LOG-009 ·
How Much of My Dinner Do I Actually Control?
I weighed every gram of food the household consumed for four weeks and computed a self-provisioning ratio. The number is humbling and the trend is not.
- Words
- 629
- Est. read
- 2.7 min
- Confidence
- 0.85
- Topics
- food, measurement, independence
Food independence attracts more romance and fewer spreadsheets than any other kind. People picture the homestead, the root cellar, the defiant chicken. I wanted a number instead. So for the four weeks ending 2026-06-14, every gram of food entering this household got weighed and logged with its provenance. My kitchen scale reads to 1 g. The dataset has 312 entries. Here is what it says.
Method
Every item was classified into one of four provenance tiers:
- Tier 0, self-produced: the garden, plus eggs from a neighbor traded for garden surplus (barter counts; no supply chain was involved).
- Tier 1, direct local: bought face-to-face from the producer. Farmers market, farm stand, one half-share of a meat CSA.
- Tier 2, regional retail: grocery store items produced within roughly 500 km, per label.
- Tier 3, industrial: everything else. The default tier of modern life.
Measured by mass, not by cost, because sovereignty is measured in calories you control, not dollars you spend. Caveat logged up front: June flatters the garden. A January audit would look worse, and I will run one to find out exactly how much worse.
The numbers
Total food mass consumed in 28 days: 87.4 kg for two adults.
| Tier | Mass | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 0: Self-produced | 6.1 kg | 7.0% |
| 1: Direct local | 14.8 kg | 16.9% |
| 2: Regional retail | 19.2 kg | 22.0% |
| 3: Industrial | 47.3 kg | 54.1% |
My headline self-provisioning ratio: 7.0%. My resilience ratio (tiers 0 and 1, food that survives a supermarket logistics failure): 23.9%.
Seven percent. Two hundred four square meters of intensively worked garden beds, a compost system I monitor like a reactor, and a season of real labor produce one-fourteenth of the household's food by mass. Anyone selling you casual food independence has not weighed anything.
What the log revealed that the romance hides
Water weight is doing the garden's marketing. Tier 0 looks respectable in June because tomatoes and cucumbers are mostly water. Rerun the table by calories and self-production drops to roughly 2.8%. The garden makes meals better; it does not make the household fed. Grains, oils, and proteins (the caloric load-bearing walls) are 96% tier 3.
The buffer matters more than the flow. Independence is not only production; it is storage. Current pantry depth, measured against our actual consumption rate: 34 days at full rations, 61 days with rationing. This number cost far less to improve than the garden did. Deepening the pantry by one week costs about $40 and zero labor. Raising garden output by one week's calories would cost a greenhouse.
Skills are the real tier 0. Bread, preservation, fermentation, breaking down a whole animal from the CSA. Each skill moves mass down a tier without new land. My sourdough moves 2.1 kg/month from industrial bread to flour I can buy in 25 kg sacks from a regional mill, and flour stores for a year.
The honest conclusion
Full food independence is not the goal, and I want to say that with numbers rather than vibes. Producing 100% of our calories would require, by my estimate, 2,000 to 4,000 m² under cultivation plus 25 to 30 hours of labor weekly. That is a job. I have a job.
The rational target for a household like mine: self-produced share of 10% by mass, resilience ratio of 35%, and pantry depth of 90 days. Estimated additional cost: about $65/month and 3 hours/week, mostly in tier 1 purchasing and storage rotation. That buys the outcome I actually care about, which is not living off the land. It is that no single supply chain disruption, strike, or regional event can make this household skip meals inside one season.
Confidence that we hit all three targets by 2027-06-30: 0.85. The scale, as always, will testify. It reads to 1 g and it has never once flattered me.