Yeah, makes sense. Take advantage of those strong root systems to grow something you like instead. 
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It needs to survive the slug onslaught, grow well with minimal weeding and no pest control.
Broad Beans - for the early season action. I might even be able to pull another crop in late summer/autumn. I forgot to try it out this year. I love them fresh sauteed in butter. You can eat the shoots and the dry seeds too. Easy to sow the big seeds.
Corn - I like the big plants, the variation, colors, ease of harvesting, fun to breed with, different uses.
My number 3 has the same fun attributes as corn with the added bonus of amazing variation of smells. It was my gateway to the plant kingdom and gardening. So if I could grow it, I would.
What is your number three plant? I’m very curious.
I change one of my choices to Sweet Sorghum: seeds for flour, seeds, popcorn. Stalk for syrup, biomass for fodder. Added benefit that deer only eat it when nothing else is available, so I don’t have to put it in my fenced-in garden. Drought resistant and pest resistant, and it is not illegal to grow where I live, unlike other people’s choices…
Maarten
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Nice choice! Have you grown it before? I’m wondering if you have experience with particular varieties that are more vigorous or drought tolerant or productive where you live.
I grew it as part of a cover crop mix this year and it did really well during the drought this year, so giving it more focus and expanding production. I got 17-ish different varieties to split in different grexes, landrace it for:
- sweetness of the stalk
- taste of the flour, poppiness of the seeds
- juice leaking from the stalk (the bee harvesting the sweetness and me harvesting the honey is simpler than extracting the juice from the stalks myself, boiling,…)
- fast early growers (using it as an annual fence to grow other annuals within)
Maarten
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The three crops I almost always grow are tomatoes, corn, and squash. Depending on the situation that would change.
If I wanted to grow the vegetable foods, I am most comfortable eating that would probably be wheat, beans, and tomatoes. Though corn or potatoes could substitute for wheat.
If I took a promotion at work to a colder climate or a very large volcano erupted, I might focus on parsnips, fava beans, and potatoes.
In a survival situation in my normal climate, I might grow corn, squash, and beans. I might also grow them if I was starting a new garden on freshly prepared ground or if I wanted foods that were easy to grow and store with hand tools that are relatively easy to make or repair.
If I lost my stored seed, I might focus on the crops that volunteer most reliably such as parsnips, sunchokes, and salsify because they will come back up where I planted them and produce a seed crop next year even if mice or fire took out my stored seed.
If I wanted to maximize calories per square foot I might grow potatoes, corn, and sunchokes.
If I wanted to grow the most valuable vegetables for cash it would probably be tomatoes, parsnips, and garlic.
If I needed to, I could also forage or trade for many additional plant foods. Though if I had many additional plant foods come back to me, I would probably use any viable propagules including live storage roots, live tubers and seeds to expand back beyond the initial three again. Though it might be optimal to focus on about 5 to 7 crops so that growing, harvesting, processing, and seed saving is efficient and if more vegetable foods are desired get them via trade with your community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNR8JfHah00 Here is a video about a professor growing three staple crops and a vegetable patch. Favas, Wheat, Olives, and vegetables. You could theoretically get the vegetables by foraging. Hereabouts you would need a different oil crop than olives. Perhaps sunflowers or some kind of tree nut such as pine nuts, walnuts, or hazelnuts. Wheat and Favas grow great here though I would probably need to be able to fence out or control the local Hungarian partridge population to grow a small wheat plot successfully.
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Oh, that’s neat! I wouldn’t have thought of juice leaking from the stalk as a positive trait, but if you keep bees and that helps your bees make more honey, which you can then eat the surplus of, that’s really neat!
Garlic is definitely something I grow enough of to almost consider it a staple crop. It isn’t, in terms of caloric needs, but it grows so easily here that I can still eat quite a lot of it. Most importantly, I’ve discovered that when I eat garlic every day, I don’t get seasonal allergies. I’m also far less likely to catch colds and flus, and I recover from them significantly more quickly if I do catch them. I don’t even need echinecea when I’m eating regular garlic! 
So garlic is definitely something I consider a staple, because it checks all the survival boxes except for being high-calorie: it’s super easy to grow, it’s productive, it’s easy to store, it’s delicious, I don’t get tired of eating it, and it’s even a medicine.
According to the book How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jeavons of Ecology Action and the Ecology Action website garlic is one of the seven root crops high enough in calories to potentially live on. It is also an important flavoring. Though unlike some of the blander ones you probably couldn’t live on garlic alone.
http://www.growbiointensive.org/grow_main.html?tab=6#TabbedPanels1
The other crops are leeks, sweet potatoes, potatoes, salsify, parsnips, and sunchokes.
In their chart they actually consider garlic to be the smallest weight of food you would have to eat a day amongst the root vegetables at 3.6 lbs. a day- so having garlic in the mix would actually make a vegan home-grown diet require less volume / weight of roots.
I got some garlic that forms lots of small bulbils from a seed swap and it’s been reproducing itself ever since- though not in huge amounts. I think it would be pretty easy to keep garlic going in a neglected garden system. Then if you worked hard to grow it well it produces quite high yields.
Of the seven root crops Ecology Action mentions I have found salsify, sunchokes, parsnips, and garlic to be weedy. So, you could potentially plant those four in a more neglected part of your garden to keep them going. I think that is my current strategy with them. Then if need ever became greater garden with them more intensely for high yields.
Wow, that’s cool! I didn’t know that!
Salsify is a weed here (yay!), and sunchokes seem to do really well. I haven’t yet sowed garlic into my lawn, but it’s definitely something I intend to do. It seems to behave well in a lot of polycultures, but I think the squash didn’t like growing near it (I could be wrong), and it definitely inhibits the germination of legumes, so I can’t plant it anywhere near my fava beans or peas. Which is a bummer, since they seem like they’d be a nice polyculture otherwise.
Corn: there’s still just so much diversity and thus potential. I can’t even fathom where it will be in a hundred years, but hopefully in my grand children’s garden.
Squash: it’s delicious and nutritious, not to mention versatile in the kitchen. I peeled a yellow crookneck I let go to seed and used it as a substitute for carrots in my stew, it was so delicious and sweet, And from a “summer squash”!
Legumes: it’s too hard for me to pick just one species or genus, I think they’re a wonderful source of protein and just as versatile as Squash with its diversity in flavors and textures. I made a corn soup for indigenous people’s day and the beans I used were soft and smooth as silk.
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Oh, that’s a fun way to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day! I like that! 