Great Depression Food Systems
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
A food system is how a community produces, processes, distributes, prepares, consumes food, and disposes of food waste. When the Great Depression came to Nina Simone's hometown of Tyrone, North Carolina, a summer resort town, things got rough. Her father was fortunate to receive a job as a driver delivering food relief for The National Relief Agency. Not only the drivers received a little extra food to take home and they developed a network of people who would trade food among themselves. Simone recalls, “Our garden was my parent’s pride and Daddy would take whatever we had left over, like collard greens, string beans, tomatoes and sometimes eggs, to swap with people who had more sugar or flour, say, then they needed.” Nina Simone, Tyrone, North Carolina, 1934
