Gardening and foraging won't get you anywhere if you live in an urban area. You need an absurd amount of arable land per capita if you want to survive. A vegetable garden is useful in times of war not for raw calorie input but for supplements (either for specific nutrients not commonly found in rationed food supply or for taste).

The good news is that food production is a "solved" issue. Any industrialized country is capable of producing enough calories to feed itself and then some, even without gas imports. Worst case you just stop growing bioethanol and beef to double the amount of available arable land at no tangible human cost.

Those who'll get fucked by Trump's war are not Americans or Europeans, it'll be poor economies that can barely support industrial agriculture in the best of times. Their ability to buy fertilizer is very price-sensitive, which we already saw in 2022, though at the time the US had leadership willing to intercede and guarantee grain shipments.

This time, millions will die, but not in a prepper fantasy kind of way, but in a "they live in a 'shithole country' and we won't care to help because our money finances ICE and bribes now" kind of way.

prepping properly is actually things like learning to garden well

A garden is never going to be a primary source of calories. I know someone who has a massive backyard garden with at least 10 pool-table sized raised beds and a bunch of other smaller areas with berries, etc. He loves gardening but he can't keep up on his own and hires help for it. And, even then, it's mostly just extra things for salads. Sometimes he dedicates a full weekend to preserving things, but even then, what he has is just a supplement to his grocery shopping.

That's the thing, they didn't think society was going to fail, even though they'd been through the depression, a world war, the oil crisis, blizzards etc and it never came to that. They weren't the only ones either, they were essentially in a suburb and they knew their neighbors well

sunchokes are fairly weedy and hard to get rid of, and don't really produce enough calories to be worth it in a survival situation.

Also, you should grow stuff you already eat - don't expect to grow a bunch of food that you aren't used to cooking or eating and to enjoy it.

tbh, it might make most sense to identify what you spend the most money on and what's easiest to grow that would replace the money you spend with time tending - usually that's fresh herbs. Growing sage, thyme, rosemary, green onions, basil, etc. is usually fairly easy and will save a lot of money (a bundle of fresh herbs can cost like $5 for a very small amount).

Garlic is also fairly expensive per 100 g, and I found it not too hard to grow - I managed to grow enough garlic in one season in a small area on a suburban plot to not have to buy grocery store garlic for over a year.

But on the other hand, you don't tend to buy a lot of garlic by weight, so it may or may not make sense given the amount of time it takes to garden.

People need to understand that gardening is a huge amount of labor and time spent - it's not economical compared to working a job and buying what you need.

So, if you're unemployed and unable to work, but able to garden, it's unlikely to be a great way to spend your time if your concern is saving money.

If your goal is to survive a catastrophe, I think it's delusional to expect gardening to fully provide for your calories, and the same calculus applies: your time will be better spent making yourself valuable to someone who has excess food to give away (like your local CSA farmer friend); even just volunteering on their farm is a better use of time than trying to provide for your own calories by making your small urban or suburban lawn into a food production system.