In Fight Club, why did Tyler have his trainees make a garden?
When Project Mayhem ramps up, Tyler starts recruiting "trainees" to live in his house. At the beginning of it all they clean up the house, etc., but specifically, one the tasks he has them devote a lot of time and effort to is making a garden. He could have just had his 'army' clean up the back of the house but instead he has them create and maintain a garden. And, it's also worth noting that after the garden is made, pretty much at all times there's someone working on / grooming the garden (or, at least, every time the garden is shown there's someone working in it).
What was the purpose/motivation behind having the garden? Given Tyler's philosophy of not owning things just for the sake of it and that a person isn't defined by what they own, having a garden seems fairly out of place to his overall cause.
Best Answer
He is building army that rejects mindless consumerism and corporate domination of the economy.
TYLER: ...Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need...
TYLER: We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.
Creating a garden is way to help make the group self sufficient and take it further off the grid. Why pay for food and prop up a structure you don't believe in when you can grow your own. He wants to go back to simpler times when people were responsible for their own food.
Again from IMDB.com
TYLER: ...And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
Also, Tyler knows that people need to stay occupied or they grow restless, this is another task to keep his troops occupied between missions and keep them all fed in the process. Having a garden meshes perfectly with his aims and helps generate the means to achieve them.
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