Many people reacted to the pandemic by starting a garden, taking up baking and learning about food preservation. Pressure cookers and home canning supplies were in short supply because of the increased demand.
In many ways, this was right up my alley because I grew up on a farm with parents who grew up in the Great Depression. When I was 14 years old in 1976, I started subscribing to The Mother Earth News. My dad had quit using chemicals on his farm in 1968 because he became concerned about the impact of farm chemicals on the water supply and environment. The Back-to-the-Land movement resonated with me as a young man.
The Waltons also played a factor because it came on the air in 1972 when I was 10 years old. I felt I was able to connect to my parents because they were kids in a rural setting at the time when that show took place.
And then there was The Good Life. When it was shown in the United States on Public Television, the British TV show that originally ran in the 1970s was called Good Neighbors. It’s about a couple living in the London suburb of Surbiton who decide to quit the rat race and become self-sufficient. It was an enormous hit and has been a beloved show for decades.
The book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance informed the hippie ethic of the 1960s and ’70s with the pursuit of quality over quantity and the affirmation of homemade food over TV dinners was an expression of that ethic. Home canning, craft beer and sourdough bread all saw a resurgence.
Another response to the pandemic which involved stocking up was informed by the Doomsday Prepper movement. That movement had it’s own enormously popular television show that became a cultural phenomenon.
Unlike the Back-to-the-Land movement, the Doomsday Prepper movement is a dark, paranoid vision of life. Instead of a quest for a better life and a better society, the Doomsday Prepper movement is about throwing in the towel on society and hunkering down to a miserable existence of packaged meals-ready-to-eat and dehydrated foods suitable to eat only if nuclear war has eliminated all other options.
Both The Good Life and Doomsday Preppers are fantasies, although Doomsday Preppers calls itself “reality” television. That’s the tyranny of people pushing the “American Carnage” narrative; they want to squash everyone else’s reality so that, once society breaks down, they can thrive after making everyone else as miserable as they are.
A lot of individual choices go into making a society. Do you want to be good neighbors and live where people exchange homemade goodies across the fence or do you want to be that asshole who leaves a floodlight on in their backyard all night because you’re convinced The Brown Hordes are coming to take your stuff?
Schmecken! 