> I'm simplifying here, but how is mining a dozen rare-earth materials, making a handful of integrated circuits, casting a flawless LCD panel, pick and placing circuit boards, winding coils for magnetic speakers, molding a case out of plastic and shipping the entire large box across the world the equivalent of growing 40 heads of Romaine lettuce? Doesn't the lettuce just kinda grow from seeds with occasional watering?
I won't pretend I know the answer, but I do know some people who work on electronics/the hardware side of things, and some who are rural workers, and I think part of the reason could be that for the TV, once you have the mass production facility operating, unless you hit supply chain issues, the whole thing is rather predictable. Predictable as in, you know if you get the necessary inputs, you can produce X units in T time max.
With the lettuce, sure, it just kinda grows from seeds (though the lettuce you grow for seeds is not one you'll eat), but it's a lot more unpredictable (there could be droughts, flooding, fires, invasive species, bugs, and last but not least, thieves).
So again, I won't pretend I know the answer to your question, and I'm not even an expert on either subject, but after becoming a little bit more familiar with the process involved in producing food to supply a population (so I don't mean your home orchard, which is lovely to have, but won't feed a city) I think a lot of us folks with very little knowledge of rural life and food production tend to underestimate the effort to produce food, and overestimate the improvements modern technology has brought into this.
In any case, I completely agree with your point about the dystopian future. In line with your refrigerator startup idea, a few years ago already some friends and I were joking that, in the future, people wouldn't even own their bathroom: it comes in for free, but you can only use it once a day. After that, it's in-app purchases (at least two tiers, of course!).