> creating enough food for a family of 4 from a home garden requires something like 8 square meters of land, chickens, and loads of labour. It’s non trivial, an

> creating enough food for a family of 4 from a home garden requires something like 8 square meters of land, chickens, and loads of labour. It’s non trivial, and if you make a mistake you go hungry. Not even close. Potatoes produce more calories per unit of land than anything else you can grow in a temperate zone garden. Intensively cultivated potatoes may produce 10,000 calories per square meter, but that would be a stupendously successful crop. In other words, to provide all the calories for a family of four, you'd need on the order of 1 to 2 square meters of potatoes per day. Since you can't really live on potatoes alone, to get adequate nutrition across the spectrum of human needs, you need quite a bit more than that. You could feed a family of four for a year on less than a acre, if none of your crops failed or did poorly. I'd hate to be responsible for trying it on less than that though in the temperate US.