This is extremely recent, most people even in my age range (40-50) recall growing up on frozen/canned in the off season for the most part.
The idea of getting year round good fresh produce flown in from other climates is regionally a very recent thing. Peru for example exports 40x more blueberries to the US today than they did even a decade ago.
You can grow the food and you can store the food but that doesn’t do much good if locally you make too much and someone somewhere else is starving but you can’t get from point A to point B, and it has to get there not only unspoiled but intact, or at least undamaged enough to eat.
Before vapor-compression refrigeration, there was the ice trade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade
We didn’t have paved roads or railroads until relatively recently, and so a good chunk of goods were being damaged on rickety horse drawn wagons on bumpy, muddy dirt roads.