I was making dinner this evening, staring at the frying pan, thinking about how easy it is to acquire the food I eat, and then thinking about the fact that everyone else in my town of 2,000 people are doing the same thing, more or less.
When did this really start happening in the US? How far back do we go before we start seeing the majority of families providing at least some of their own food?
Well, it's fairly easy to measure that, since we can assume that urban families didn't provide their own food, while rural families did. The USA became an urban-majority nation between 1910 and 1920. In 1910, 45.6% of inhabitants were urban, while in 1920 it was already 51.2%. In 2010, it was 80.7%.