was in the car with family pointing out all the empty lawn spaces around homes businesses churches etc that are used for nothing and could be replaced with wildflowers or vegetable garden or some other important ecologically functional and enjoyable thing easily
Once you see it, it's impossible to stop seeing it, and it will drive you crazy
If you go around Google Earth street view you will see that basically no other country wastes space the way USA does. We make buildings and in between them we turn huge spaces of earth into lawn because we can't think what to do with them.
and because we wouldn't want poor people to benefit from public crops, would we
This reminds me of something i learned in my african american history class
during the early 20th century lots of black people were moving into cities to find a better life
now it was a very strong tradition among these families to grow big gardens to support their needs for food, a way of self sufficiency
it goes back a long ways. Oftentimes enslaved people had to grow their own food in secret to keep themselves from starving because their captors did not give them sufficient food. In fact many of the important cultural foods and crops associated with the southern USA are originally from Africa.
and a lot of white racists did not want black people to be living near them so one thing they did to suppress the people who were moving in was to make it illegal to grow gardens within the city
HOAs likewise, originated as a way for white neighborhoods to racially discriminate against people
