You’ve Been Trained to Depend on the System for Survival—Here’s How to Break Free

The first step is the simplest: take back your food.

Photo by Green Prophet on Unsplash

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You don’t have to grow all your own food.
You just have to stop letting the system feed you lies.

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You’re dependent on something that literally pushes itself out of the ground.

Carrots. Potatoes. Kale. Tomatoes. All of it just grows.

And yet, we treat food like a miracle that arrives in a plastic box after a long supply chain alchemy. As if only experts and corporations can grow it. As if growing food for yourself is a fantasy, or a burden.

That’s how deep the dependency goes. It’s not just logistical. It’s psychological.

Step 1 in “7 Steps to Quietly Exit a System that Wants to Keep You Dependent” is food because food is the lie we’ve swallowed the deepest. And it’s also the place we can most easily begin to spit it out.

You don’t have to do it all at once. You don’t have to become a farmer. You just have to reclaim one small connection to your plate—and remember that it’s yours to reclaim.

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What the System Doesn’t Want You to Notice

You’ve been convinced this is hard. That feeding yourself requires magic in the form of chemical inputs, machines, and the whispered secrets of corporate supply chains. But this illusion is part of a loop: one that extracts your time, energy, and autonomy in exchange for the promise of convenience.

The system of extraction thrives when you:

• Don’t have time to cook

• Assume your only option is the store

• Rely on fragile supply chains, imported calories, and processed foods

• Confuse access with nourishment

It’s designed to keep you cycling through dependence, spending to survive. But the more you rely on it, the more you lose your ability to opt out.

And here’s the hard truth: the foundations of this system are cracking.

• Public health outcomes are declining while ultra-processed foods dominate shelves.

• Soil fertility is plummeting. Water access is fragile. Climate events disrupt global harvests.

• Grocery chains are consolidating. Local food infrastructures—like small farms, public gardens, community kitchens—have been systematically dismantled.

We no longer have resilience within the system. And that makes building it outside the system not just a choice—but a necessity.

When the U.S. cut off trade with Cuba in 1962, Fidel Castro issued a single, sweeping command: plant food. Everywhere.

Lawns, rooftops, vacant lots—turned into gardens. Urban agriculture surged. Cuba’s people survived not because of central planning, but because they localized. They adapted. They reclaimed food sovereignty.

You don’t have to be a prepper. You just have to be prepared.

Preparedness is not paranoia. It’s dignity. It’s sovereignty. It’s knowing that you can make decisions that serve your well-being—not corporate margins.

And the best place to begin that sovereignty is with your food.

Offramping starts when you realize the loop is optional—and the exit is already under your feet.

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🔀 The 3 Levels of the Food Off-Ramp

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🔹 Level 1: Minimize Dependency

This is about seeing the system for what it is—and slowing your intake of it.

Start here:

• Do a pantry audit. What do you actually use? What’s expired? What’s marketing?

• Cook one more meal at home this week than usual. Pick something you love but think would be hard to make.
  BudgetBytes - Easy Meal Ideas

• Shop intentionally: stick to the outer edges of the grocery store and skip the middle aisles.

• Choose one item in your shopping cart with ingredients you don’t recognize, and find a natural alternative you could use instead.
  EWG’s Food Scores

• Freeze leftovers. Learn which foods freeze well (soups, stews, beans, shredded meat).
  Check out Stealth Health Life here on Substack for easy, excellent, healthy, homemade freezer meals

• Pick one shelf-stable item to “buffer” each week. Rice, beans, oats, canned fish, etc. Not for fear—for breathing room.
  Shelf-Stable Staples List

🛠 Want a tool for this? I’ll be releasing a printable pantry audit & 3-day reset plan soon. (Make sure you’re subscribed.)

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🔹 Level 2: Rebuild Basic Skills

This is the part where people usually bail. Don’t.

We’ve been convinced that cooking is a burden. But basic food prep is one of the most powerful acts of resistance there is.

