It is not absolutely essential, however everything counts in the end. Growing a least a portion food your own food ends up decreasing the amount of Carbon produced into the environment. It takes a lot of resources to transport store bought food and package it. None of these things are needed if you grow your own food, most people will not be able to be completely self sustainable off their own grown food, but if everyone tries to do this then it will make a very large impact over all. If growing your own food could save you one trip to the store a month this is already making a large impact, although it doesn't seem like it if everyone around the nation (318 Million in the US) didn't take make a trip to the store every month, assuming that most families are made of 4 people, that means there would be 954,000,000 trips not made to the store in one year alone in the US. Imagine all of the resources that would be saved by not making that one trip, if everyone around the world in all aspects of their life could do these small things, it would make huge global impact.

I completely agree! the amazing thing about society is that since there is so many people a small act in each family could add up to a larger scale. I also heard about these planter boxes that allow people to grow produce very easily, all that a family would need to do is water it and the box does the rest.