What can be more patriotic than a tomato growing stealthily by your kitchen window?

Home gardens have always been popular during hard economic times; during the World War II era, when Americans rationed pats of butter, these backyard plantings were the “victory gardens” that provided up to 40 percent of the nation’s foodstuffs. Eleanor Roosevelt promoted them by weeding out a plot on the lawn of the White House and planting everything from lettuce to beetroot. And I can think of no better time than now to bring them back.

This is not an entirely new idea to St. Louis. Community gardens have appeared throughout impoverished neighborhoods, these little patches of squash and a few fruit trees gracing the abandoned lots of North St. Louis or the once-empty stretches of grass behind the industry of downtown. The gardens and their produce are open to all who lend a hand, as lunch and as a way to teach children where food comes from and develop in them a deeper appreciation of ecology.

There is in these twin concepts, wartime victory gardens and hard-time community gardens, the idea that while one might not have much money, there is great pleasure to be had in the creative power of cultivation and in the fine appreciation for such simple things as a tomato. Right now, our nation is so painfully realizing that all this luxury and brute excess that we have so undeservingly swam in for decades must, in every way, be scaled back. We, a generation unused to the concept of conservation, who has laughed in disbelief at our grandparents’ memories of saving every tin can during the Great Depression, must give things up. But I think it will be for our greater humanity.

There have been points in history when mankind has realized the inhumanity and danger of hedonism. Right now there is a Slow Food movement that began in Italy, which has rejected the overabundance and immediacy of American cuisine and promotes the native human pleasure inherent in the laborious search for food, that ever-so-cautious preparation, the savoring of each bite that arises alongside the knowledge of limit.

Their idea, and mine too, is that it is somehow less human, somehow less genuine and less full of life to have at our hands so much. In a book on the history of agriculture, Richard Manning writes that “to hunt is to be insecure about the immediate future, to experience the nagging fear of want that has driven us to our finest creations. Agriculture dehumanized us by satisfying the most dangerous of human impulses-the drive to ensure the security of the future. In this way, we were tamed.”

So used to having at our hands so much, we have forgotten what it is to truly need, and what it feels like to have that desire fulfilled. We have forgotten the pleasure of cultivation at our own hands.

If times are tough, as they are, and if we must bear the pain of recession, let us also cultivate pleasures unseen in times of excess. If times are tough, as they are, let us turn our eyes to our own productive power, and exult once again in the tomato.

Roberta Singer is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.