The number one irrigated crop in America is not corn.
It’s not soy.
It’s not high-quality educational YouTube content.
It is, in fact, grass: a crop that we cannot eat, that cannot support an ecosystem, and
frankly doesn’t even look that cool.
Now, that might not sound too shocking to you—grass is everywhere, it’s natural;
when you boot up a new Minecraft world, you’ll be met with thousands and thousands of blocks
of grass, that’s how nature works, right?
Well… no, at least not on this continent.
In fact, pretty much all of the grass covering the United States wasn’t there a few hundred
years ago—our obsession with this little green plant was a choice, and the iconic American
lawn is actually a fairly new invention.
But how did grass become the default plant of the American suburb, and why do we spend
billions of dollars and millions of acres farming a crop that doesn’t actually do
anything?
Well, now that you’re locked into watching an educational video essay about grass, let’s
start by talking about something that’s not grass: cannibalism.
When Europeans first came to America, their plan was simple: find whoever was already
there, give them smallpox, and then rely on them for food supplies for the next several
decades.
This didn’t work, and within two years, the Europeans had resorted to eating each
other.
The taste of settler got old quickly, and they started importing livestock.
The problem with this second plan was the same as the first plan, though: there was
still nothing to eat.
Most of the native grasses in New England like broom sedge or switchgrass would only
grow in warmer months, and the cows would basically drive them to extinction, bringing
all the cows with them, and then…
all of the settlers, again.
So the American colonies were really only able to stabilize after the import of foreign
grasses like perennial ryegrass, bermudagrass, and Kentucky bluegrass—yes that’s right,
Kentucky bluegrass is from Algeria; that state had exactly one thing going for it and it
was a lie.
Now, that explains how modern grass got here, but it doesn’t explain why 80% of American
homeowners have a useless, empty square of it sitting in front of their house.
And to explain where that came from—and why a bizarre number of people are still legally
bound to keep that square alive—is a little more complicated.
When America first started to urbanize, homes were built European-style: close to the street,
with private gardens in the back, and cigarette-smoking children in the front.
But as long-distance trains became increasingly popular and started to bring people outside
their immediate town or city, neighborhoods needed a way to signal to wealthy, traveling
outsiders that they were high-status areas, and one of the easiest ways to do this was
with lawns.
Why?
Well, because the only way to make grass grow back then was to throw money at it—not literally,
but, y’know, it was expensive.
In most parts of the country, these foreign grasses weren’t necessarily built to survive,
and there weren’t pesticides or chemical fertilizers to keep them alive.
Maintaining a healthy lawn of Kentucky bluegrass required constant replanting, and around-the-clock
maintenance—both clear signals of wealth.
Basically, grass became popular because of how bad it was; if you could defy nature for
no reason other than to tell people you were rich, you were… probably rich.
But then things got weirder.
Over here, in Long Island, New York, a guy named William Levitt founded a town called
Levittown around the beginning of the 1950s.
There was an ongoing affordable housing crisis, and Levitt had set out to solve it—he had
created an assembly-line construction method for building a suburb, putting up a brand-new,
identical house roughly every 16 minutes, and each and every house came with a lawn.
Now, this was partly to make these houses seem more deluxe than they actually were,
and managed to distract people from the fact that Levittown didn’t, for example, have
basic plumbing, but it was also, bizarrely, a political move.
Lawns, it turns out, are a weirdly good tool for social control—Levitt distributed strict
pamphlets on lawn-care to every single resident, and placed a covenant in their deeds that
required them to mow their lawn at least once a week between the months of April and November;
if they failed to do so, he would have their lawn cut and charge them for it.
If that sounds creepy and conformist, that was exactly the idea—Levitt wanted to convince
the government that his suburb was keeping people in line, because they were subsidizing
all of his housing and essentially letting him rewrite whatever zoning codes he wanted.
The idea was, if you were busy enough mowing your lawn, you wouldn’t have time to read
Das Kapital—that’s not even a joke; it sounds like a joke, but that’s literally
what they thought would happen and they were basically right.
Given the success of Levittown, it became the blueprint for new affordable suburbs all
over the country, and the creepy anti-communist grass stuff came baked right in.
Homeowners associations—which all started popping up a few years after Levittown to
privately manage suburbs around the country—still enforce many of the same sorts of regulations
that Levitt put into place, which is why we still go around arresting people for letting
their grass grow wrong even though we can’t even remember why we cared about that in the
first place.
So, there you go: the reason your parents have a small patch of this particular plant
in front of their house is because 200 years ago this plant was really hard to maintain,
which turned it into a status symbol, which was used to lure boomers into horrible factory
houses with no plumbing, which were in turn used to distract them from learning what the
phrase “means of production” meant.
Mystery solved!
But here’s another mystery: how do you cook for one person without wasting a huge amount
of food and money?
Well the answer to that mystery is simple: HelloFresh.
I gave up on groceries years ago—I hated schlepping to the grocery store, flipping
through recipes I wasn’t even sure would be good, wasting my whole evening preparing
the meal, and throwing out half of the ingredients I bought at the end of the night.
It was bad for me, and it was bad for the environment, but HelloFresh saved me from
all of that.
The concept is pretty simple: you select which meals you want on their app, then the next
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I’ve been using HelloFresh since 2020 and have these hundreds of recipe cards to prove
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