So, I'm a US Civil War reenactor and I do a lot of teaching at schools. One of the things that I really focus on when teaching is the daily life of a soldier /civilian. What they wore, what they thought, how they lived, what they ate. With that in mind, I thought I'd offer a couple of thoughts about food in a T2K environment.
Let me note right off that conditions in Central Europe and Sweden are going to be vastly different. Poland has been a battlefield for 3 and a half years in-game and has suffered repeated NBC attacks. Sweden has been a combatant for 2 years or so and the proliferation of NBC weapons has been much smaller. Of course, Sweden has less land arable land and a shorter growing season... therefore the damage warfare has done to the food supply is just as acute. I'm addressing Poland because it is most similar to the US, where I'm from. I simply don't know enough about farming in the higher latitudes to be able to comment with any authority.
First off, food is gonna be a bitch. The Referee's Book describes a Poland that is damned near as buggered up as that Gawdawful book series from the 80's, The Zone. Croplands have been NBC'd to literal death and only a major human die-back and decades of rain and weathering are going to fix it.
Now, I don't see the picture as quite that bad. I'm well aware of the poisoning spectrum [at least, that described by the US Army Chemical Corps]. The setting describes survivors that really are hanging on, with sufficient croplands to support the remaining population... barely. The problem is twofold: a lack of trained farmers and a transportation net that's thoroughly wrecked. Almost everything that's grown is consumed within 25 miles /40 km of its acreage. Then you add the problems of a barter economy, bandits, organized units of soldiers 'foraging' [or as like to tell students, 'authorized stealing'] and the need for high starch/ sugar content plants to distill fuel from.
To be blunt, society's ability to feed itself has retreated to medieval level and damned few people have any idea how to actually do the work necessary. Most communities are closer to the Stone Age hunter /scavengers, rather than the organized work of a medieval village.
So let's get down to some basics here. Let me go point-by-point...
a] the general rule of thumb is 'one acre [2.5 hectares] of grain supports one adult and requires the full time effort of one adult to cultivate'. However, this presumes that the adult has some knowledge of what they're doing and has the energy and the security to work the land. Under the conditions of 'modern' Poland, a more realistic estimate would be doubling the needed land to feed one person.
b] a healthy person consumes, at minimum, their own body weight in food per month. This presumes a varied diet of 2700 calories a day. In T2K terms, this diet is a distant memory. As 'Monk' put it in the flavor text of T2013, "I'd be willing to kill somebody I know for a bacon double cheeseburger." A realistic figure for the current diet is probably along the lines of 1800 calories a day in the sparse time of the year [December to June] and 2200 calories in the 'fat' time of the year [July to November]. Of course this will vary widely.
c] many food preservation techniques have been lost or preserved only as 'ancient lore'. The only methods of food preservation commonly available in Poland at this time are likely to be salting, pickling in vinegar, drying [jerked meats, dried vegetables], and possibly smoking. Drying and smoking require a lot of time and fuel to do, and smell of the process will draw bandits like flies to a corpse. And something that can't be emphasized enough; the most efficient fuel for fires is charcoal made from hardwoods. The knowledge of how to make charcoal in large enough amounts is largely lost. People think only in terms of dry, seasoned wood and are not at the point of cultivating wood-lots yet.
I'll discuss some solutions and how Civil War soldiers ate [which can provide some of those solutions] in my next post.