Skip to main content

PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Land, Livelihoods and Food Security
Volume 8 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2024.1424879

Individual Nutritional Self-Sufficiency: A Viable Option in the Present Era

Provisionally accepted
Alik Pelman Alik Pelman *Ohad Nachtomy Ohad Nachtomy Yohay Carmel Yohay Carmel
  • Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    At the present state of industrialized agriculture and specialized economy, achieving nutritional self-sufficiency on a personal level is widely considered a naïve goal, unsuited to the present technological era. Furthermore, nutritional self-sufficiency is considered overly demanding in terms of training, land, labour intensity, and time requirements. This study contests these common notions. Drawing on a study of a small (approximately 0.075 ha) low-input self-sufficient farm in an industrialized country, we show that achieving nutritional self-sufficiency on this farm required modest initial agricultural training, a small parcel of land, and, perhaps most surprisingly, a single day of labour per month, on average. We offer these results as proof of concept that, when properly planned, nutritional self-sufficiency may be sustained over an extended period (more than a decade) and that doing so may be compatible with working full-time outside the farm, as well as engaging in regular leisure activities. We also propose that some upscaling is viable at the industrial, small-scale, and household levels.

    Keywords: Self-provisioning, Sustainable food systems, water-smart food production, Food-security, Sustainable diet, Plant-based diet, Dietary reference intake (DRI), agroecology

    Received: 28 Apr 2024; Accepted: 08 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Pelman, Nachtomy and Carmel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Alik Pelman, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.