The most self sufficient people I can think of, like hunter gatherers, are dependent on their close personal networks, if for no other reason then to pool resources and pass down information.

Living off the land is a FUCKTON of work. Hard, physical labor. And even if you're into that, how many things can one person/family grow/make? I'm thinking a lot of people look at that and look at modern office life and their house with electricity and a dishwasher and a fridge full of groceries and think, yeah, I think I'll stick with that I've got.

*flashes the Miko beacon*

Hunter gatherers are definitely dependent on near-claustrophobic close tribal cooperation

As for living off the land. The other word for that is subsistence agriculture. It's a pretty hardscrabble life. Unless you want to be farmer who sells stuff, then going back to TPS' point, it's a lot of work and management.

One way your point works though is that a lot of financial woes are based on chasing illusions and debt. Individuals are highly leveraged in a way the maybe private people shouldn't be. If you were just trying to be 'self sufficient' you'd settle for a simple location and some food & friends and be done with it.

His name was Jeremiah Johnson, and they say he wanted to be a mountain man. The story goes that he was a man of proper wit and adventurous spirit, suited to the mountains. Nobody knows whereabouts he come from and it don't seem to matter much. He was a young man and ghosty stories about the tall hills didn't scare him none. He was looking for a Hawken gun, .50 caliber or better. He settled for a .30, but damn, it was a genuine Hawken, and you couldn't go no better. Bought him a good horse, and traps, and other truck that went with being a mountain man, and said good-bye to whatever life was down there below.

I grew up on a corner of my grandfather's dairy farm. My family was nowhere near self-sufficient, and that despite both my parents and my grandparents planting vegetable gardens annually in addition to an apple and pear orchard. Further, despite their operating a dairy farm, we bought our milk and other dairy products from another farming family who also ran their own creamery.

To achieve self-sufficiency for the eight of us would have required about 25% more land, all of us kids attending school only half-time, and 3 more full-time boarding workers.

That was *40* years ago.

Oh, and they would have had to sell all but four or five of the cows, and to achieve total self-sufficiency, keep a mature bull on hand.

There's not really any land available here for people to go off the grid in any major way. A lot of farmland is family-owned (and a significant proportion of those families are the aristocracy or the 'landed gentry' who've controlled the land for generations), and even if you did own a piece of land, you wouldn't be allowed to build a house on it due to green belt planning restrictions.

But over the last few years - since the recession - there's been a big demand in the UK for allotments (which are little parcels of land rented from the council for people to grow things on).

The big trick to living off the land is having the cash to buy a worthwhile stretch of land in the first place. You aren't going to be able to sustainably fend for a family on a postage-stamp-sized suburban lot. You're going to need at least a few acres. And that's not going to come cheap unless it's the crappiest marshland to be found.

I think this is why so many of the hero-stories we hear of couples/families shucking the modern life and turning to the land almost always contain some variation of the line "...a former Wall Street lawyer..."

Let's say we have a patch of land big enough to sustain our family .. enough room for a huge vegetable garden. And enough children to help plant, weed, harvest and cook all those vegetables.

Maybe we have animals for meat or for dairy, like cows and chickens. I respect the vegan lifestyle but am not sure if it would provide enough fuel to sustain people who are going to be working as hard as we are while we're living off the land. Hopefully we have plenty of trees to cut down for firewood. We will need a lot of firewood to heat the house which must be big enough for all those children.

OK probably we're going to need sheep too, for their wool, to make clothes for everyone. We need to figure out a source for oil for lamps so we can see at night. That's when we'll be sewing, mending and fixing all the stuff that broke during the day.

Since there's no electricity, there's not a lot of food storage other than old fashioned methods like smoking, and canning over a wood stove. Better make it a much bigger plot of land with a lot more trees. And we will need a few more animals to help transport all that wood from the distant reaches of the property back to the house. Eventually the wood supply will dwindle but we have much more pressing problems.

Some sort of infection seems to be running through the sheep so we need money for a vet otherwise we'll lose the whole herd. And one of the kids broke her arm and we need money for the doctor. And we need money to keep the car running, and for gasoline because we have to be able to get into town once in awhile. Oh yeah, and we owe money to pay the taxes on this huge piece of land and the government refuses to take vegetables and sheeps milk cheese in trade.

