Nearly everyone recognizes that the U.S. may be in for very hard times in the near future. Some economists are predicting financial collapse as catastrophic as the Great Depression. With a significant number of people now living in cities, far away from their food sources, one may be left to wonder if the degree of famine this time around may result in the starvation of the roughly 240 millionn Americans who are incapable of growing their own food.The idea isn’t as farfetched or alarmist as it may seem at first glance. At the turn of the 20th century, more than fifty percent of the American labor force earned a living through direct involvement in agriculture, but this number decreased to just 2% by the year 2000. Even more frighteningly, only .8% of Americans are involved in the industry full-time.This transition is a distressing one indeed. While demographic shift from rural to urban lifestyles may seem like a blessing to many who loathe the hard labor associated with rural, agrarian life, it may spell disaster for those who are struggling through life in the Big City, hundreds or even thousands of miles from their food sources.During the Great Depression, formerly wealthy executives stood in line for hours waiting in ragged clothes for a hand-out of hot soup, while the rural “poor” went about life as usual, barely noticing the Depression. Survivors of the Depression who lived in agrarian regions often joked that they were “too poor to notice the stock market crash”, but they were, in fact, better off than the majority of inner-city workers in that they never went hungry. As a result of this, the one-half of Americans with access to their own home-grown foods were exempt from the horrors of the Great Depression.
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