Food justice makes for a good brief window into our greater predicament. To eat well is better for the individual: in the short term it stabilizes the mood, results in less body inflammation and aches, it clears the mind, and in the long term it means less chronic health problems. This is still a superficial treatment, but illustrative anyway.
Even to put it more crassly, it is better for the economy. It means less environmental damage and health problems which manifest in the long term as sunk costs and expended energy.
In terms of the environment, it means less processing, less industrial effluents, and less toxins passing through the body and through livestock and soil.
There are other things going for it too.
But to eat well is usually expensive. It doesn't have to be expensive, but for it to be convenient and accessible it usually is expensive. It also takes time and energy to shop for fresh ingredients, especially in food deserts and suburbs. It takes time and energy to prepare ingredients. It even takes time and energy to break out of patterns of eating junk food, because the junk food itself can be irresistible, because it is manufactured to be, and it takes energy to resist that impulse.
Besides that, junk food tastes great and it feels great, at least initially. It is colorful and enticing and it surrounds us and impresses upon us. Many of us grew up with it. It has embedded itself into the culture.
So to eat well is a privilege that many simply don't have, on many levels, not all of them readily apparent.
Good food doesn't have to be expensive though. This is a policy choice. We've chosen the corn subsidies and the ag subsidies, and the regulations and preferences that keep large food corporations in power. We allow the large food corporations to grow and stifle competition, and squeeze farmers and laborers. And we've invested the time and energy in various industrial processes that exploit cheap oil to make plentiful food through artificial yield improvements, processing, transport, and other means.
And to say something is inexpensive does not always have to imply an absolute claim. Expense does relate to the availability of natural resources and the complexity and feasibility of existing technologies, but it also relates to the proportion of social energy invested in production. The more something is available, the more specific skills are being exercised and developed regularly to produce it, the more efficient a given process becomes over time, and the more readily configured existing technologies and infrastructure are to assist in production, the more inexpensive something becomes.
This can get much more complicated pretty quickly, but I guess my basic point is that it is a constructed reality that is determining what the availability of food looks like, and this constructed reality produces a least path of resistance of its own.
Which seems counter-intuitive of course. All of that concentrated and organized energy and power: how should it exist at all? But centuries upon centuries of accumulated human activity have made it so, and through its inertia we have a direction of movement to contend with.
Change itself becomes trickier with complexity; if you have more systems acting on each other, they form a tension with each other in which each influences the other back toward an established homoeostasis. Change in one area is more likely to snap back to conform to the character of the larger system, so it takes a far greater expenditure of energy to change everything at once, once and for all.
Yes let's encourage localized, organic foods. But volume and distribution requirements necessitate larger energy inputs, packaging, and perhaps some processing, which necessitate petroleum or coal in turn, which introduces exposure to contracting energy supplies with everything else. Or else these foods must still compete with the industrial foods and large-scale agriculture outfits that still exist. And this availability and the ultimate expenses have to be fed back into the class system, both through wealth mechanisms and geography, among other things. Of course there's also the simple matter of the availability of arable land, which is influenced by various ecosystem pressures such as increasing drought, toxicity, soil erosion, loss in biodiversity and etc.
