Isn't that exactly what we're doing, though? The essence of cheap junk calories is grain (flour), soybean oil (another plant with similar growing needs), sugar (largely from grain in the US - high fructose corn syrup - but sugarcane is also easy to grow at scale), and meat from grain-fed chickens and cows.
All this stuff is shipped to factories, where it is broken down into refined materials for other factories, that make the junk food - burgers, sliced bread, candy bars, whatever - that are sealed or frozen for portability and shelf stability.
This is how we've doubled the population of the planet in 50 years, while bringing per-capita food cost to the lowest point in human history.
Well, yeah. I'm just saying we should keep doing it.
People whine about high fructose corn syrup, but it's not like it's a plot or something; people really like sweet things, and HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff. If you restricted the sale of sweet stuff to help combat obesity, it might have an impact on the corn market, but corn would still be an amazing, important, huge part of out food supply.
On the other hand, consider grain-fed chickens. Factory farmed chicken is fantastic from an environmental and a dietary standpoint, it is extremely space efficient; even when the land used to grow the grains is considered, it is still competitive with plant sources of protein, and it's a lean, versatile meat. It's even a major source of organic fertilizer.
Meanwhile, it's pretty bad from an animal welfare perspective, and it is just awful from a labor standpoint. Meat processing at scale is one of the greatest cesspools of human misery in the US, and has been for over a century. A huge number of people make a pittance of a wage doing unpleasant, dangerous, body-breaking work, and it is a big consumer of illegal immigration as a source of cheap, exploitable labor.
Fixing meat processing, through technology, regulation or labor organization, would be HUGE.
> HFCS is a really efficient way to produce sweet stuff.
Nowhere near as efficient as sugarcane. HFCS would not be produced, sold or consumed at anything approaching current levels without tariffs preventing the import of sugarcane.
All this stuff is shipped to factories, where it is broken down into refined materials for other factories, that make the junk food - burgers, sliced bread, candy bars, whatever - that are sealed or frozen for portability and shelf stability.
This is how we've doubled the population of the planet in 50 years, while bringing per-capita food cost to the lowest point in human history.