A day of food self-sufficiency? How'd I do with that?

My veg garden is in its glory, so I decided to eat as close to I could to all home-grown one day, and to supplement the home-grown, I chose what I could grow even if I don't yet. Spoiler alert: I didn't get very close.

I'll go through the menu, though, and tell you what I ate, and what I grew, and what I could not have grown (considering laws, climate, funds, and other realities.) Every ingredient with an asterisk, I grew myself. Several others, I will produce in the future.

Here we go. Breakfast was an omelet.

2 Eggs

*handful of cherry tomatoes

*diced scallion

chopped artichoke heart

cheese

How self-sufficient was I at breakfast? By law, I can have five hens, so these could be, in a couple of years, my own eggs. Not today, though. Someone else owned those hens. If I had hens and wanted to be self-sufficient, I'd also have to grow grain for hens to eat (in addition to table scraps and bugs they could find), but I can't grow enough on the land I own. I can't have a cow or a goat, so cheese would be off the menu, were I only eating what I could grow. I have artichoke plants growing, but they are not yet flowering, and I'm not sure I can get them to that point before frost in this climate—and I suspect they will not over-winter here. I could substitute a different third veg, of course.

Lunch was this wonderful and simple kale salad:

*3 c dinosaur (aka Tuscan/Lacinto) kale

2 oz cheddar cheese

1 apple

olive oil

apple cider vinegar

honey

This is easy to throw together, but wow, was it good! (If you think you hate kale, try this variety—it might convert you.) I don't yet grow apples, but 2 apple trees are on my list of things to buy next year.

Again, the cheese is one part I can't do myself. People can do it, mind you, and folks make cheese at home, but I can't. To have a dairy cow, you'd need 3 extra acres, one for pasturage the cow grazes on, and two for growing grains for your cow and the hens. And you'd need to borrow a bull every year, or buy his semen, so you'd be dependent upon a neighbor for that, or you'd need a lot more land to have your own bull. And rennet? I haven't the faintest idea how you'd begin creating that yourself. As you can see, it's pretty complicated and land-intensive to get a wheel of cheese. It should cost ten times as much per pound, it's so complicated! Thank goodness for grocery stores, eh?

Vinegar is doable at home, and with little equipment, but I'm sure I'd feel it was a waste of perfectly good fruit I could have eaten instead. Cold-pressing any oil would take some equipment. You could invent a seed press if you're handy and have the tools and metal to do that, or perhaps you own a hand-crank oil press already. But olives don't grow here in any case. Sunflowers do, but how to keep the squirrels from eating every seed before harvest, I can't figure out. They ate every one I grew this year, that's for sure!  If you could grow avocado trees, that fruit could supply your dressing fat, but I can't grow them. Maybe peanut butter thinned with fruit juice as a dressing? I can grow both of those ingredients. I'd grow tired of that taste very quickly.

Supper:

3 ounces roasted chicken with hot sauce

*sautéed Swiss chard ribs

(cooked in oil, once again)

*steamed carrots (yeah, they're weirdly shaped!)

another few artichoke hearts

salt

Replace the hot sauce with a rub of home-grown hot peppers (dried, pulverized) and herbs, and if you were raising meat chickens, the main course would be easy enough. By law, however, I cannot raise meat (only laying hens are legal here). If I lived more ruraly, and had no other source of meat but chickens, I'd be eating half a chicken per day, so I'd need to kill and cook 180 per year. That is one whole heck of a lot of work. It's possible, mind you. People do it. Most people did it or something similar a century ago. But me? I admit, that's never going to happen. Nor will I have pigs or caged rabbits, the "easy" meat animals. Let's be honest: I cannot physically work with hand tools the number of acres of grain I'd need to feed meat chickens, much less more complicated animals.

Salt. Now there's another difficult issue. There are salt deposits in every region of the world, but I don't know where my nearest one is. Someone does, and in the case of a collapse of civilization, you can bet that's going to be guarded with guns. I'm not going to kill someone or risk death just to eat salt on my eggs and chicken and potatoes, so either I'd learn to live without, and/or I'd be very careful with what I had on hand. (strangely enough, right now that's 3 pounds because I have a brand new box for pickling later this season, but it usually isn't that much salt sitting around here.)

Snack:

Strawberries

And so…this is what I ate that one day. 1000 Calories (which wouldn't be possible to sustain for more than a few days, considering the physical labor the farm lifestyle takes without diesel tractors), 56 grams of protein, 73 grams of digestible carbs. A much smarter menu for getting those calories up to survival level would have been to eat 4 eggs for breakfast and half a chicken for supper, eat every single bit of skin on that chicken, and half the organ meat, and to have a big sweet potato at supper, some white northern beans in that lunch salad, and a medium white potato for breakfast. That brings you up to a bit over 2000 calories. You'd still lose some weight eating like that day after day while hoeing, harvesting, and lugging supplies around the farm, though you could survive on it. But I imagine you'd get quite grumpy in a few months from chronic hunger.

I came far closer than most people ever do to feeding themselves for even one day. And yet I failed abysmally.

What I'll realistically never produce myself: butter, cheese, vinegar, oil, and salt. What I can't by law produce any time soon: meat animals or dairy animals. What climate prevents me from producing: olive oil, avocados, my favorite nuts, and possibly artichokes. Also chocolate, coffee, black tea, bananas, and other foods I've been known to ingest on a fairly regular basis.

What I may produce in the near future: eggs.

What I will certainly produce in the near future: apples, strawberries, and honey. (I know someone who knows a bee guy, and he should put hives in my yard next year. I'll get a jar of honey in return, if he does. So the bees are technically producing it, but I provide the blossoms, and I'll get paid in honey.)

I don't grow many grains, so I didn't include them in this day's menus. Wheat, I could grow in this climate, and oats, and flint corn, and I could cut and flail the grain and even know how to, but all of these crops take up acres I don't currently have. For someone with less than 1/2 acre in my climate who is attempting to reach food self-sufficiency, the bulk of calories and carbs would need to come instead from these crops: potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, peanuts, cowpeas, and dried (shell) beans.

I've gardened in three locations, and I'm getting fairly good at it here in August of year two…but I'm fighting birds, rabbits, and squirrels for my food, so I'm not sure I could survive on my bit of land (even if no human tried to take it from me). I tell you this: the fantasy people have about surviving the apocalypse is just that for most of us, me included: a fantasy, not realistic in the least. If you aren't already a master gardener or homesteader in your own climate/locale, you're not going to learn how to grow food in time if the Stuff Hits the Fan, as some people seem to want it to, Goddess alone knows why.

If you don’t have the fruit trees, bushes, and nut trees already in place, you'll be waiting 3 years or more to harvest those things even if you can grow them from seed, and even if the wildlife leaves you any to eat. If you don't already own four acres per family member and have the staff and arms to defend it should civilization as we know it collapse, and if you don't already own the domestic animals that you'll need going forward, you won't survive an apocalypse. Simple as that.

However, that's not entirely bad news. A life without cheese, butter, coffee, chocolate, black tea, white flour products, salt, and your favorite salad dressing? A life of physical chores and random devastations of weather and pests? Not sure many people will want to live that life.

I am grateful I don't have to.

Bonus photo. The next night, I had Hunan pork/eggplant/scallion over rice. Healthy and my favorite meal since I made myself eggplant Parm,  but once again, I didn't grow the rice or the pig or the soybeans to ferment soy sauce.