thats called cannibalism
True, but it has vitamins, minerals, fiber, and bulk. Pork and potatoes don’t have that much fiber. Constipation is not fun, just saying…
But it doesn’t have to be kale, any green leafy would serve the same role - chard, spinach, turnip greens (and you get turnip bottoms, too!), collard, dandelion, etc.
Yes, but are they easy to grow and calorie dense?
Potatoes are Native, too.
Me? In Iowa I would grow corn (both sweet for humans and field for animals), and tomatoes, potatoes, greens of topside (lettuce types) and below ground types (turnips… snip every so often and the ones you miss= root crop later), onions (same as turnips), plus whatever seeds I had on hand and survived whatever happened: actual zombies= doesn’t affect crops . Messing with crop hybridization= could be stuffed. End of World via asteroids etc= who knows.
Human disease, World ended but my area survived, God or gods stepped in: I would forage for grape vine leaves (edible not just as wraps as the Greeks use them but as food themselves,), mushrooms which are protein and show up year around if you know what to look for and how to tell from poisonous ones, and mulberries because they show up just about everywhere.
and cattails, dandelion greens, itchweed/nettles, a ton of wild greens that are in a suburban yard let alone the woods but taste “too green”. Thinking here quite a few herbicide plants that have other applications other than soybean or corn (mullein http://www.motherearthliving.com/plant-profile/herb-to-know-mullein )
Calorie dense? nuts maybe… then meat (squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, possums) or fish and then greens or fruits.
One will have to juggle every few days what one eats just like our ancestors did to get a complete diet… and they were not fat until food was mass produced/mass made (flour which breaks down to sugar, sugar, salt and fat).
Sorry… just got back from 5 days in an actual BIG CITY. Or a suburb of one… still larger than the metropolis I grew up in. I felt like the ant that did not smell the trail in an anthill. Or the bee that did not read the dance.
I spent 4 nights watching for zombies or… shady characters … or anybody I knew since I am used to stepping outside to have a smoke and seeing NONE (he’s shady) or hearing dogs barking, raccoons mating, Hoot Owls calling , teens doing fireworks or screeching their tires, cows lowing, mooing or revolting (click it, you’ve did it before and it’s always worth listening to) Cows With Guns - The Original Animation - YouTube
I’m home… waiting for the planting season to begin. And thinking about planting seeds for plants to be planted in a month to 5 because who knows when our last frost date will be anymore .
And I might check for mushrooms this week cos the temps hit above 50 degrees F.
They taste of cucumber sandwiches.
If you do skip the insects, try not to skip the insects - at least not until you’ve rebooted civilisation and got it properly back up and running stable. Raising invertebrates for food is probably an order of magnitude more efficient than vertebrates - and that’s going to make the difference between success and failure. It doesn’t make that difference right now, because we live in a comparatively plentiful situation.
Yes, it’s efficient in terms of non-human-usable calories in -> human-usable calories out.
But it’s also not easy. You have to count the effort of farming these damn things. It seems to me that I can’t think of any traditional subsistence farming culture that cultivated insects, aside from silkworms. Ate insects, sure, especially when the locusts have chewed your crops to the ground the only sensible thing to do is feast on locusts for the next few weeks until the swarm is gone.
But farming insects? Makes no sense. With chickens you let them out and they scratch most of their own food, then come back to the coop for the night. You can’t do that with crickets.
Insects are suitable for modern intensive industrial agriculture, but not so much for subsistence agriculture.
Maybe, but traditional subsistence farming can consume a significant portion of available labour - I guess it depends on whether you want to go all the way through the agricultural revolution again before getting back to the industrial and technological revolutions.
As far as I can tell, insects are not widely cultivated either because:
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[li]They are not desired aesthetically as a foodstuff[/li][li]Where they are desired, they are available wild[/li][/ul]
However, in the latter case, they are typically foraged at the cost of great human effort - in places where such labour is cheap.
They’re not that hard to cultivate - crickets, for example, are pretty low-maintenance.
Bingo. I was going to suggest beans and yams, but this covers it. We planted one butternut squash plant last year and were buried in the resulting harvest.
The OP should research what the native indigenous people lived on for his area. Then enhance that with crops that grew in a similar climate that aren’t native to his area. Then look into the higher maintenance crops for nutrition and variety. The big question as noted is why he has been reduced to subsistence farming in the first place and what the competition for food, land, and security is. Survival farming from an economic collapse with starving mobs moving through is different than a biological disaster. Size of community that can help or hinder also matters. I’d lean towards the plant and forget about it type stuff like squashes, potatoes, peas, beans, rhubarb, burdock root, dandelions, and other edible weeds. Maybe now you won’t have too much zucchini. Not only humans will want to dine on your chickens so them foraging may not be much of an option.
Too late to edit:
I’d set up a way to distill and preserve from the fruit trees in the area also. Dehydrate apples and cherries and plums or brew them into cider. Don’t want to be wasting them and starving three months later. Also a flourishing vegetable garden will draw the meat sources to it such as rabbits, deer, raccoons, starlings.
This isn’t something I have real knowledge about, but-- It seems that sunflower kernals are the cheapest of the nuts/seeds/peanuts sold at Trader Joes’s. They’re full of oil (calories) and protein and TJ’s sells them for $2 a pound. Peanuts are about $3. Other nuts and seeds are much more, and other legumes don’t pack the same calorie load.
I don’t know if the low price can be taken to mean they are productive and easy to grow. Wikipedia says they need significant sun and fertilizer, but raising flowers seems unintimidating. :^)
I grew corn a couple summers ago. It is pretty easy to grow IF you can find a way to stop other animals from raiding your crop. Deer and raccoons love raiding corn fields, so you would have to guard it really well or you could end up losing everything. I only was able to harvest ONE corn cob from many different plants because some deer got to it right as it was turning ripe.
Peas and beans are easy, grow fast, and provide protein. That’s definitely a good option.
Peanuts and lentils would also be decent protein sources.
In general, plant based protein will be faster and easier to produce than animal protein, other than insects, so I would think the people who do best in this scenario would be vegetarians who are willing to eat bugs. 
Anything with enough sugar/starch to make alcohol will be invaluable to barter.