Sprouts!

  One of the most efficient ways to ship food is as a seed.



  Sprouting is the use of water to cause seeds to grow into salad greens, and frankly, for the price of a tub of salad greens, you can have several years' worth of salad. The seeds tend to swell to several times their size, and then grow, so a quarter-teaspoon of seeds can make a large container of salad greens. Sprouting is sometimes called "bucket hydro" due to the habit of using 5-gallon paint buckets (about 20 Litres), which can allow one to provide enough green, leafy vegetables to feed an entire small city, easily.

  Anything that can be eaten can be eaten as sprouts. The classic sprouts found in salad bars and deli sandwiches are usually clover or alfalfa, and bean sprouts can make a good salad; it takes very few beans. Some flavors are surprising; mustard and radish sprouts offer a spicy flavor to salads and soups, while carrot sprouts have a very, very mild carrot flavor which vanishes in combination.

  All one needs is a large jar, a small square of cloth, and some seeds... and of course, water. Soak overnight with the lid on the jar, where applicable, drain during daytime and let air and dry with the top covered with cloth to keep dust and flies away, and repeat.

  Most seeds will become tasty sprouts within 3-6 days. Multiple jars of each variety can be grown "in the round" to keep a constant supply.

  It is phenomenally easy to provide all one's leafy vegetable needs this way, and is usually several orders of magnitude less expensive than buying the salad greens.


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