11d • Sovereignty
Food security
Our grandparents kept a Victory Garden through the war. Many kept it going for sixty years after. And what they told when asked is the reason I'm writing this right now.
why did they continue to grow so much food when the grocery store was right down the street?
Grandparents commonly said — because once you've seen the shelves go empty, you don't ever quite trust them to be full again.
As a child we didn't understand. The store was always full. That was like telling us the sky might turn green.
But they knew something we didn't. And something that is always a potential in an uncertain global market.
Here's what they knew.
The food system in this country has broken three times in the last hundred years. And every single time — without exception — the families who survived were the ones who had seeds in the ground before the shelves went empty. Not after. Before.
The first time was 1917. World War One. Europe was starving. Farmland bombed into trenches. The US government looked at the math and realized they couldn't feed the military and the civilian population at the same time. The UK victory gardens were the main source of food for communities, with our land girls working the fields. Children had to help. It was a community effort.
The American government told American families to grow their own food too. Three million of them did. By 1918, five million. Kids as young as eight were organized into groups the government called Soldiers of the Soil.
The second time was 1943. World War Two. Rationing hit hard. Meat, butter, sugar, canned goods — all controlled, all rationed. Twenty million families planted Victory Gardens. They grew ten billion pounds of food. Nearly half of every vegetable people ate came out of someone's garden.
Both times, the US government showed up. Printed planting guides. Distributed seeds. Built the whole system and handed it to you.
Then came the third time. 2020. And this is where it starts to affect you directly.
Grocery shelves went empty. Not in a history book. In your store. The one you drive to every week. Produce section — bare. Meat case — gaps you'd never seen before. In the USA Canned goods were limited to two per customer. Lines wrapped around the building. People looking at each other with that look — the one that says something is wrong and nobody's saying it out loud. In the UK we had similar restrictions on how much we could buy per shop across a variety of products.
And this time the government did absolutely nothing.
No commission. No planting guides. No seed programs. No help of any kind. Complete silence.
Millions of families panicked and went online to buy seeds for the first time in their lives. And they couldn't get them. Baker Creek — one of the largest heirloom seed companies in the country — shut down ordering entirely. Burpee was backordered for weeks. Smaller companies sold out in days. The seeds were gone before most people even realized they needed them. The same happened right across the UK seeds sold out at record volume. Quality Compost no where to be found.
Now here's the part that should make your stomach drop.
The exact same pattern is forming again. Right now. While you're reading this.
Factories are being asked to shift to military production. The defense budget in America is being pushed toward $1.5 trillion. In the UK government is on alert. Whilst destroying the UK farming infrastructure. Supply chains are fracturing under pressure from directions nobody predicted six months ago. The same sequence of events that preceded every food disruption in the last century is playing out on your screen in real time.
And you are no more prepared today than you were in March of 2020.
Be honest with yourself about that. Because what I'm about to tell you next makes it even worse.
Even if you went out tomorrow and bought seeds — even if you decided right now that you were going to start a garden and take control of your own food — the seeds they're selling you at the store won't do what you think they'll do.
This is the part that made me angry. It should make you angry too.
The seeds your great-grandmother planted in her Victory Garden could reproduce. She'd plant tomatoes, save the seeds from her best fruit, dry them on a paper towel, store them in a jar, and plant them again next spring. Same tomato. Same quality. Same taste. Year after year. Decade after decade. One purchase. A lifetime of food.
That's how twenty million families fed themselves through a World War. Not by going back to the store every spring. By saving what they grew and planting it again.
The seeds on the shelf at your hardware store right now cannot do that.
Most of them are hybrids. They grow one season. One harvest. But try to save those seeds and replant them the following year — the second generation comes back stunted. Deformed. Weak. Sometimes nothing grows at all.
Scientists call it F2 breakdown. The genetics collapse after a single generation.
And here's what you need to understand — that's not a defect. That's the design.
A seed that can't reproduce is a seed you have to buy again. Every spring. Every year. Another packet. Another £4-5 charge. Another season where you're completely dependent on the same supply chain that already failed you once in your lifetime.
They turned your garden into a subscription. And you didn't even know it was happening.
Four companies now control over 60% of the world's seed supply. Every single one sells hybrids. Every single one profits from you coming back next spring. And not one of them is going to tell you there's another option — because that option means you'd never need them again.
Meanwhile — and this part should make you furious — the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built into a mountain near the North Pole and designed to survive nuclear war, is storing heirloom seeds. Not hybrids. Open-pollinated seeds that reproduce forever. Governments know exactly which seeds sustain life long-term. They're locking those away for themselves in an Arctic bunker. And selling you seeds that expire after one use.
Let me be very clear about where that leaves you right now.
The supply chain is showing cracks in real time. The government isn't coming to help — they proved that in 2020. The seeds at your local store are designed to keep you dependent on the next shipment. If that shipment doesn't come — if the factories are making weapons instead of consumer goods, if they keep selling out the farmers, if war becomes more local, if the supply chains are redirected, if demand surges the way it did in 2020 — you have nothing. No seeds saved. No way to grow food. No backup plan.
Your great-grandmother never had that problem. But you do. Not because you're less capable than she was. Because they changed what's on the shelf while nobody was paying attention.
Our grandparents understood this sixty years ago. They saved seeds their entire lives because they knew one thing that most people alive today still don't understand — a homs with seed in a jar has a future no matter what happens next. A family without one is standing in an empty aisle hoping someone restocks the shelf before their family goes hungry.
Which one are you right now?
Here's the truth I have discussed and watched play out.
By the time you see the crisis on your television, it is too late to start planting. The families who eat are the ones who planted before the shelves went empty. Every single time. Without exception. That is not an opinion. That is the historical record.
If I'm wrong about what I'm seeing right now — if the pattern breaks for the first time in a hundred years — you lose nothing. You have a beautiful garden and tomatoes that taste like real food.
If I'm right — and I have spent my entire adult life talking about this exact pattern — you'll be the family that eats while everyone else is standing in an empty aisle wondering what happened.
I would rather be the woman with the jars.
Grandparents kept a Garden for decades after the war because they never trusted the shelves again. They were right. 2020 proved it. The seeds at your local store can't be saved and can't be replanted — they were designed that way.
What you want to source is heirloom seeds when starting your garden of independence
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Food security
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