Also we need money for shoes because with all this work we're all doing, strong shoes are really a must. Otherwise we're going to have more doctor bills for broken ankles and tetanus shots when someone steps on a nail. We also need money to buy materials to maintain the house and the barn, things we can't make ourselves, like shingles and hinges and nails, and buckets to haul water.

Oh yeah, water. We need a great source of fresh clean water. I sure hope it's close to the house since we'll be carrying it ourselves. And more trees for more wood, to heat water for baths, because we're all going to be pretty sweaty and dirty because there's so much work to do.

Here's what we're going to have to do without: Cell phones, internet, vacations, cute new clothes, gadgets, television, air conditioning, Diet Coke, and on and on.

Throw in a couple of years of drought or a bad flood, or a house fire, tornado or mass uprising from the kids, and the whole enterprise can fail.

Sure, people used to live like this. But they either had strong communities where they could rely on each other to help plug the gaps or to trade goods and services, or they did without a heck of a lot of material things and creature comforts that most of us consider essential, and lived shorter, more difficult lives. There wasn't much time to be creative, to read books, to pursue hobbies or just to lounge around.

And I don't even know much about this - I'm a city person. I get that it often sounds tempting to opt out of the rat race. And from a distance it looks pastoral. But up close the cows smell and the bugs are terrible and I need my internet and A/C.

So, to answer your question, I think the reason more people don't opt out is that it takes way more work than most of us are willing to do. It might sound romantic but the reality is not actually so appealing.

What I find hilarious is the current food thread on MeFi wherein the primary argument is people are too ignorant in the arts of food preparation to subsist when fresh produce is commonly available.

Ardiril, the way people are willing to sacrifice everything -- health, family togetherness, longevity -- in the name of convenience is nothing less than amazing. Because food preparation is easy, easy, easy for anyone who can read or visit You Tube or watch TV cooking shows. Which is virtually everyone.

Some us just really don't like cooking. I can, I just don't want to.

But cooking is a measure of your moral rectitude now! Particularly if you can condense what is really a lifetime of learning into one handy speech to break out any time anyone wants to talk about social inequality and structural environmental issues with food consumption and production! Because you know how to make pasta, roast a chook and freeze things!

But yeah, we don't have the knowledge, the space, or the background to go subsistence in many ways any more. The communities don't exist on any large scale, the land itself doesn't exist they way it did and we have a huge cultural resistance against the death/damage that subsistence lifestyles often cause.

wherein the primary argument is people are too ignorant in the arts of food preparation to subsist when fresh produce is commonly available.

A stronger, more relevant argument is that different people and different populations have varying levels of access to the foods in question as well as varying access to the very basics required to prepare foods from scratch, including time, cooking experience or instruction, kitchen wares, plentiful or inexpensive fuel, and even things we might take for granted like running water and reliable refrigeration.

Particularly if you can condense what is really a lifetime of learning into one handy speech to break out any time anyone wants to talk about social inequality and structural environmental issues with food consumption and production!

Exactly. There are plenty of neighborhoods where it's much harder to buy whole foods than prepared foods, plenty of people who live with buildings (and kitchens) in a poor state of repair, plenty of people who work 2 jobs and commute to both. That adds up to plenty of people for whom even a modest 20+ minutes of prep and clean-up feels like a big chunk out of their already scant time at home, even assuming they could readily get the foods to begin with.

None of which I believe since eating and nutrition are so central to an individual's survival that there are no excuses whatsoever. Not seeking an adequate market and not acquiring cooking skills are both absolute choices, and the individual lives or dies by the consequences. Those are equivalent exactly to putting a plastic bag over one's head and tying it off with a rubber band. Sympathy for such individuals from the political spectrum is what leads to ridiculous measures like banning extra-large soft drinks.

I don't think everybody can do this easily or has the skills to do this easily. But I do know a handful of people who live somewhat "self-sufficiently" (nobody is really self-sufficient, and they weren't 200 years ago, either).

There's a bigger difference today between the average, usual norm for standard of living and living on the land by raising your own food and providing for your own energy needs. There was a difference in 1812, too, but not as dramatic a difference, except that the wealthier you were, the more servants or slaves you had to do normal household tasks. But even then, people lived in clusters or in cities where they specialized and traded certain kinds of labor for certain kinds of goods. Very few people, even by 1812, were trying to produce all their own needs from their own land, and many who tried just really failed.

