How do YOU want to be fed?

Alright, so taking in thoughts from everyone: what do you you think is the best method of feeding a town of basement dwellers? Community mess-hall style?

Or should we just make the food available and hope that no one starves to death (grocery store style)?

i vote aquaponics or whatever it's called. seems to be relatively self sustaining and room efficient, etc.

Mess hall style of feeding has my vote. For something like this to work, you need a strong sense of community. It's hard to know 200 people well enough to develop the trust needed for a self reliant town when everyone is at their own house doing their own thing. A large group meal would give a chance for everyone to see everyone and recap on the day they just had bettering the society everyone is helping shape. I envision it a lot like highschool, but instead of a bunch of little cliques doing their own thing, we'd all be one giant group. That covers the psychological benefits of mess hall feeding.

As far as the logistics, it would cut down on waste. Give 50 people five pounds of food each, there's going to be 10 people who only eat one pound, 30 people who eat all 5 pounds, and 10 people who find themselves starving and wanting more. I'm not saying that it would be a good idea to limit any and all food to the "cafeteria". By all means, let people come and grab some ingredients to make a cake or something and share it with some people they've grown close with. Mess hall meals just seems like a simpler task to keep up and plan out how much food we use and how much we'd need for the future.

I like the idea of growing our own, and shipping some in. We should probably ship heavily when we first start, as we prepare our first crops. Once we get our system of agriculture going, we can decrease the amount of shipping we do. I don't think we should cut out shipping entirely, though, so we can at least have a lifeline in the event of a drought or other disaster.

Time frame if we work hard to get an Aquaponics farm running is somewhere around 3 months after which it will produce food constantly for the entire year.

Considerations:

Climate, IE Gets super cold in winter. Need space heaters and water heaters. Plants do not like temperatures below 12 degrees celcius.

Food for Fish, either fish food or worms from the local compost or duckweed. depends on fish species.
(As part of experimental grants we can test multiple fish species to see which grows best with what. Tee hee)

Seed stock. We need a room to sprout seeds before moving them to the main aquaponics system.

BONUS: The food we produce will be certified GRADE A ORGANIC. No pesticides will be used in production, no chemical soups to make them grow.

If sold they will go for a premium in stores.

Simultaneous Food stock and cash crop.

Rockin mah socks.



EDIT:

On top of this, instead of moving everybody in all at once we should prob space it out by half a year.
Gives us enough time to put in the essentials first IE food production.

We should look into greenhouses and other safe methods of farming
I would like us to be more reliant on our own produce, that way we will be setting an example for the future.
We could go on some bullshit on how if this works the US will get out of debt and never fall into that pit again if other towns follow our lead.
A mess hall is a great idea, that would bring us close together as a community.

Pfffft, enough with the socialism.

Prepare your own food and live how you want to live, if it gets mess-hally not everyone is ever going to be satisfied, we will be better off importing basic ingredients and processing it ourselves and providing people with what they order.

As I said in my introduction, my fiance is great with chickens and I'd say birds in general. While I don't think we could realistically sustainably raise meat chickens (at least early on, those guys eat a ton!) I would certainly hope a steady supply of eggs would be helpful and delicious.

Personally, I would think something more community based would be better to start off with. I don't think it is realistic to expect everybody to be able to fend for themselves and it would honestly be nice if we could create a tight community especially since I am sure that we are going to need to help each other out to survive early on. If it all survives and we get some sustainability and actual work going then we can transition into a normal economy.

As for sources of food we should definitely aim for self sustainability. Major food operations might also be the ticket for getting money into the town as opposed to slowly losing our funds to buying goods from outside and whatever taxes there may be. That being said I doubt that with a small community we could cover all the food needs for everybody so we should plan on importing food. So far I haven't seen anybody talk about milk production and I know that I'm going to want some.

We'll need to plant trees and such for fruits, but more importantly nuts for protein.
We'll need to plant beans, rice would probably be a good idea as well since it fills you up when you eat it, and goes well with most dishes.

we should grow our own staple crops (potatoes, beans, corn, ect.) and a few basic fruits and vegatbles once we've given ourselves some breathing room, but luxuries (chocolate, spices, coffee) and more varieaties of food will need to be shipped in. like oranges during winter. inb4 scurvy. fried fish and potatoes? im fine with that.

I vote for self sufficiency so we can have as little to do with the outside world as possible.

Here are the most successful crops in SD. The figures are from NORML so it may be biased but if they can grow them so can we and probably better.

http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=4564&wtm_view=crop10

I vote for like an open market were we gather to get what is available and at the same time provides a social center for everyone to interact daily, I find that important because we want to be comfortable around each other and this should help things along.