[octygen]

Food... or fresh/unpolluted water. For food, I think it's a little easier but societies that have a hard time producing would have to adjust what they eat and how they eat it. Also, less meat, less red wine, more beer and more potatoes. The latter are much more sustainable.

E.g., In Canada, we'll have to accept we can't have bananas, pineapple, kiwis, mangos any time. We'll have to stick to locally grown apples, way fewer (but higher quality) blueberries and probably eat all the things Icelanders eat like smoked fish.

There's a course on Coursera called The Nordic Diet which is about Scandinavia as a whole adjusting its national diet to eat more local produce. Talk about foresight! That's just one of the principles at least. It's a Danish-run program. E.g., They eat more lingonberries since they grow all over the place?

[waihtis]

> The Nordic Diet

Need to check this out.

There is definitely a possibility to go much more local by just foraging. I ate probably tens of kilograms of golden chanterelle, bilberries (local equivalent of blueberry)& lingonberries last fall - the forests are spilling with food and a lot of it rots because people don't take advantage of it.

Healthy, free, very tasty food - and you get exercise and fresh air while foraging. Clears your head very nicely too if you do computer work. Almost makes me wish summer was over already and I could be in the woods picking mushrooms and berries.

[adrianN]

Foraging can't sustain the current population levels. People in Europe were foraging after WW2. Population was much lower than today, people still starved.

[fogihujy]

If you're in a situation where you would need alternative ways to feed current population levels then foraging will be required even if it's not enough on it's own. It's a matter of adding whatever can be added to the total pool of resources, and not about finding a single source.

Post WWII, didn't just forage, they also rationed food, bred rabbits in parks, went fishing, planted potatoes in their backyards and so on. If any of those options hadn't been available things would have been much worse.

[waihtis]

Nor did I claim it can

[tokai]

>It's a Danish-run program. E.g., They eat more lingonberries since they grow all over the place

There is no lingonberries in Denmark.

[hjek]

Yes, there are[0]. We call them tyttebær.

[0]: https://www.raavareguiden.dk/frugt/tyttebaer.html

[djxfade]

In Norway, there is a large import tax on foods like cheese and meat, to encourage buying locally. This seems to work, as most shops only sell Norwegian produce.

[mnky9800n]

This is also motivated by local food monopolies where they don't want competition from cheaper and higher quality cheese producers in the rest of Europe.

[vidarh]

It's certainly maintained by that, but Norway has a couple of centuries history of political focus on food security, ever since the British naval blockade of Denmark-Norway during the Napoleonic wars, and then strongly reinforced by the nazi occupation. The strong focus on keeping the rural areas settled also in large part stems from that, though of course it is also self-reinforcing in that people who now benefit from policies designed to do so tend to want it to continue for their own reasons too.

There's a lot of cultural significance of food security, going back to e.g. decades of making primary school children learn about Terje Vigen (Ibsen's epic poem about someone trying to brave the blockade to feed his family), coupled with a lot of cold war thinking that at least up to the end of the 80's saw food security as part national defence during a time where we still had air raid siren tests many times a year in case of Soviet invasion.

While that has certainly softened up since, most Norwegian politicians still grew up with that.

[tonyedgecombe]

Norway is part of the European Economic Area so can’t apply tariffs on goods from within the EU.

[djxfade]

The EEA Agreement provides for a free trade area covering all the EEA States. However, the EEA Agreement does not extend the EU Customs Union to the EEA EFTA States. The aim of both the free trade area and the EU Customs Union is to abolish tariffs on trade between the parties. However, whereas in the EU Customs Union, the EU Member States have abolished customs borders and procedures between each other, these are still in place in trade between the EEA EFTA States and the EU, as well as in trade between the three EEA EFTA States. Furthermore, the common customs tariff on imports to the EU from third countries is not harmonised with the customs tariffs of the EEA EFTA States

Source: https://www.efta.int/media/publications/fact-sheets/EEA-fact...