They don't produce food; they produce shareholder wealth. That's their goal.
Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them.
It's also not a cost-effective plan for most shoppers who have enough other expenses in their lives that they can't afford their food doubling in price.
Most of us are stuck in globally-horrible local maximums, and we aren't going to get out of them without some external push.
I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has.
I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.
Sure. But 50 years ago, healthcare and education didn't cost an arm and both legs. In those 5 decades, every single rent-seeker that you need to engage with to live has dipped his hand deeper into our pockets.
> I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget....
You forgot the "For the brief period of time their produce is in season."
Only selling what you have, when you have it removes a lot of costs from food supply chains. If, like the local grocery, those small, local, organic producers had to keep you fed 24/7/365, their prices would go up - by a lot.
I am also pretty confident that those small, local, organic producers aren't the source of most of their customers' caloric demands.
I don't understand your second point. One of my close friends is a farmer, they mostly grow organic apples. They work (insanely hard) across the whole year to prepare the crop and take care of the trees. They are not rich, but it starts to be sustainable. Locally, it's having a community of farmers that grow different things that make you fed across the year, as long as you accept eating exotic food only very occasionally.
Regarding calories, I honestly don't know. What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today. Different times, different agricultural practices, different population also, fair.
Obesity has skyrocketed across the whole world. People already eat too much, too much hyper transformed, too much sugar, too many calories.
When I go to the grocery, food is available to me at any time of year.
Your friend's apples are only available for ~2 months/of the year. The supply chains that feed the world have to work year-round, and all the people that work them expect to get paid. Availability adds to the cost.
> What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today
I have a very hard time believing that the average apple from the 50s had 94 * 10 = 940 calories.
And he has to work insanely hard all-year-long to do it.
And you know this "for sure" exactly how?
Carbohydrates are way cheaper, but the distribution of nutrients you can get for any price has not gotten cheaper proportionally. Then you factor in choices, like paying rent vs eating healthier, etc etc.
At least an order of magnitude more calories? Just to be on the same page, you're saying that apples in the 50s had at least 10x as much calories as they do today? :DD
You realize an apple is ~10-12% sugar by weight, right? The rest is just water and fibre. So an apple with an order of magnitude more calories would mean a solid block of sugar. (alternatively, an apple that's 10x the size, but we have photos of 50s apples, and they were roughly the same size as today)
Did people choose to do that, or why they forced to by increased costs in other areas?
I bet the least healthy options in people's shopping trolleys are some of the most expensive items. Cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice creams, alcohol, pre-prepared meals, etc.
And even in those areas many staples will be industrially farmed and imported from other countries, or at least shipped from far away within the same country.
All that is to say - I’m not sure I agree that supermarkets are the cheapest outcome for food. Locally grown food can be substantially cheaper. What we give up is the year long availability for any kind of produce we could dream of. Instead we eat seasonally and we eat what is available. It requires a shift in cooking practice from “I want to make X - I am going to go buy A,B,C ingredients” to “I have A,B,C - what can I make with this?”.
Maybe that lack of choice is an unacceptable trade off for some - for us we find it fun. It’s well worth cheaper, better tasting (really cannot understate this part), and substantially longer lasting produce. It’s actually crazy how long the produce we get from the farm lasts - we have basically zero spoilage now.
I just wish we could get food like this year round - and I am considering buying a second share next year entirely to can it. So maybe it will be possible!
It's not just "not cost-effective", it's not technically feasible.
Do you want to grow enough food to feed maybe a couple of dozen people and spend every waking minute doing it, or do you want to scale out to feed everyone including the vast majority of the population who do no useful work?
Even from an environmental perspective the arguments are dubious. The yields on organic food are much lower which means you need more land under production, land that could have been left to the wilderness.
There have been some rumblings about the nutrient qualities of certain food goods. You also hear about European vs. American vs. garden-grown in terms of qualitative differences. I've even seen it quantitated, indeed there was a documentary surrounding this [0]. There's a researcher that took historical records of micronutrient measures and compared them against modern cultivars, finding a decline in the per-volume contents.
I think it begs several questions about modern practices in agriculture beyond increased volume yield which is too often in the limelight. It just reminds me of Pika, which is associated with micronutrient deficiencies.