The term food industry just feels wrong to me.
Take a look at this graph : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3a/Human_populat...
The industrial era. What happened in the last 50 years is that the quality/quantity ratio went to almost zero. Industries now produce a LOT of stuff for a LOT of people, but the quality of this stuff is insanely low, food included. Industrial food is sometimes void of anything good for your health.
In my view we have two options : rebalance the quality/quantity ratio, ie make a LOT of stuff of quality, or if we can't, drastically reduce the quantity of stuff needed. I let you imagine the consequences of the second option.
I'm optimistic, but scared.
Adjusting for special dietary needs (diabetes, allergies, pku etc).
1: http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/usda-protein-requirements-gr...
2: http://www.eufic.org/en/whats-in-food/article/plant-protein-...
If scale/cost was the only issue, we would not have a problem. You could replace most processed food in a typical naive modern diet with potatoes, beans, and/or eggs (which are extremely cheap) and increase the healthiness of the diet tremendously.
It is very cheap to eat healthy.
The problem is knowledge. The modern processed food/ad industry in the 20th century somehow managed to a lot of destroy traditional cultural knowledge in the west about cooking and eating, and replace it with its own brand new, untested ideas.
It's getting better, but very slowly. Too many people have been tricked by the newest big food lie: that choosing which foods to eat (eg, beef vs avocado) is not the most important thing, but rather what's important is the label -- it should be organic, local beef, not conventional, it must be an organic avocado, not just any old avocado. In this world view, eating healthy is reserved for those who can afford it and unhealthy industrial food is indeed unfortunate but a necessity. This world view is very convenient for food businesses, but is also wrong. In real life, the conventional potato eater is healthier than the organic white bread eater, despite spending much less money.
I ate a lot of food that came from cans, boxes and packages growing up.. and today its' far worse... I know a lot of people around my age (early 40's) who never eat any vegetables at all. none... Unless it's filler in something else they're eating. Lots of refined starches, more than enough meat... but very few actual veggies.
I mean, I'm not all about the veggies, I'm far from getting enough every day (per whatever standards), but I at least get 4-5 salads a week, and have at least 3-4 other times with at least a vegetable side that aren't starches (root-veg) a week. But man, there's something to be said for going from at least some, to almost none.
I'll admit, I do tend to favor lower-carb (I'm diabetic, I really have to), but the anti-fat fads of the late 70's through the 90's did more harm than good. Compounded by the proliferation of snack items and refined fats (mostly vegetable source), starches, preservatives, fillers and stabilizers is astounding.
I no longer have any children living with me, but I can't believe the number of ads for foods that aren't whole or at least minimally processed on TV, targeting kids... "fruit rollups", gellies, gogurt, soda, pops, drinks, fast-food and the rest... It's time to start saying no to kids, no to ourselves and trying to lead by better examples.
Another issue is thinness !== healthy. Metabolic syndrome is really dangerous when you don't show the typical outward symptoms right away. Body shaming doesn't work... We, as a larger society need to start making better choices for ourselves. And I say this as someone who has McD's for breakfast pretty much every day (breakfast sandwich, sometimes just an egg and sausage, no bun with a water to drink). If you eat fast-food, skip the side of fries and the sugar-water. Hell, use a calorie tracker for a week, and be surprised how much you really take in (including snacks, drinks, etc)... it can actually be hard to take in under 2500 kcal a day.
Edit: I also know a world-class chef who agrees that the McRib is one of the most tasty things ever developed. But you don't eat that every day...
If you believe their research that is.
[1] https://rodaleinstitute.org/
[2] https://rodaleinstitute.org/assets/FST-Brochure-2015.pdf
We would have plenty only so many want to eat meat with every meal.
Citation needed. It's not like we'd have some food crisis if we didn't have a "food industry", by which people usually mean the actively harmful and inducing food staff that's mass manufactured, you know the 20,000 mass market varieties of sodas, chips, snacks, burgers and such.
If you just mean "agriculture at scale", we had that since ancient Babylon.
In fact, outside of floods and famines that are orthogonal to what we're talking about, many countries do just fine feeding their populations with 1/10 or 1/20 of such an industry as it exists in the US.