First in many places you do NOT need to buy the land to live on. You can find yourself a piece of property that isn't being used and put up a shack and move in. Unless the property owner runs you off in a certain amount of time (varies from state to state) you will own the land. It's called homesteading still and it is legal in many states. It's not exactly moral but it's legal.
But I think the question was whether you could live off the land. It doesn't say anything about owning it or not. Remote land is often cheap land anyway so you can buy yourself a tract of land surrounded by open spaces and actually do quite well living off the land. You just have to be willing to do the things it takes to live that way.
Take the area I live in. I would have no problems putting up a tent or moving into a cave and surviving. I like in SE Ohio and I grew up in NE Kentucky. There are wooded hills all around this area and there is plenty of wild game some of which can be killed at any time during the year. If you're willing to eat possum you can have meat all year long with very little trouble. All it takes is a decent tree dog and you can kill a possum or two a day if you want. I wouldn't want to live off possum but it actually wasn't that long ago that people ate them on a regular basis. Read some of the books by
Jesse Stuart and you'll read about him killing possums and selling them to black people back during the 1920's and 30's. They ate as many as he could kill and they survived and thrived actually. And you can legally hunt possums all year long.
Then there's the fishing. You can fish year round including such things as trot lines and jug fishing. You don't have to be around. You just have to check your lines every day. And there are plenty of places to fish and catfish makes a fine meal.
Then there's bullfrogs. You can eat frog legs all spring and if you've never tasted frog legs you don't know what you're missing. It's about the best food I've ever eaten.
Then of course there's the game that is available during hunting season. Often the state allows you to kill 3 or more deer in a season. And if you learn to smoke meat to preserve it like the pioneers did you can have a lot of meat for a long time.
Then of course there's trapping season. You can catch a lot of game with a well placed trap.
Mean and fish aren't the only thing on the menu either. From apple trees to blackberries and raspberries and hickory nuts and beech nuts and walnuts and wild onions all growing wild in some places. You might have to plant your own apple tree but you can plant other fruit trees also. Then there's persimmons, pawpaws, wild plums, and a lot of other wild foods. And that's before you even start growing your own food. Some people don't include food they farm when they say "live off the land" but the fact is you can raise certain foods pretty easily without modern equipment. And of course you can own livestock. Chickens are especially easy to take care of and they make a tasty dinner not to mention the eggs they produce.
The fact is I've seen lots of people "live off the land" here. My great grandparents lived off their farm their entire lives including smoking their own meat. My grandmother was a horticulture major in college and she knew pretty much everything there was to know about wild food and preserving food. In fact we raised or grew almost everything we ate. We lived on the same farm as my grandmother. The plain fact is that not only did we live off the land but the food we ate was far, far better than the stuff you can buy in a store. We raised beef cattle until I was about 16 and we had a milk cow when I was very young. About the only things we bought on a regular basis was bread (even though we made it ourselves at times), milk (after the milk cow was gone) and flour. You need a mill to make your own flour and of course we didn't have one. But we lived without running water, without a telephone and with a road that was impassable for months out of the year.
My family still owns the farm that fed us all so well. If times get really hard you'll find me working that farm again. My grandparents moved there from the city during the Great Depression because that's the one way you can be sure to survive. My grandmother made me promise a thousand times to never get rid of that farm. She made us all promise. It's been in my family a long, long time (back to the early 1800's) and I hope it will be ours a lot longer. BTW if you try to homestead on our farm expect to be caught doing it.
We even manage to keep the deer hunters out so homesteaders are never going to make it the 5 years it takes (in Ky.) to actually assume ownership of the land.
