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Comment by msimpson | Hacker News Reader

"It pretends that vanishing institutional knowledge of growing food isn’t a problem; we should be TERRIFIED that fewer than 1 in 100 Americans actually knows how to grow enough food to feed a family or more."

Why? There are many other vital survival tasks that the overwhelming majority of the world's population cannot perform. This is merely the consequence of living in modern society; such efforts are abstracted away from the consumer. People will educate themselves when such information becomes necessary.

Also, fabricating dramatic statistics doesn't help anyone. I can quote a Farm and Dairy article from three years ago which stated, "One in 3 households are now growing food — the highest overall participation and spending levels seen in a decade." And that, "Households with incomes under $35,000 participating in food gardening grew to 11 million — up 38 percent from 2008."

Should I be less "TERRIFIED" now?

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> Why? There are many other vital survival tasks that the overwhelming majority of the world's population cannot perform. This is merely the consequence of living in modern society; such efforts are abstracted away from the consumer. People will educate themselves when such information becomes necessary.

Depending on your climate, food is one of the most pressing thing to acquire if you don't have it. Our human system right now is becoming fragile, because having such a large apparatus around food production and such a small number of people who practice it, a disruption could cause massive starvation. I personally would prefer not to see our species decimated as a result of insufficient latent food production ability not dependent on a massive industrialized base. It is not sufficient for people to learn how to grow in the event of an emergency; you need practice, growing food is not as easy as it seems.

In addition to making our species less fragile, it forces people to eat better, encourages diversity of life, and done properly it makes the environment more attractive.

Would you rather have more people trying to sell you shit?

You can apply the same argument to fresh water access. Urbanization is not conducive to individualized sustainability. You either come to terms with that or move out to the sticks and adopt a DIY attitude toward survial.

This comes down to how our species survives, and there are really two issues: global sustainability and the human race's fragility to catastrophe.

We to get globally sustainable as quickly as possible, there's absolutely no argument against that. We definitely need to make our agriculture more petrochemical efficient, at the very least.

In terms of urbanization and the human race's vulnerability to catastrophe, we can mitigate a lot of the dangers by just limiting city density, and including intensive food cultivation. That way, in case of a major emergency, you at least have a buffer. Having a lot of people who know how to grow food also allows you to spin up production quickly.

Ultimately, we're looking at a crisis of employment as computer programs take over white collar work. We have millions of years of evolution as efficient mixed source foragers, robots aren't going to take that job.

How does one limit city density? Population growth creates cities. Not the other way around.

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