On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 19:09:00 +1100, "Fran"
wrote:

"Richard A. Lewis" wrote in message

It was once a common topic on the misc.survivalism group....how many
acres would it take to grow a year's food and all that. The bottom
line was that if you plan *nothing but a veggan diet*, you pretty much
have resigned yourself to a slow death.

Most of our folks had heard or believed that it was possible to grow
enough food on an acre, but it never stood up to scrutiny.

Oh for Heavens sake! You are being patronising and heading off the track
into pure fantasy. Bucket asked about a self sufficient lifestyle. Bucket
did NOT ask about a vegan lifestyle or what the many froot loops at
misc.survivalism go on about when they congregate for a fantasy session.

Au contraire. Richard presented quite a few examples and numbers. The
original question, like so many others that generate a lot of
interesting discussion, is a nuanced one. What does "self-sufficient"
mean? A hunter/gatherer nomadic existance? *Entirely* depending on
one's own efforts to live without any transactions with others? Bucket
mentioned vegetarian (not vegan) and telecommuting. So we can assume
he uses money, and is just looking to produce much of his own food. As
has been pointed out a number of times. a vegetarian diet with
sufficient calories to sustain life would be *very* difficult for one
person to achieve *on his own*. He may well be able to grow (and
preserve) enough veg to eliminate the need for store-bought. He *will*
have to have canning supplies, an energy source for canning, and time
to do that work. Veg provide nutrition, but not many calories. It
isn't the potato, it's the sour cream and butter. :-) Fats and sugars
are calorie-dense foods. He proposed goats and chickens for milk and
eggs, but they're labor-intensive food suppliers, and *also* require
their own food.

I wonder if there are *any* modern examples of true individual
self-sufficiency.