Image
Mayor Bernard Samuels buys the first ticket for Philadelphia's Victory Garden Harvest Show, for Army and Navy Relief, September 16, 1942.
Credit: Courtesy of Temple University, Urban Archives, Philadelphia, Pa.
To secure the food required to supply American troops fighting around the world, the federal and state governments encouraged Americans to plant and eat from their own home gardens. At the peak of the war effort, Pennsylvanians tended more 1.5 million Victory gardens. The Commonwealth also funded 111 Food Conservation kitchens to teach homemakers how to stretch their food.