1
00:00:00,650 --> 00:00:03,760
The number one irrigated crop in America is
not corn.

2
00:00:03,760 --> 00:00:04,859
It’s not soy.

3
00:00:04,859 --> 00:00:07,660
It’s not high-quality educational YouTube
content.

4
00:00:07,660 --> 00:00:12,821
It is, in fact, grass: a crop that we cannot
eat, that cannot support an ecosystem, and

5
00:00:12,821 --> 00:00:15,360
frankly doesn’t even look that cool.

6
00:00:15,360 --> 00:00:19,699
Now, that might not sound too shocking to
you—grass is everywhere, it’s natural;

7
00:00:19,699 --> 00:00:23,279
when you boot up a new Minecraft world, you’ll
be met with thousands and thousands of blocks

8
00:00:23,279 --> 00:00:25,980
of grass, that’s how nature works, right?

9
00:00:25,980 --> 00:00:28,740
Well… no, at least not on this continent.

10
00:00:28,740 --> 00:00:33,150
In fact, pretty much all of the grass covering
the United States wasn’t there a few hundred

11
00:00:33,150 --> 00:00:37,230
years ago—our obsession with this little
green plant was a choice, and the iconic American

12
00:00:37,230 --> 00:00:40,010
lawn is actually a fairly new invention.

13
00:00:40,010 --> 00:00:43,670
But how did grass become the default plant
of the American suburb, and why do we spend

14
00:00:43,670 --> 00:00:47,350
billions of dollars and millions of acres
farming a crop that doesn’t actually do

15
00:00:47,350 --> 00:00:48,350
anything?

16
00:00:48,350 --> 00:00:51,590
Well, now that you’re locked into watching
an educational video essay about grass, let’s

17
00:00:51,590 --> 00:00:54,870
start by talking about something that’s
not grass: cannibalism.

18
00:00:54,870 --> 00:00:58,469
When Europeans first came to America, their
plan was simple: find whoever was already

19
00:00:58,469 --> 00:01:02,090
there, give them smallpox, and then rely on
them for food supplies for the next several

20
00:01:02,090 --> 00:01:03,090
decades.

21
00:01:03,090 --> 00:01:06,260
This didn’t work, and within two years,
the Europeans had resorted to eating each

22
00:01:06,260 --> 00:01:07,260
other.

23
00:01:07,260 --> 00:01:10,409
The taste of settler got old quickly, and
they started importing livestock.

24
00:01:10,409 --> 00:01:13,670
The problem with this second plan was the
same as the first plan, though: there was

25
00:01:13,670 --> 00:01:15,770
still nothing to eat.

26
00:01:15,770 --> 00:01:19,100
Most of the native grasses in New England
like broom sedge or switchgrass would only

27
00:01:19,100 --> 00:01:22,729
grow in warmer months, and the cows would
basically drive them to extinction, bringing

28
00:01:22,729 --> 00:01:24,579
all the cows with them, and then…

29
00:01:24,579 --> 00:01:26,000
all of the settlers, again.

30
00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:29,829
So the American colonies were really only
able to stabilize after the import of foreign

31
00:01:29,829 --> 00:01:34,920
grasses like perennial ryegrass, bermudagrass,
and Kentucky bluegrass—yes that’s right,

32
00:01:34,920 --> 00:01:39,350
Kentucky bluegrass is from Algeria; that state
had exactly one thing going for it and it

33
00:01:39,350 --> 00:01:40,350
was a lie.

34
00:01:40,350 --> 00:01:44,710
Now, that explains how modern grass got here,
but it doesn’t explain why 80% of American

35
00:01:44,710 --> 00:01:48,260
homeowners have a useless, empty square of
it sitting in front of their house.

36
00:01:48,260 --> 00:01:51,570
And to explain where that came from—and
why a bizarre number of people are still legally

37
00:01:51,570 --> 00:01:54,670
bound to keep that square alive—is a little
more complicated.

38
00:01:54,670 --> 00:01:59,460
When America first started to urbanize, homes
were built European-style: close to the street,

39
00:01:59,460 --> 00:02:02,439
with private gardens in the back, and cigarette-smoking
children in the front.

40
00:02:02,439 --> 00:02:06,340
But as long-distance trains became increasingly
popular and started to bring people outside

41
00:02:06,340 --> 00:02:09,920
their immediate town or city, neighborhoods
needed a way to signal to wealthy, traveling

42
00:02:09,920 --> 00:02:13,900
outsiders that they were high-status areas,
and one of the easiest ways to do this was

43
00:02:13,900 --> 00:02:14,900
with lawns.

44
00:02:14,900 --> 00:02:15,900
Why?

45
00:02:15,900 --> 00:02:19,879
Well, because the only way to make grass grow
back then was to throw money at it—not literally,

46
00:02:19,879 --> 00:02:21,730
but, y’know, it was expensive.

47
00:02:21,730 --> 00:02:26,010
In most parts of the country, these foreign
grasses weren’t necessarily built to survive,

48
00:02:26,010 --> 00:02:29,230
and there weren’t pesticides or chemical
fertilizers to keep them alive.

49
00:02:29,230 --> 00:02:33,900
Maintaining a healthy lawn of Kentucky bluegrass
required constant replanting, and around-the-clock

50
00:02:33,900 --> 00:02:36,540
maintenance—both clear signals of wealth.

51
00:02:36,540 --> 00:02:40,510
Basically, grass became popular because of
how bad it was; if you could defy nature for

52
00:02:40,510 --> 00:02:44,220
no reason other than to tell people you were
rich, you were… probably rich.

53
00:02:44,220 --> 00:02:45,560
But then things got weirder.

