Good grief .. you're serious?

Flour comes in sacks, meat comes in cuts - we've a quarter lamb in the freezer, part of that in the fridge, and yeast and flour enough for bread for the next six months.

We shop cheap, like the family has done for the past 100+ years, much of our food comes from the garden - our excess gets swapped with others excess (we have a lot of fruit, we never buy eggs, they come from people that can be bothered to run chickens).

It's a bit of work, we save money by not going to a gym and our life expectancy and cancer survival rates are much better than, say, middle north America.

To cut mbfg a bit of slack here, your approach doesn't work in all situations. I admire your functioning community and supportive family and the fact that you've got time and space for things like gardening.

If people can't live like you do, it's probably because they've been placed on some kind of economic hamster wheel, and rather than figure out how to get a quarter of a lamb their better bet is to emigrate or to disrupt the system that's making McDonalds feel like a relevant factor in a survival equation and build the community that you're describing in the wake of that disruption, which might be difficult if you've never been part of a community that functions in that way.