[9rx]

I suppose that depends on what you mean by "from scratch". If first you must invent the universe, starvation is certain. If you have to produce the food from the ground by yourself, you will struggle to scrape enough calories out of it to survive. There is no hope of excessive weight gain here.

If "from scratch" means going to the grocery store to buy a bunch of prepared ingredients that you go home with to mix up in a bowl, sure. Then it starts to become much easier. Where does the line get drawn?

[simoncion]

> There is no hope of excessive weight gain here.

Uh. We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.

Also, butter, processed animal fats (such as lard), fatty meats... none of these are recent inventions, and they're all good at helping you to grow fat. I feel very confident in claiming that they (or things functionally just like them) have been around for a thousand years, and I expect that they've been around for several thousand.

[9rx]

> We can pretty confidently say that ancient civilizations had fat folks, too.

Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself. If you include the input of many other people building things like a tractor you could also grow enough of your own food from the ground to exceed your normal caloric requirements without much trouble, but you're a long way from doing it from scratch at that point.

Unless, like before, you consider throwing some prepared ingredients into a bowl to be "from scratch", at which point anything goes. Perhaps opening a bag of chips is also "from scratch"? You did have to exert the effort to open it, after all.

[simoncion]

> Not without a lot of extra help. That is why I said by yourself.

One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves. While it's far easier with help, it's not as if you're asking the fellow to -say- change the orbit of the sun. Fat people and high-calorie foods substantially predate modern industry.

[9rx]

> One guy can totally make butter, lard, and harvest fatty meat by themselves.

Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people. So in a vacuum it is true that you could gain excessive weight.

But it still isn't actually possible in reality. The time commitment to produce that much is expansive. There isn't enough time in the day for you and you alone to both produce it and also eat it to excess. If you cut down on your time commitment to the animals so that you can focus on eating, then your caloric production plummets.

That is, of course, much easier to pull off with the modern tools we have, but then you're back to requiring the help of many people. Those tools don't magically appear out of nowhere.

[simoncion]

> Theoretically it is possible that one person could, on their own, produce enough calories with cattle to feed around two people.

Right. This is the same species as the "birthing in olden times was fatal 50% of the time" assertion.

Anyway, I see what you're driving at.

Yes. I agree that a lone, naked, unarmed human surrounded by a couple dozen wolves looking to eat him right now is almost certainly going to be eaten by those wolves.

Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.

[9rx]

> Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.

Me neither as it has never happened. Said farmer was typically burning around 4-6,000 calories per day. If eating butter and fatty meats as suggested, we're talking a pretty significant time commitment just for maintenance, never mind pushing yourself over the time. You can't exactly guzzle down a slab of meat like it is a Coca-Cola. If you wanted to start packing on the pounds, ignoring the challenge of even just getting that much food down your gullet in the first place, when would you actually find time raise the animals in order to provide that much food?

It has always been possible if you have a lot of help, sure. Even the aforementioned bag of chips was made from scratch by a group of people — unless we're counting the need to invent the universe, I suppose. That's probably not what earlier comments were talking about, though.