This is one of the more bizarre artifacts of our system. And it took the concentrated efforts of almost everyone involved to make it this way.
But in a way , cheaper is always better. Nutritious food is also cheap, relatively, unless the "nutritiousness" of it is also a price differentiator. Frozen veggies are pretty easy to get, IMO - but it seems there usually has to be a largish supermarket to buy them in. And that implies a finance model, which implies a governance structure, which in the end means more dependence in suppliers being "standard". Junk food makers probably can spend more bandwidth on being "standard" and less on "quality".
If I had to describe Whole Foods model I would say that it intentionally "violates" this tendency.
I have never been to a Trader Joes, and I usually use a mix of WalMart and the dominant local chain - Publix when I lived in Florida. Whole Foods is kinda creepy to me to shop in. I can't say exactly why.
> But in a way , cheaper is always better. Nutritious food is also cheap, relatively, unless the "nutritiousness" of it is also a price differentiator.
Well, to get things into perspective, one needs to consider a few things.
We start from the fact that there is a disproportionate amount of people living on food stamps, which will be effectively forced to buy junk food.
Then we factor in that junk food is harmful (not just unhealthy or less nutritious).
Finally, we correlate with a huge amount of people having disease which are linked to unhealthy lifestyles, primarily food-related (60% obese people is the very general guideline given).
I see a very strong thread here.
Food is not just calories, it's a complex mix of things - the way the industry is working, in a way, it's giving cheaper food by stripping that mix of things; this doesn't match the idea of "making food cheaper" in a generic way.
(Note that I'm strongly identifying junk food with processed food in the logic).
For me, it's the paradoxical idea that not only do some dirty hippies have enough money to shop there, but also that there are enough of them to actually keep the company in business. Nationwide.
But in a way , cheaper is always better. Nutritious food is also cheap, relatively, unless the "nutritiousness" of it is also a price differentiator. Frozen veggies are pretty easy to get, IMO - but it seems there usually has to be a largish supermarket to buy them in. And that implies a finance model, which implies a governance structure, which in the end means more dependence in suppliers being "standard". Junk food makers probably can spend more bandwidth on being "standard" and less on "quality".
If I had to describe Whole Foods model I would say that it intentionally "violates" this tendency.
I have never been to a Trader Joes, and I usually use a mix of WalMart and the dominant local chain - Publix when I lived in Florida. Whole Foods is kinda creepy to me to shop in. I can't say exactly why.