> food itself is not worth the price you are paying for it...the service and the logistics that you are paying for

It's the mass production and constant availability. (Also logistics.) Subsistence farming works great until a drought.

Put another way, the waste lets the fresh produce be cheap. (That doesn't mean we can't do something better with it than drop it in a dumpster.)

> If everybody paid the dumpster price the supermarket would fail. It would be cool if there were business models where this was made more explicit.

If everyone paid the dumpster price, there wouldn't be any food in the dumpster.