It's hard for me to imagine moving onto the land as a solution for financial troubles. It takes capital to buy land and to buy all the (mass-market-produced) equipment you need to set up a homestead. Part of the reason people are in financial trouble is that they don't have that kind of capital and are in fact indebted.

Also, it's not possible to both "work very little" and live off the land. It's a lot of work, especially when your working unit is one family rather than a full community that can organize the many various kinds of labor more efficiently. It's true that Native people in the Northeast seem to have been able to subsist on just a few hours of work each day, but they were in bands where some could fish, some could hunt, some could garden, some could make pottery, some could make clothing, etc., and they were also living in an abundance-producing natural matrix that has been thoroughly destroyed. So I don't think it's at all possible now, especially for a single person or a single family. The farming couples and families I know come the closest, and they work their asses of, and can't avoid debt either (Farming and debt go hand in hand, because all your investments - seed, fertilizer, soil amendments, equipment, fuel) are up front, but all your profits arise, if they arise, only on the back end.

None of which I believe

What part don't you believe? The existence of food deserts? Of differential access to the resources (including hardware anf fuel) necessary to cook from scratch? Or that for some people, it simply doesn't feel worth trading off short-term comfort and ease for the promise of long-term health?

I agree that it's important for all our socioeconomic populations to have access to wholesome food, whether they choose to enjoy that access or not. But I don't think shaming people or telling them that it's easy to eat a specific, privileged way is productive or helpful.

I don't really know what point you're making with the soda-law reference, unless you're suggesting that I agree with the paternalistic forces that want to take food choices away from an underclass.

Yeah, I could never be so sanguine, when in my own town there are families living in weekly rental hotels with no kitchens, where the parents are working a full-time job or more plus keeping the kids in school and childcare. There's no way I'd look those folks straight in the eye and tell them they weren't working hard enough to feed their families. You need basic facilities and reasonable access to food in order to cook and eat well, and whether or not those are available to you is nothing but a factor of the policy environment.

A lot of the local recent immigrants here are poor, but they eat way, way better than most Americans. We shop in the same stores, and what I see are entire carts full of fresh produce, rice, and raw meat. They're cooking real food. And the kinds of people I hear lecturing about how "those people" should eat tend to be the same kinds of people whose food seems to be branded, labelled with dubious claims, and coming in boxes and bags.

I think there's actually a pretty big disconnect here between what people think other people who are poorer are eating and the choices they really do make - when they can shop in a store that sells produce, have a car to get there and get the food home, and have the cash to stock up and cook in bulk.

I have two markets in reasonable public transit routes. One is the fancy gourmet one in the city, only on Wednesdays during the day, and is ridiculously expensive. The other, more budget concious option, is two bus rides away, entails a longish walk along a truck route in the sun to the bus stop and changing buses on a busy road. Both of which are nerve-wracking beyond reason with a small child, and the bus only comes once an hour on the Saturday/Wednesday night those markets are open. And they're hit and miss - they aren't farmers markets in the true sense since it's mostly retailers and there's imported stuff and the organic is usually the pre-packaged and produced stuff like bread. Sometimes the produce is great, sometimes it's awful and it's only slightly less expensive. The advantage is that I don't buy as much.

I have two convenience stores within walking distance. Both sell fresh produce and meat! And dairy! So they're a step up.

All of which are more expensive than the grocery store at the end of one of the bus routes. At the grocery store I can also get all the other stuff I need for the house, like baking soda and vinegar (assuming I don't use cleaning products) and batteries and flour and so on and so forth. Things that aren't at the market. The produce isn't as good, but it does the job.

To go to the market means I make more trips, particularly if I am using public transport, because as much as I love the convenience of a 5kg bag of flour, I am not lugging that home on the bus with a toddler and the rest of our shopping.

