If you are in the US, food is one of the most heavily subsidized items people typically buy.

which "free market" is that?

in the US the "free market" for food continually gets porked up "Ag bills", leaves food deserts in low income areas, subsidizes complete and utter garbage used to feed livestock, and pays farmers directly even though it's not efficient by any means.

despite all of this you almost certainly want this to continue because in the event the ol' "free market" decides that it's not worth, say, maintaining food infrastructure due to a few good years, you'll probably die in a famine or the chaos that comes as a result of it.

This amuses me as I'm familiar with the quality and price of hospital food - both sold to visitors and given to patients. The food given to patients is nearly always of a decent quality since making people sicker really doesn't help, but it usually isn't nutritionally great and it's always over priced - for visitors the food is even more overpriced and the production of it is usually farmed out to a random restaurant in the area that can cater for it so quality will vary wildly.

And just you try to find some competition in terms of food suppliers while you're in a hospital - it's the cafeteria or nothing.

Food is simple. Practically everyone understands what food is, knows where and when they can get it, and (usually) has plenty of choices of where to eat.

All of these things are untrue of health care.