There are already some good points made about efficiency, but I’ll also add that for an individual sometimes it’s not about efficiency but about survivability in the event of a crisis. As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk, so it’s logical that some would want to mitigate the risk of food production failures.
By the looks of things we did make out of COVID-19 just fine (from a civilization standpoint even if not at the individual level for all individuals) so not sure this supports your point.
“Just fine” is relative I suppose. We were fortunate that COVID-19 was relatively mild compared to what could have happened, but if you recall, there were major supply chain issues and at least in my area there were shortages, outages, and elevated prices on food items. Given what we saw, it seems reasonable to me that some people would want to hedge against something even worse by growing at least some of their food at home.
> As we saw in 2020, over indexing on efficiency can lead to cascading failures that put individuals at risk
I don’t know what you mean here. By 2020 I assume you mean the covid-19 pandemic? I agree that the pandemic itself put people at risk. But what do you mean by “cascading failures that put individuals at risk”?
From my perspective society and systems of it kept on going despite the large scale upheavals happening. If for anything I would cite 2020 as evidence that things are not as fragile as we suspected. But maybe you have a different perspective?
I suspect they are referring to the whole "we can't even produce face masks" kind of fiascos. Yes we got out of it alright, but in good portion out of pure luck that covid-19 isn't as deadly as ebola...
