Victory Garden of Tomorrow

IN A TIME WHEN PINEAPPLES, GUAVA, AND ASPARAGUS ARE AVAILABLE YEAR ROUND AND NEARLY ANY FOOD IS STOCKED ON THE SHELVES OF MOST GROCERIES, JOE WIRTHEIM OF VICTORY GARDEN OF TOMORROW WANTS TO FURTHER EXPAND YOUR SELECTION.

If you want fancy French lettuces that your local market does not carry or heirloom blue pumpkins from Australia, he wants you to have it. The one caveat Joe has is that you grow it — on an organic farm. He also wants you to make compost, and to have a few backyard chickens.

BY: DAVID GOBELI | 2012

The Victory Garden of Tomorrow has its roots in Portland, Oregon, a city that has long been seen as a center of political and cultural activism, so a poster campaign that wants us to re-identify our eating habits is fitting. He hasn’t always been in Portland though; he moved there in the mid 2000’s from Columbus, Ohio.

Remembering Columbus, he says, “I was...one of the small group of people getting around on bicycles — I had no car at the time. I was living in a neighborhood that was a little out there in terms of low rents, and eccentric

In an age when most everything is available year round, Joe sees it as more of a perceived choice. Processed foods come at a very high price to our health, the environment, and in petroleum dollars. “Our entire food system is built on oil and corn subsidies. Today there’s no reason to believe these will last. To top it off, the industrial foods we’ve been eating are terrible for our health. Childhood obesity makes my ears turn red. I realize that in many ways, it’s difficult for an average middle-class person living the urban or suburban lifestyle today to see a reason to supplement their diet with a backyard garden. But that’s why I make propaganda, to insert the message that gardens need to become a normal part of what Americans do again; and even if the amount they produce is small, there occurs an important education and rise in awareness.”

Joe calls his propaganda campaign The Victory Garden of Tomorrow. He designs and prints art posters that
are based on the iconic American propaganda posters of both World War I and II. Using their style, and sometimes actual posters as inspiration, he has begun to create a new type of propaganda; this time it is about what we eat and where we get it.

artist types. I suppose being on a bike and being around a sensibility that is acutely aware of waste, the greater city seemed strange to me. I wondered why it was the way it was, why it was segregated, why
the suburbs were so popular, [and] why shopping centers were a thing to be excited about. Parking lots everywhere. I just felt that this wasn’t normal.” So, Joe left Columbus and moved to Portland, where bikers rode in crowds and morning rush hour traffic jams involved not only cars but cycles. In awe of the city and the old main street aesthetic that housed small community businesses, he enrolled at Portland State, the local university, where he met and has since had the chance to work with a variety of talent that he can draw inspiration from.

Then came The Victory Garden of Tomorrow, his self- described poster campaign that is “designed to channel the bold energy of historical poster propaganda. It is committed to civic innovation and social progress — better food, better gardens, and better cities. It is design, politics, and whimsy for the modern home front.” Drawing inspiration from the Victory Gardens of WWI and II and the 1939 New York World’s Fair (“The World of Tomorrow”) he developed the name of his campaign. “... like a lot of nerdy kids of my generation, I was enthralled with the idea of space exploration, loved the images and stories of moon landings, and just loved the idea of heroic, capable explorers. I imagined our mid-century economic era as a kind of fork in the road where America sort of chose the industrial path. However, the world of tomorrow could have been, and still can be, the path illustrated by the Victory Garden and waste-reduction movements.” He began to imagine the “Victory Garden of Tomorrow” as an “exciting new 21st century place of discovery, innovation, and excitement. A place where young people are needed to urgently man the gardens and consider creative, imaginative ways to solve contemporary problems.”

Then Joe designed atomic lettuces, atoms spinning around the leaves in mid-century simplicity; pickles
in space; and heroic chickens standing guard like B5-2 bombers over the airstrip. Taken out of the posters are airplane hangars, rockets, and industrial powerhouses pumping out wartime munitions. Common everyday backyard heroes now take their place. In his design about compost, a father and son peek into a compost bin watching the micro-organisms doing all the dirty work. Another, emblazoned with the words “Break New Ground,” calls to mind a soldier’s boot on the edge of a shovel digging a trench, but instead urges “Plant an Urban Farm Garden.” Even the flying bee in the poster’s background is reminiscent of a warplane, whimsically crafted into the modern, backyard air force.

Each piece calls to mind the strong imagery and text of the old propaganda posters. Bold, normally few colors, heavy strokes, and implied detail make every design speak with the same intensity as the originals. Joe loves the idea of “... turning the hero into something that is common, that is understated, and right in the backyard. To me, chickens, compost, [and] lettuce all speak to the idea that there’s more power in small and ordinary places. Our society has been all about industrial sized power moves, and I’m just thinking that the future might be a place that’s smaller scale, more human, er, chicken powered.”

A whopping 1.5 million people contract either e. coli or salmonella per year. Many of these cases involve large- scale industrial farming and crops that should never be exposed to those bacteria. Type 2 diabetes (which was once an adult disease but now is found in 1 of every 400 children), obesity, hypertension, heart disease, and cancer are all on the rise. It is thought that the current generation is the first generation that will have a shorter lifespan than their parents—the first time in American history. Our food plays a direct role in all of these diseases as well as our mental states and, it has been said, our general state of happiness. Millions of Americans are sick and the food they eat has a lot to blame for it and Joe Wirtheim is trying to do something about it.

“I believe that ... America needs a culture change around food and eating. People need to set examples for each other, begin discussing these things in their community, demand better foods from their grocers, demand variances for [egg-laying] hens from their municipalities, and so on. We need critical mass of demand before government programs are successful. I’d like to see more support for local farms and gardens, while seeing a reduction of government support for the industrial corn and soy based products. But to get the ball rolling, folks have to demonstrate this is something they want, not something imposed. That’s why I make the art I make; I want to charm while accessing people’s imaginations as to what is possible.”

SHOP