And God forbid I try and do all that AND hold down a job too. I'm unemployed so yeah, I hit the markets when I can (when it doesn't conflict with appointments, or any other thing). I'm lucky that we have a car as well, so I can go buy in bulk without paying for exorbitantly priced taxis. We only have one though, so we've had to do the calendar chore jiggle to try and line up days between who needs the car more and what is cheapest (me driving to work was cheaper, him driving me to PT was most expensive, me taking PT the whole way somewhere in the middle - our calculations had to include that PT all the way was 2+ hours, our child still naps in the middle of the day, our pram is not the kind you can fit a billion things in and PT doesn't account for multiple appointments/errands). And that's not even touching on any ability issues - I'm mostly okay now but four years ago the markets would put me out of commission for a day.

Yeah, it's a choice. It sure isn't a free choice though - it's survival, it's making ends meet and it's dealing with our situation in our house in our suburb in our street with our lives. And here's the kicker - if I eat canned, eat junk I am still alive. You can actually live without a farmers market and without cooking. You really honestly can. Life and death is eating, not eating to your socially approved standard.

Farming and debt go hand in hand

good point. Farmers actually buy hedges/derivatives and other financial instruments that are more complex than taking out mortgages etc

Psst, Kangaroo, you left out a few paragraphs. Once you have to have livestock animals to transport your wood, you need yet MORE land to grow hay and possibly grain for those animals (at perhaps one ton of hay per acre--if you are extremely lucky--you'll need about half an acre of hayfield per animal for each month you don't have sufficient grass in the pasture {ie, fall, winter, and early spring}). And even more land--with expensive fencing--as pasture so they can hopefully eat grass when grass is in season (about two acres per animal, if you have plentiful grass and good rain during the warm seasons).

You also need to add maintenance of the hay and pasture to your chores; you have to fertilize, aerate, sometimes overseed in order to keep the right grasses growing. You need the equipment to do so; you can use a tractor or you can get livestock-drawn equipment, but that will take a lot more time and a huge toll on your body and theirs. You have to mow regularly to keep the weeds down; the animals won't eat the weeds, and if you don't mow them they'll take over and you won't have any grass left. But you also have to let the hay fields grow, so you can't just mow them to cut down the weeds, so you have to use a carefully balanced fertilizer/weedkiller mix that will encourage the growth of the right crop in those fields.

You also have to regularly walk all the fields with crops for the animals to make sure nothing poisonous is growing. Oh, and you have to know *everything* that can possibly grow in your area that is poisonous, and be able to recognize it on sight.

You need equipment to cut, turn for drying, and bale the hay. Or you need even MORE land so you can "hire" someone to do it by giving them a percentage of the hay crop. You need another, very large shelter, one that can keep the baled hay protected from the elements.

God forbid you have a drought and the hay doesn't grow, or you have too much rain and you can't cut the hay on schedule (because it needs 3 days without rain to dry). Either way, if you even get any hay, it's not nourishing enough to keep the animals fed over winter, and you have to have money to buy more.

Also, coyotes or wolves are picking off the sheep one at a time. You really, really need those sheep for their wool and meat; every sheep they pick off is one more week you don't eat meat, and represents more of your time invested than you like to think about. So you have to get a livestock guardian; either a dog (who will need to eat meat, too, so you need to increase the size of your flock) or a llama or a donkey, who'll need even more of that hay/grain above. Llamas and donkeys aren't as effective as dogs, so if you gamble on one you'll probably end up losing more sheep before you finally give up and get a dog. And you now have a useless mouth to feed, unless you can sell it or eat it.

There is a slight bonus, though; if you're willing to take a whole day away from the essential farm chores of weeding, removing insects, keeping mammalian pests like rabbits, moles, deer, etc off your crops, you can use those hauling livestock as transport for essential errands and so you don't have to spend as much on gas. You're already feeding the livestock whether they're working that day or not. (You will need money to buy a wagon, though, and you'll also need a source of grease--you were making grease every time you slaughtered an animal, right?--as well as worked wood and metal in case anything on the wagon breaks. Really, someone on the farm will have to train as a blacksmith anyway to make sure they can keep up with the repairs on all the necessary equipment. And you'll need a blacksmith shop setup and a carpentry shop setup on the farm; places to store and use the working equipment. The carpentry shop just needs to keep the woodworking equipment protected from the weather and be well-ventilated to keep you from inhaling sawdust, but the forge for the blacksmith will need to be fireproof, so it should be made of brick or stone.)

