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Comment by mahogany | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of people in various "prepper-adjacent" communities that romanticize and idealize being fully self-sufficient. There's often a hyper-individualistic mentality that comes with that too. My comment is just to add context that going fully self-sufficient is extremely challenging and community is important, especially in an end-of-world scenario.

To be clear, I think becoming more self-sufficient is definitely a good thing, and I strive toward that myself.

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>I think becoming more self-sufficient is definitely a good thing

Why? I live in Paris, and get my food (vegetable, fruits, bread, eggs, peas...) from an AMAP. It's like a coop for about 100 families where we pay the farmer one year in advamce for their whole annual production. It's cheaper than most supermarkets, it's local and organic, it's self sufficient (no competition, we pay the farmer well, according to their actual costs). We only have to organize the distribution weekly (take a few hours per year for every member). I bet the farmer will do better for our organization than any "self sufficient" family.

What's the goal of this? eating healthier products or does it minimize environmental impact? In particular, would that model scale to the whole city of Paris?

French farmers are notorious for getting shafted if they're selling to supermarket chains etc, so it would actually be a significant benefit to both parties.

there have been several documentaries about related topics, this is a recent one: https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/095178-000-A/supermarkets-the-...

(the farmers are addressed later on in the video)

That's beautiful, and something we need more of, but the idea behind self sufficiency is to not starve after the farmers in your coop decide to stop selling their food because historic flooding and heatwaves mean they can barely feed their own families.

"What will you do when public servants leave their posts and infrastructure fails" is a fair question considering our ecological predicament.

>the idea behind self sufficiency is to not starve after the farmers in your coop decide to stop selling their food because historic flooding and heatwaves mean they can barely feed their own families.

If a professional farmer (with the best knowledge and equipment but also the full support of the coop members) can't feed us, how do you expect to better resist to floods and heatwaves on your own? As far as I know, small groups with good ties have always better fared than single families.

We agree re: small groups with good ties. And I kinda think if we go down we're going down together. But not relying on others as much as practical could still be useful, even if it's as simple as "my farmer got covid" or "floods washed out the bridge".

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