development into Ubiquity

The widespread development of lawns does not happen until “the post-World War II period [when] the growing lawn industry combined with the suburban housing boom” which were associated with white, upper class homes (Weigert 87).

The growth of the lawn industry was underwritten by federal and state governments (Lohr 89).

The Construction of the Lawn

Eating Lawns: The Social Construction of Lawns in a Capitalist Interaction with Plants

Increasing centralization of food production, industrialization, and development from the post Civil War period with a heightened development in the post WWII period indicates a link between global food capitalist systems and the development of lawns as ubiquitous to American homes.

Global Food Systems

Characteristics of Food Production Before the Lawn

“Food was commoditized with the liberation of trade markets after the Second World War,” lending implications to a consumer base that is surviving on commoditized food (Patron-Cano 6). Part of the globalized industrial capitalist agenda relies on consumer dependence onto the global food chain of production, limiting consumers in producing foods and medicines themselves from local plants.

Literature detailing general food production in America in the 1700 and into the 1800s emphasizes the multiplicity of sources from which peoples got their food- through autonomous agriculture, some commodized staples, bartering, gathering, and hunting to name a few.

Generally, many residential spaces within this pre-Civil War time frame in America had some sort of food production or small scale agriculture, which was a supplemental or central production of food for a family.

Before the Lawn: Autonomous to Semi-Autonomous Food Production

Why Is the Lawn a Cultural Object?: The Lawn Facilitating Global Capitalist Food Systems

Colonial Residential Outdoor Spaces in America 1700-1800

In tandem with an increasingly consolidated, mechanized, and industrialized capitalist food production were the types of foods that were marketed to the post-war American that relied on processed, ready-to-eat meals creating a dependence on this system and a reduction in family kitchen gardens and home-cooked foods.

In the colonial period of America, colonizers engaged in at least minimal food production to supplement commodized staples while forcing indigenous peoples to assimilate to agriculture and further assuming a positions of 'owners' in slave labor to support agricultural interests.

References

Food Not Lawns

“If we care about the Earth we could heal it by removing lawns, by finding alternatives to lawns- Lorrie Otto” (Wild Ones).

Resistance to the Lawn: Recognizing the Link Between Food and Residential Outdoor Spaces

‘Edible landscaping’

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