Things are getting tough all over

[sw363535]

The world is not going to afford --- any time soon---- to shift to protein and home grown vegetables, or even mass produced green and leafy's.....  Transportation, storage, shelf life, and population congestion all work against it......... and if you can get the general population to consider the idea of a family garden.... and I would love to see the sale of spades and hoes to go through the roof... but it ain't gonna happen and we will loose the state of new jersey trying to provide a garden spot for every philadelphia family.

But it really plays into our current trend of thinking on a totally short term basis..  

How ya gonna feed a population of 3-500 million and not use the long term storage and and life of calories that come from grains...all else is highly perrishable.  We don't live on the equator.

And maybe the question should be not How ya gonna feed,  but how far are ya willing to pay the freight and are you willing to depend on the rest of the world to provide.

Is that way off thinking on my part?    Usually there is some reasoning to why we do what we do....

[ncwinn54]

I think the self-sifficiency fad is waning.  Urban chickens turn up at animal shelters in droves these days. 

I understand the logistics you are outlining...we did manage to grow collards and kale in an unheated experimental greenhouse all this past winter in Virginia.   I didn't commit to huge crops, because I really wanted to see if we could get through the bottleneck of a few very cold ( for us) nights, with no energy expended.  Success! 

The lettuce did bite the dust right before Christmas, though.  Most regions do - or at least did - have seasonal crops to sustain, or utilized salting smoking, drying, root cellaring, etc., pre-refrigeration.  Most in the country xould manage to do that again, pretty simply.  City dwellers, not so much.  

I always follow the money, when it comes to figuring out why things go the way they do....