54
00:02:45,560 --> 00:02:49,730
Over here, in Long Island, New York, a guy
named William Levitt founded a town called

55
00:02:49,730 --> 00:02:51,780
Levittown around the beginning of the 1950s.

56
00:02:51,780 --> 00:02:56,350
There was an ongoing affordable housing crisis,
and Levitt had set out to solve it—he had

57
00:02:56,350 --> 00:03:00,180
created an assembly-line construction method
for building a suburb, putting up a brand-new,

58
00:03:00,180 --> 00:03:04,900
identical house roughly every 16 minutes,
and each and every house came with a lawn.

59
00:03:04,900 --> 00:03:08,220
Now, this was partly to make these houses
seem more deluxe than they actually were,

60
00:03:08,220 --> 00:03:11,519
and managed to distract people from the fact
that Levittown didn’t, for example, have

61
00:03:11,519 --> 00:03:15,060
basic plumbing, but it was also, bizarrely,
a political move.

62
00:03:15,060 --> 00:03:20,270
Lawns, it turns out, are a weirdly good tool
for social control—Levitt distributed strict

63
00:03:20,270 --> 00:03:24,500
pamphlets on lawn-care to every single resident,
and placed a covenant in their deeds that

64
00:03:24,500 --> 00:03:28,270
required them to mow their lawn at least once
a week between the months of April and November;

65
00:03:28,270 --> 00:03:32,260
if they failed to do so, he would have their
lawn cut and charge them for it.

66
00:03:32,260 --> 00:03:36,560
If that sounds creepy and conformist, that
was exactly the idea—Levitt wanted to convince

67
00:03:36,560 --> 00:03:39,870
the government that his suburb was keeping
people in line, because they were subsidizing

68
00:03:39,870 --> 00:03:43,600
all of his housing and essentially letting
him rewrite whatever zoning codes he wanted.

69
00:03:43,600 --> 00:03:47,150
The idea was, if you were busy enough mowing
your lawn, you wouldn’t have time to read

70
00:03:47,150 --> 00:03:50,970
Das Kapital—that’s not even a joke; it
sounds like a joke, but that’s literally

71
00:03:50,970 --> 00:03:53,879
what they thought would happen and they were
basically right.

72
00:03:53,879 --> 00:03:57,880
Given the success of Levittown, it became
the blueprint for new affordable suburbs all

73
00:03:57,880 --> 00:04:02,269
over the country, and the creepy anti-communist
grass stuff came baked right in.

74
00:04:02,269 --> 00:04:06,159
Homeowners associations—which all started
popping up a few years after Levittown to

75
00:04:06,159 --> 00:04:10,560
privately manage suburbs around the country—still
enforce many of the same sorts of regulations

76
00:04:10,560 --> 00:04:14,140
that Levitt put into place, which is why we
still go around arresting people for letting

77
00:04:14,140 --> 00:04:17,950
their grass grow wrong even though we can’t
even remember why we cared about that in the

78
00:04:17,950 --> 00:04:18,950
first place.

79
00:04:18,950 --> 00:04:21,700
So, there you go: the reason your parents
have a small patch of this particular plant

80
00:04:21,700 --> 00:04:24,490
in front of their house is because 200 years
ago this plant was really hard to maintain,

81
00:04:24,490 --> 00:04:27,670
which turned it into a status symbol, which
was used to lure boomers into horrible factory

82
00:04:27,670 --> 00:04:30,560
houses with no plumbing, which were in turn
used to distract them from learning what the

83
00:04:30,560 --> 00:04:32,449
phrase “means of production” meant.

84
00:04:32,449 --> 00:04:33,449
Mystery solved!

85
00:04:33,449 --> 00:04:37,530
But here’s another mystery: how do you cook
for one person without wasting a huge amount

86
00:04:37,530 --> 00:04:38,530
of food and money?

87
00:04:38,530 --> 00:04:40,990
Well the answer to that mystery is simple:
HelloFresh.

88
00:04:40,990 --> 00:04:45,380
I gave up on groceries years ago—I hated
schlepping to the grocery store, flipping

89
00:04:45,380 --> 00:04:48,750
through recipes I wasn’t even sure would
be good, wasting my whole evening preparing

90
00:04:48,750 --> 00:04:51,960
the meal, and throwing out half of the ingredients
I bought at the end of the night.

91
00:04:51,960 --> 00:04:56,410
It was bad for me, and it was bad for the
environment, but HelloFresh saved me from

92
00:04:56,410 --> 00:04:57,410
all of that.

93
00:04:57,410 --> 00:05:00,810
The concept is pretty simple: you select which
meals you want on their app, then the next

94
00:05:00,810 --> 00:05:04,420
week, an insulated box shows up on your doorstep
with all the ingredients you need to make

95
00:05:04,420 --> 00:05:09,450
those meals already measured out and prepped—then,
in 30 or so minutes, you’ve got an awesome,

96
00:05:09,450 --> 00:05:13,290
hassle-free home-cooked meal, like this crispy
buffalo-spiced chicken with scallion mashed

97
00:05:13,290 --> 00:05:14,640
potatoes and roasted carrots.

98
00:05:14,640 --> 00:05:18,500
I’ve been using HelloFresh since 2020 and
have these hundreds of recipe cards to prove

99
00:05:18,500 --> 00:05:22,500
it; they’ve made it so much easier for me
to eat healthier, cook faster, and spend less,

100
00:05:22,500 --> 00:05:24,050
and I’ve gotten better at cooking, too.

101
00:05:24,050 --> 00:05:28,650
So, I’d encourage you to try Hello Fresh—just
click the button on-screen or go to HelloFresh.com

102
00:05:28,650 --> 00:05:32,160
and use code HAI60 for 60% off plus free shipping!