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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Again, there is every reason to believe (know) hinting/foraging is woefully inadequate. Simple numbers. Natural 'foods' are pitiful fractions of modern cultivars. It takes a quarter acre(?) of Jerusalem Artichoke to gather a few baskets of roots, which must be boiled and peeled down to a few score pounds of edible material. Even a bonanza 10-acre plot in a meadow would feed 40 people for a few days.

Early Americans spent the whole summer struggling/working like slaves to put up enough food for the 3 months of winter.

Seafood - that sounds like continuing to rely upon the food supply line (fishing boats and their supply chain). That used to be pretty good return. Not sure stocks today could feed a fraction of America for long. Most of us eat seafood a meal a week/month that way even in the best of times.

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I don't really understand what point you're trying to make, w/r/t the post you're replying to.

Again:

A family might feed themselves through a combination of any or all of: hunting, trapping, fishing, foraging for wild edibles, home gardening, AND buying from whatever is available on the market.

I'm saying that hunting, etc. are individuals components of a broader strategy for providing food - not that any one of those things is sufficient in and of itself. As as of today, it doesn't appear to me that the commercial market for food is going to just disappear overnight. But if things devolve to the point that you can't buy everything you need, then some of these other approaches can come into play.

Seafood - that sounds like continuing to rely upon the food supply line (fishing boats and their supply chain).

There isn't just one "food supply line." The supply chain for the steak you buy at Food Lion involves a lot of intermediate steps and processing. And those are exactly the steps where we've heard news reports of the processing plants closing down, etc.

My point about seafood is that there are fewer such intermediate steps involved. A boat comes in, docks, and sells their shrimp to the seafood house, and the seafood house sells to the public. The main processing is weighing. And some boat captains even bypass the "sell to the seafood house" part and sell direct.

Responded to the comment directly above (?) As a supplement to a family's food supply, hunting and foraging are totally insufficient. Not if everybody was doing it. The numbers aren't there.

Fewer steps in the seafood supply chain, doesn't offset the fact that in America anyway, it currently provides a whopping total of 1 meal a week per. That's gotta be dropping too. So still the numbers don't support any idea of supplementing food supplies to any great degree.

The OP was just a puff piece about an uptick in hunting. That was fun and interesting. I just posted to provide the insight that, this isn't going to ever matter to our situation in any significant way. We have to support/restart our commercial food chain, or its going to get very bad. No alternatives are reasonable.

As a supplement to a family's food supply, hunting and foraging are totally insufficient.

You can't really make that claim without quantifying the degree of supplementation in question. And that's an unknown. So really this is all just speculation. But I can say that for myself, I'd rather have the ability/knowledge/skills to acquire food by hunting, trapping, foraging, fishing, etc. than not, all things being equal. If you want to take a defeatist attitude and not pursue those things, well... that just means you'll be one less person I'll be competing with for food eventually.

I just posted to provide the insight that, this isn't going to ever matter to our situation in any significant way. We have to support/restart our commercial food chain, or its going to get very bad.

I think we're ultimately talking about two different things here. Of course we have to restart the commercial food supply chain. That, to me, goes without saying. It's also somewhat irrelevant to that I'm talking about (which I think is different from what you're talking about). I'm talking about things to do in the interim for base survival... until the commercial food supply chain is working again. It sounds like you're assuming that we're talking about depending on hunting/foraging/fishing etc. as the default way of life for perpetuity. On that point, I agree with you... it's not reasonable to sustain a population of our current size for an indefinite period of time.

Agreed.

If it comes to it, good luck out there hunting with all the amateurs who are hungry, unskilled and outnumber trained hunters 100:1.

Let's hope it doesn't come to it though. There's a reason I have a lot of dried beans and rice stored away... :-)

I have grown Jerusalem artichokes in my home garden a few times. Each plant easily produced two pounds of tubers before boiling and cleaning. Plant spacing of around 9 square feet per plant. That comes to over ten TONS per quarter acre. They are amazingly productive.

I highly recommend "How to Grow More Vegetables: Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine" by John Jeavons.

Every year, my garden produces an ever increasing portion of the food for my household and this year it has expanded to provide a significant amount of food for a small flock of chickens. Important things that aid my productivity and reduce the time it takes are a heavy mulch to minimize weeds, improve soil fertility and reduce water consumption as wel as drip irrigation on timers.

There are plenty of people using sustainable techniques to produce more food than they can eat if you look around on the internet.

Yes, agriculture works! Especially modern agriculture with fertilizers, irrigation, weed control and crop rotation.

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