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I think if you're not aiming to be fully self-sustaining it makes a lot of sense to buy things like these and focus on growing fresh fruits and vegetables. From

I think if you're not aiming to be fully self-sustaining it makes a lot of sense to buy things like these and focus on growing fresh fruits and vegetables. From a sustainability perspective beans/wheat/corn and to some extent potatoes are fairly easy to store, making them suitable for central/slow processing. I don't have numbers on this but my sense is that a lot of the resource usage of our agricultural system is due to perishables - food that needs to be cooled, that gets thrown away if no-one buys it on time, that's easy to damage in transportation, and that has high water content (making it heavy to transport).

Kliment 6y ago
Can confirm - I tried growing all sorts of things in an awful north-facing garden with varied success but am now mostly focusing on two things - leaf vegetables and small fruit. Chard and raspberries are my primary outputs, and being able to go out and pick a handful of raspberries for dessert is a way superior experience to buying them - better taste, more varieties, better quality, and they store longer than store-bought. Same thing with leaf vegetables - unless I buy frozen (which I still do in winter) you can't get decent spinach or chard outside the peak of the season. They store for months on the plant though unless temperatures get too hot, so I can just pick as much as I need for a meal and not worry about spoilage.