It's probably best to think of supplementing rather than replacing external food supplies and sources. Raising perishable / vegetable crops and having a source of protein (fowl -> eggs, goat -> milk) would probably be your best bets.
You'd need to spend an extraordiary amount of time preserving harvest: drying, salting, smoking, curing, fermenting, and canning.
On a per-acre and per-hour basis, potatos are probably your best bet. A carb-heavy diet will tend to add pounds.
The traditional native American crops were the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash:
These are mutually symbiotic (the beans add nitrogen to the soil, I believe there's some pest-management aspect to this as well).
Preindustrial communities also relied heavily on fishing and shellfish --- another iconic pattern are shell mounds, literally the remnants of shellfish eaten. (See Shell Mound Road in Emeryville, as an example, in the SF Bay Area.) Grazing livestock was another standard.
Note that the native population of regions such as the Los Angeles basin may have been a few thousands, and for pre-Columbian North America (including Mexico and Central America) roughly 50 millions.
> You'd need to spend an extraordiary amount of time preserving harvest: drying, salting, smoking, curing, fermenting, and canning.
back in soviet times, we didn't have 365 day a year avaliability of fruit from another side of the planet, and our grandmother used to can hundreds of kilos of fruit and veg in the summer. She would fill up a storage room and that wouod supplement our diet in the colder months.
Its quite a bit of work, like a week or 2, but was normal withing living memory. Also you need equipment: a canning machine, and like 30+ 5-liter glass jars. And this is just one aspect of what you would need.
The epic exploration of east Asian technology, Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, devotes an entire volume (Vol 6, Part 5) to fermentation and food science. (The series itself is simply phenomenal.)
Canning arrived late to the scene, in the 19th century. It requires glass jars (which are re-usable), and in modern practice, lids which are replaced for each fresh batch. Prior to this, curing and fermentation were heavily relied on for long-term food storage: saurkraut, kimchee, salami, cheese, yoghurt, kefir, tofu, miso, tempeh, many forms of pickling, and of course, fermented alcohols (often employing grains or fruit).
It's probably best to think of supplementing rather than replacing external food supplies and sources. Raising perishable / vegetable crops and having a source of protein (fowl -> eggs, goat -> milk) would probably be your best bets.
You'd need to spend an extraordiary amount of time preserving harvest: drying, salting, smoking, curing, fermenting, and canning.
On a per-acre and per-hour basis, potatos are probably your best bet. A carb-heavy diet will tend to add pounds.
The traditional native American crops were the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash:
https://www.almanac.com/content/three-sisters-corn-bean-and-...
These are mutually symbiotic (the beans add nitrogen to the soil, I believe there's some pest-management aspect to this as well).
Preindustrial communities also relied heavily on fishing and shellfish --- another iconic pattern are shell mounds, literally the remnants of shellfish eaten. (See Shell Mound Road in Emeryville, as an example, in the SF Bay Area.) Grazing livestock was another standard.
Note that the native population of regions such as the Los Angeles basin may have been a few thousands, and for pre-Columbian North America (including Mexico and Central America) roughly 50 millions.