Start here:

• Cook once, eat three times: Batch meals like chili, roasted veggies, or grain bowls.
  Again, I recommend Stealth Health Life for freezer meals

• Learn to stretch ingredients: That leftover chicken can be tacos, soup, or fried rice.

• Try one new skill: making stock from scraps, drying herbs, or baking a simple loaf of bread. Make your own Foccacia one time. It's easy and probably one of the best things you'll ever eat.

• Get familiar with what food wants to do—not what recipes tell it to do. That means noticing how a vegetable softens when roasted, how a broth deepens when simmered, how leftovers combine into something new. Trust your senses. Recipes can guide you, but real confidence comes when you start listening to the food itself—its smells, textures, and rhythms. That’s when cooking shifts from instruction to intuition.

Food doesn’t have to be a performance. It has to be yours.

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🔹 Level 3: Source or Grow Outside the System

You don’t need a homestead. You need a crack in the chain of dependency.

Start here:

• Buy herbs or greens to grow on a windowsill or patio.

• Join a CSA or find a local farm box.
  Find what works for you on the USDA Local Food Directory

• Swap or share food through a Facebook Buy Nothing groups or in the next version of my app, NeighborhoodShare.

• Ask a neighbor who gardens if they ever have extra. They do. Drop by with a serving or two of whatever you've made with what they've gifted you. This will move you to the top of the "I have extra, do you want some?" list.

If you want to level up:

• Container gardening is real. You can grow tomatoes, peppers, or even potatoes in 5-gallon buckets.

• I'm building a greenhouse and a hydroponic system for year-round fresh fruits and veggies. I'll have later posts with plans and suggestions as this "grows." Make sure to subscribe to get all the info.

• Look up your city’s community gardens or permaculture meetups.

• Learn to identify one wild edible in your area. Just one.

The point isn’t self-sufficiency. The point is co-sufficiency—a future where your food doesn’t have to come with a barcode.

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♻️ Bonus: Stop Throwing Away Resilience

Compost is a Revolution in Disguise.

Every time you toss veggie scraps in the trash, you're not just wasting food—you're throwing away future soil.
Composting is how you take your waste and turn it into wealth. And it’s easier than you think.

Start here tonight:

• Put a bowl or container by your sink.

• Toss in veggie peels, coffee grounds, eggshells, tea bags.

• That’s it. That’s the beginning.

Then pick your path:

Option A: Compost at Home

• Backyard? Make a simple bin from scrap wood or buy one.
  EPA Home Compost Guide
  Cheap DIY Compost Bin (YouTube)
  Register on Make Soil to get scraps from your neighbors.

Option B: Drop It Off

• Check local farmers markets or gardens.

• Use Make Soil to connect with people who’ll take your scraps.

Option C: Indoors

• Use a Bokashi bin or electric composter.

Composting teaches this: nothing is lost—only transformed.
That’s true of waste, and it’s true of us.

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Why This Matters

We’re being told change is impossible—until a truck doesn’t show up, a price doubles, or a product disappears.

But the truth is this: you are already enough to start rebuilding.
The offramp doesn’t require escape. It requires reorientation.

Take back your food.
Take back your rhythm.
Take back your power.

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💬 I'd love to hear:

• What changes have you made around food in the past year?

• What feels possible now that didn’t before?

👇 Share your story in the comments—or just reply and let me know what step you’re on.

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Ready to Step Further Off the Grid?

If this article sparked something—don’t let it fade. Subscribe to get the full series as I break down each of the 7 steps in more detail. Each one is designed to help you reclaim another piece of your life from systems that no longer serve us.

And if you believe in this work—if you believe we need blueprints for a better way—consider becoming a paid subscriber. It’s how we build a resilient future, together.

Subscribers get:

• Early access to future guides (including how to set up tool-sharing, local currencies, and backyard solar)

• Printable how-tos and checklists

• Direct input into future topics and community experiments

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☕ Not Ready to Subscribe? You Can Still Help

If this gave you something—an insight, a nudge, a moment of clarity—consider supporting the work:

Or just Restack it on Substack so others can find their offramp too

Every small act builds the path forward.