This was a delightful read. Modern eating really feels like an exercise in alienation by contrast: I try to be mindful of the things I purchase, and even still I barely understand how the ingredients are formed into the final product.
I don't understand. Just cook stuff from scratch? This isn't difficult. Just modestly time consuming it you want a varied meal plan. Unless you're saying that even for raw ingredients like eggs and potatoes, it's hard to know what's in them, in the sense that modern agriculture is a complex affair.
What I meant was most prepared foods, even ones that are ingredients themselves: our entire food supply chain is built around uniformity, shelf stability, etc. constraints in ways that have fundamentally changed how things combine into final edible products. Tomatoes that are all the same size, for example, or the fact that I can leave peanut butter in a humid cabinet for months without worrying about it going rancid.