That lost day spent traveling won't set you back terribly unless, you know, you NEED those crops you're neglecting that day to live. Which you do.

I have a small farm; I have done some in the way of attempting to keep us fed with vegetable gardening and keeping chickens. It is hard, heavy, repetitive manual labor. I've had to give up my garden in the middle of growing season because I had a bad week when I couldn't weed/remove insects, and by the end of that week the garden was completely unsalvageable.

Farm work is unending, exhausting, beats the hell out of your body, and leaves you with no energy or time for anything else. You use every minute of daylight, which also means you're out in the worst heat that the day can give you. You destroy your back early, you spend the latter part of your life getting skin melanomas removed once a year or so, your hands get swollen and calloused so you can't do much else besides the farm work, and you are so tired and in so much pain you don't really care. And at the end of the day, you still don't have enough food to feed all the people and animals, because without power equipment you have to keep adding more bodies to plant, care for, and harvest the crops and livestock...and then THOSE bodies have to be fed. It's like a pyramid scheme, only no one wins.

I grow a lot of my own food and it's a huge amount of work. It is also (except for carrots and potatoes this year but this is weather dependent) much more expensive than the fresh produce I can find in the supermarket.

Quite simply it is naive to think going off-line helps in an economic recession. If anything you cut yourself off from the possibilities of networking, staying sane and getting work while you're up to your arse in mud.

I still do it, even in horrible weather like yesterday because it gives me great pleasure and some fresh air excercise but it's a luxury.

I grew up poor and was taught to forage for food so I can live pretty cheaply in Autumn in particular but there's only so many blackberry, apples, plums, mushrooms and greens a body can convert into 20 different recipes. I have no doubt given better weather conditions you can live very cheaply, but I note that one of the least economically affected communities in Spain (Euskadi or the basque country) over the last 2 years almost every garden front and back is growing produce. In the past that was more common on the outskirts or in the small towns and villages, now it's wherever there's a patch of green. Supplementing by growing yourt own, mending, re-using etc., is far more effective in a modern society.

I've grown up poor on a farm, hunted my own dinner, lived in inner city slums where I had little access to good groceries, and am now living in an upper middle class yuppie suburb in a small progressive city with 2 Whole Foods, a Sprouts, a fancy King Soopers (Kroger), a Sunflower market, a well-stocked communal farmers' market AND several honesty-box farmstands within less than a 2 mile radius (and an easily accessible bicycle cruise) of my house. We have great alternate and public transit options. And it is horrendously expensive to live here. I had a tremendously difficult time making ends meet, with no car, no "luxuries", living in the cheapest shithole apartment I could find, and working a fulltime-with-OT position at nearly double the minimum wage. I have no clue how a family could manage on less, but they somehow do.

The general complexity, cost and drudgery factor's been well covered here. What I think modern people also maybe missing is that people are, generally speaking, just as resourceful / self-sufficient as they've ever been, or not. It's simply that networking and resourcing paradigms change (I hate the p-word, but it is applicable there). The most simple example I can think of being: 100 years ago as a newcomer to town, you'd likely chat with the neighbors round the way or at church to determine where the best [tailor/fresh produce/butcher shop] etc, was. Now we have an app for that.

If self sufficient actually meant one could do things alone, on their own without other people, things have been set up for that now more than ever before, with automation and computers. You just have to look around the world to see how hard it is to live without plumbing or electricity, but does anyone remember those PBS shows where they took contemporary people and put them in historical setting to see if they could survive? They calculated how much more wood needed to be chopped if they could even make it through part of the winter.
I've said before how regularly grateful I am to not have to spend most of the day fetching water and having a machine to clean my clothes.
A big part of me would love to live more naturally, walking everywhere, farming, etc. but I can't possibly envision it realistically without a form of commune and some type of industry for funding. The biggest obstacle to this kind of dream is acquiring the place and finding the right combination of people, which is pretty much the thing with any grand project.
With the internet and delivery, I can learn how to do or make almost anything, but finding the right place and people?
It is amazing how few basic living skills people can exist without these days and I think it started commercially for "city bachelors," but there are people who know nothing about basic cooking or laundry or cleaning, and now how to do anything where all the information isn't just handed to them, how to spell or even write by hand or find information. There are startling pockets and blankets of ignorance, depending on where you look.