One farmer and activist suggests reaching local food security means stopping the construction of McMansions:

Salatin — a successful American farmer, former reporter and author of nine books on the food revolution — is able to produce far more food per acre than industrial-scale farms using techniques that make raising beef, chicken, eggs and even pigs palatable to the neighbours…

Putting fallow land around monster homes that are proliferating in the Agricultural Land Reserve back into production will be key to building local food security in B.C.“We call those McMansions,” he said. “It is a problem because that is agriculturally abandoned land. We can’t begin to feed ourselves with a local-centric system if we lock up land in royal manor models.”

Even urban dwellers need to consider how far their food has to travel and whether it will come at all if there are shortages, he suggested. The integrated approach he takes to food production on the farm can be applied at any scale, Salatin said.

There are a lot of things that people, even in well-established communities, can do themselves to become more food secure, said Salatin, giving examples such as keeping honeybees on rooftops, installing food-producing solariums in our homes, capturing rainwater for food production, container gardening and reclaiming some of the billions of potentially productive acres sequestered under lawns in North America.

It is rare to find a critique of McMansions that explicitly addresses food. Such homes are often criticized for being wasteful, using too much land and resources as well as providing more space than people need.

Yet, I suspect it is not quite as simple as suggesting new McMansions automatically mean less agricultural space. McMansions aren’t the only use of land. This argument seems to use McMansions as a shorthand for sprawl. The sprawl often associated with McMansion neighborhoods consumes green land and pushes farming and agriculture further and further away.

Would a middle ground be consistently using McMansion land for growing things and raising animals? I have yet to see a request from McMansion homeowners to allow chickens or livestock – though such lots could accommodate such activities. It probably comes down to property values…

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