Someone in Deep Adaptation posted this chart showing how much food a person has to grow to feed themselves for a year. It’s a very individualistic doomer prepper mentality. And regardless of whether the numbers are correct or not, it’s not doable by most people as individuals or even small family unit.
My take:
Hyper-individualism is anti-adaptive. I have been urging our mayor and other city officials to retool our landscape maintenance practices so that we are supporting pollinators and wildlife, and growing food for humans, instead of toxic manicured landscaping. Whether people listen remains to be seen, but I will keep bringing it up.
Also we need to support our local farmers in the immediately surrounding rural areas. Instead of driving to big box stores and buying food from 3000 miles away.
I also talk to church pastors, school principals and teachers, and of course fellow residents. In many parts of the world that are not the rich global north, large amounts of food are grown in cities, towns and villages.
On a personal note: Several fruit trees in our little yard are fruiting this year for the first time. Major milestone! And of course because Nature is generous, there will be plenty of fruit to share with neighbors. I also share education and seeds with neighbors. And show people how to make use of food when it’s in abundance and needs to be cooked and preserved.
This includes not only fresh fruit & vegs we grow, but also food that comes through the charitable church-run grocery distribution system. Sometimes there will suddenly be pounds and pounds of nuts for example, to the point where the people who receive the grocery bags are just leaving them along the road. I am a famous one for scooping them up and trying to share, find recipes, redistribute. It’s a wild task sometimes.
One year the neighborhood was like flooded with cans of green beans. And for a while there were just massive amounts of canned tomato sauce. And the canned salmon, there was so much of that it was crazy. And for a while they were bags and bags of walnuts. Whole walnuts, not even in the shells. In other words a super expensive thing and there would be 10 or 20 bags, two pounds each.