Comment by midtake
9 hours ago
What do you mean? This is very much true. We are economically compelled to buy food from supermarkets, for instance, because hunting and fishing have become regulated, niche activities. Compared to someone from the 1600s who could scoop a salmon out of the river with a bucket, we are quite oppressed.
Most people lived on the knife's edge of starvation before the application of fossil fuel energy and nitrogen to agriculture in the 20th century. That's why the global population exploded after the introduction of these technologies. Read "Energy and Civilization" by Vaclav Smil. For most of history, it was an open question the crops you grew would even contain more calories than the physical effort it took to grow them. This means you were spending ~90% of your time (or money if you were in a specialized trade) just on getting enough carbs in grain to avoid keeling over. And, your diet was 90% grain with almost no variety.
Were there a lucky few who found an unoccupied niche where there was some surplus for a generation or two? Sure. But pretending like this was commonplace is like pretending that everyone in the 1600's was a nobleman.
> Compared to someone from the 1600s who could eat a gourmet meal prepared by their 10 cooks every night, we are quite oppressed.
On the flip side, fishing quotas are the reason there are some fish left. However you are free to grow your own vegetables.
... provided you own land that the government allows for agricultural use. And most people can't afford to own enough land to be self-sufficient.
So you're not free to grow your own vegetables either; just like fishing, farming is regulated to manage limited resources. Things get ugly fast when you start raising pigs in your city apartment, or start polluting with pesticide runoff, or start diverting your neighbour's water supply...
>.. provided you own land that the government allows for agricultural use
Gardens are a thing, and you do not need your house to be on agricultural land to grow a garden, at least in my state.
Actually, cities often regulate gardens:
https://www.savingadvice.com/articles/2025/07/07/10160132_th...