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When I had only been around NYC and the Newark airport, I used to laugh at the license plates that said "New Jersey - The Garden State". But South Jersey is an amazingly lush and productive farm area.
The northern part of the Turnpike corridor and the Sopranos give a misleading picture of the whole state.

My grandfather was a South Jersey farm boy who grew up to become a professor of entomology in the Rutgers ag school by the 1930s. He saw the postwar suburban expansion eat up much of that farmland first hand in his work with the ag extension program's pest control officers, and he often lamented how much first-rate farmland was being "wasted" growing a crop of houses.

It is really a shame that most people's experience of NJ is only the Turnpike and the refineries around EWR.
Imagine if every state was judged on its character for the aesthetic of the area by its airport and highways. NJ gets a horrible rap! It’s a beautiful state in so many places.
Shhh, quiet on the NJ-is-nice front, please. NJ doesn't need more people, let's all pretend the bad rap is true.
It's ok, I could never live in NJ, I want to pump my own gas and turn left.
And get a free bobblehead with a minimum eight-gallon purchase.

When I lived in New Jersey, the gas stations in New York would offer spiffs with a fill-up, and there was always a disclaimer "offer not valid in New Jersey," which made it seem like the spiff wasn't available at all in New Jersey. For those who knew, the rule was actually that gas companies couldn't require a minimum purchase to get the spiff in New Jersey, so if you knew what you were doing, you could put a gallon in and still get whatever the free item was.

But I haven't lived in New Jersey since gas was priced in ¢, and not $.

What do you mean by "spiff" here? Google doesn't give me any clues, and the only Spiff I know of (as opposed to the word "spiffy", meaning well-dressed) is Calvin and Hobbes' Spaceman Spiff.
What’s the “turn left” thing you’re referencing? I’m from Morris County and have no idea what you mean.
The prevalence of jughandles in the state.
Hello fellow Morris County friend, let’s do a lunch sometime
I think you're good. Everyone I know in both tri-state areas who think of moving to Jersey largely complain about the property taxes & stay put.
Not so much anymore. That really changed from the late 70s onward with tremendous development of suburbs and very little protection. The word “open space” hadn’t enter the collective conscious yet.

The drive east/west between Philadelphia and Atlantic City before the Atlantic City Expressway was mostly all farm, pine forest, and farm stands. The pine forests are still there (the ones that were state forests, anyway), but not the farms and not the pine forests that were on private land.

US-40 from I-95 to Atlantic City is still very rural. When I lived in the DC area, I would take US-40 from I-95 to go the FAA's Technical Center at the Atlantic City airport because it was nicer drive and you get to see interesting sites.

Among them:

1. The Cowtown Rodeo in Woodstown, NJ with the giant cowboy statue at the cowboy supply store across the street.

2. An ancient Radio Shack store

3. Many road-side fruit and lunch stands.

4. A car repair shop with a painted stack of tires.

5. A store named 'Ted's Taxidermy' across the street from an airpark in Buena, NJ.

(edited for formatting)

The word “open space” hadn’t enter the collective conscious yet.

I guess you've never heard of the Pine Barrens — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Barrens_(New_Jersey)

1,100,000 acres of forested land, most of it preserved by the federal government for emergency use. In the event of a catastrophe, it contains 17,000,000,000,000 (that's 17 trillion, with a "T") gallons of the most pure water in the nation.

I know them very well. And they were never called "open space". They were called state forests.
I live in South Jersey. Can Confirm. It is nothing like North Jersey/NYC border.
Perhaps similar, the US doesn't harvest a ton of eggplants, but of eggplant producing states New Jersey is #1 in terms of acreage. About 20% more acres than the #2 state of California. I've idly wondered in the past if it's a cultural artifact as the distribution of acreage in the US is New jersey, then CA, then FL/GA, so some pretty different climates, so this article is interesting!
This is just a wild guess, but New Jersey had/has a large population of Italian immigrants and I believe eggplant is a pretty popular ingredient in Italian dishes. I'm sure that drove some of the demand.
That would cover farms selling to local buyers (restaurants, super markets and direct to consumer), but that's a tiny part of the market. Most are going to wholesale distributors & production on this level would need more of an explanation than that. New Jersey is nicknamed the garden state for a reason. Despite it's population density, it's got a ton of farm land and grows a lot of food for the NA east coast & beyond. I'd guess that they found a niche where eggplants grow well in NJ soil/climates and probably catch more at market than other alternative crops.
Hard to see it as a cultural artifact, though, because those are also pretty different places culturally. (As it happens I've lived in New Jersey, California, and Georgia.)
Ah, I meant in New jersey specifically as its climate feels like more of an outlier to me in that list.
I can see that, maybe if you figure that Italian-Americans eat more eggplant than the average American?
Also cranberries. New Jersey was the world capital for cranberry production with the headquarters of Ocean Spray juices.
Does our state smell like urine? Yes, yes it does, clean bacteria-free urine

https://www.cc.com/video/u11ezi/the-daily-show-with-jon-stew...

Argh, I got geoblocked. Only for the USA?
Eggplant parmesan.
I live about 10 minutes from the Campbell's headquaters. Every one I know has grown tomatoes at least once in their life. As a kid I remember my cousins having the "Campbell's tomato seeds" as if it were a big secret. This was before we had the internet to just look this stuff up.
I mean, the knowledge that Campbell's invested in agriculture research and went as far as breeding its own varieties of tomatoes is not really common knowledge. So in that sense it is a bit of a thing to have the Campbell's seeds, since they were never sold for other people to grow on their own.

Tomatoes are a very easy plant to grow, which explains the prevalence.

I'm kinda surprised that canned tomato soup contains actual tomatoes :)

We don't get Campbell here but the soup I got a few times has for this unrealistic red colour that stains my microwave cover. Doesn't seem natural at all. Homemade soup doesn't do that.