I hate this meme about gardens

Welcome to Garden World.

The modern American supermarket is a miracle. In the dead of February, in the frozen suburbs of Minneapolis, a middle-class accountant can walk into a Kroger and buy a pint of blueberries grown in Peru, a bag of avocados from Michoacán, and a filet of salmon flown in from the Norwegian coast. The shelves are not just full; they are aggressively overstocked.

It is the result of ten thousand years of agricultural selection, a century of chemical engineering, and a global logistics network so complex it effectively functions as a planetary nervous system. It allows 330 million people to live in a country where fewer than two percent of them are farmers, liberating the other 98 percent to be doctors, welders, poets, software engineers, and people who write angry tweets about capitalism.

And yet, we hate it.

We look at the plastic-wrapped English cucumbers and the industrial fluorescent lighting, and we feel a vague, spiritual sickness. We yearn for something “real.” We want to touch the dirt. We want to be connected to our food.

This anxiety manifests in a specific meme that circulates with the regularity of the seasons:

It is a beautiful, seductive fantasy. It promises a world of wholesome self-reliance, green abundance, and social justice, all grown right out of the suburban soil. It suggests that hunger is a choice we make because we are too vain to plant potatoes.

I hate this meme.

The first problem with this meme is that the premise is false: people in the US don’t starve.

There is food insecurity in this country, which is bad, but it isn’t starvation.

The more interesting problem with this meme is everything else!

The closer you look at the math, the economics, and the history, the more terrifying the “Garden World” becomes. If we actually took this meme seriously—if we actually attempted to replace the industrial food system with a decentralized, lawn-based agrarian utopia—we wouldn’t end hunger. We would engineer the collapse of modern civilization, destroy the environment, and reinvent feudalism, all while starving to death in a backyard full of zucchini.

So let’s take it seriously!

The Arithmetic of Collapse

Let’s begin with the ground itself. The meme relies on a single, dazzling statistic: the sheer size of the American Lawn.