This week, a discussion on food during the Great Depression, highlighting how families tried to stretch their money and food supply.

Iowa State University professor Pamela Rine Kerberg examines how families use gardening and cheap ingredients to survive.

Grandma survived the Great Depression because her supply chain was local and she knew how to do stuff.

More after this.

Greetings, everybody.

This afternoon, we are going to be starting our discussion of the Great Depression.

And what we're going to be doing today is talking about how the

Great Depression affected ordinary people. We're going to talk about sort of the nuts

and bolts of the situation and the things that people would have experienced in their everyday

lives if they were seriously affected by the problems of that decade.

Now, I don't normally use images like this,

but I'm using this one for a reason.

Grandma survived Great Depression because her supply chain was local,

and she knew how to do stuff.

That's a really important concept, and we're going to come right

back to it at the end of class as well. This really is sort of the theme for the day. Now, in terms

of what we're going to be talking about, we're going to start with an overview of what the

problems of the Great Depression were for ordinary people

and sort of the depths of the problem. We'll talk about how families tried to cope in terms of

their work strategies, about the process of asking for help in the case of a disaster like this.

We're going to talk about keeping families fed. What did people actually do to try and put food on the table

in the middle of a collapse like this?

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