UK - How well could you survive on your diet if you could not import food or get vitamins.?!

If you were forced to survive on a seasonal vegetarian (especially vegan) diet in the UK with no food imports whatsoever, i think it would become VERY difficult to ensure the diet was nutritionally balanced and you would probably end up eating a diet that was extremely mundane/lacking in diversity.

Having said that though, whether you are vegetarian or not, generally speaking eating native seasonal foods is better for the environment. But its always not a straightforward issue of the closer to home the better- i was reading a New Scientist magazine recently and they had a column in it on how growing water heavy crops like lettuce are draining California's water reserves and that there is great concern over the long term sustainability of these water heavy crops on water reserves.

So some things may possibly be better being imported while other things may be better being grown at home. There is also the issue of food miles- something may have been grown in your country, but it may have been sent off to be packaged in a completely different country before being sent back to your own country. This way, some foods can knock up serious food miles when the farms they come from are hardly a few miles away from where the supermarkets are where they will eventually be sold at.

So cutting down on packaging can really help reduce the food miles of a product too (i'm always a bit miffed when i see someone in a supermarket putting an onion in a plastic bag which will then go into a larger plastic carier bag when they pay for the shoppung; the onion comes in its own packaging- its skin lol!) ^_^v .

The person who answered about WW2 is correct. Britain is a very fertile island and its weather is perfect for non-tropical plants.
Rickets is caused by lack of vitamin D which can be most efficiently absorbed from sunlight not diet. And dysentery is a parasitic worm. None of these thing have anything to do with vitamins and i never heard of people starving in the street during the war. My gran said they were the best years of her life

I grow all my own veg, and only eat what I grow. It just takes a bit of imagination when you cook them. But I'm not totally vegetarian I eat meat 3 times a week. I think Britain could possibly sustain that if everyone got off their bums and grew as much as they could to help.

me personly i wud strugle as i have a varied and "international" diet
however any country could survive for ever on there own resources if it wasnt for mordern life.
what was it like 100 200 or even 300 years ago, we all lived of what grew in our garden

probably not well ;-(

it would affect me a lot , badly, i pretty much rely on a lot of suppliments and herbal teas/foods etc to see me right, when i go without, it shows

of course, and might I remind you that in the war the UK had its healthiest decade ever.
People were fit and healthy on home grown food.

We could eat peasants or economic migrants, this would ensure we gain all our nutritional requirements.