Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems fairly inextricably tied to a heavy reliance on cereal crops & soy. If fruits & vegetables were a higher portion of our collective diet, more small farmers could be supported (produce being less mechanized) and while food spending would increase, our collective health might improve at the same time.
It's not really possible to produce enough calories for the population by focusing on fruits and vegetables. Only cereal and starch crops can do that. This has been true ever since humans stopped being hunter-gatherers and it won't change in our lifetimes. Also even produce farming is increasingly automated. For example there are already working prototypes of strawberry picking robots; within 10 years those will be i…
It's true produce is increasingly automated. The viable scale still seems much smaller though.