>There's 120 sq miles of cornfields in New Jersey and 160 of soybeans, which are enough to feed Manhattan for a year, even if they're not currently allocated to

>There's 120 sq miles of cornfields in New Jersey and 160 of soybeans, which are enough to feed Manhattan for a year, even if they're not currently allocated to feeding people in Manhattan and not enough to feed the entire metropolitan area. There's a considerable amount of food within one day's walk of even giant cities like New York. Ya, but that's the farmer's food, so you're talking about stealing it. The farmer might not like that and shoot at you. Even if he doesn't, what mechanism is in place to make sure that food is distributed evenly over the course of a year? How are you going to keep that corn from spoiling? What's going to stop a group of people sealing it just for themselves? That's a lot of faith in local governance and structure. >I think there's going to be a decent glide path to an alternate structuring of civilization I would think so too, but it's fun imagining what would happen if it were abrupt (largely because of the word imagining rather than living through).