I'd like to see people eating food grown by themselves and local farmers that they can actually meet and talk to. Neither of our hopes seem likely to happen unfortunately.
The sheer cost and time it would take to actually show with a high level of certainty that a chemical liner layer is safe won't work for the commercial food industry. It's much easier to claim some new process or packaging is totally safe, send that to regulators who largely outsource safety testing to the industry itself, and move on selling what is potentially toxic.
All magic comes with a price, and the inside of Mylar packaging is absolutely magic. That is, it seems like whenever we try to science our way out of some food mistake, we end up making it worse.
Don't get me wrong, science has kept a lot of people from starving (although heavy nitrogen fertilizer use and monocultures are a challenge for the environment), but after a certain point, we started losing gains in health because we started optimizing for profit.
Now, we put pictures of nature on ultraprocessed food and convince people it's good for them, when all they really need is to eat an apple, which, unfortunately, has no marketing department.
Humans are smart, but there is probably no magic bullet. The safest food packaging is the skin on an orange.
If you think the average person's soil is bad, try looking into the solid waste matter that the US government allows to be applied directly to our crops. They basically take what's otherwise called sewage sludge, including all the chemicals we pour down drains, and spray it on fields as fertilizer.
This seems like a terrible idea “for the environment”. Growing food as massive scales, often times in places where people don’t want to live has incredible economies of scale in terms of water, and energy infrastructure.
Can you imagine how much water would have to be brought in to feed the people of Denver, CO, and the economic and environmental impacts of that?
I think you're reading too much into my comment here.
I'm not saying that the only change I'd like to see is people raising their own food and shopping locally. Our current system in the US is entirely based on the average person wanting to outsource responsibilty, not just with food but also with things like education, safety, and conflict mitigation to name a few.
If I could magically change the world I'd want to see a world where people live much more locally, with smaller tight not communities. Among other things, "the economy" wouldn't even be a concept to worry about. That's not to say money wouldn't exist, but there wouldn't be one overarching government tracking GDP data as though we're still in the midst of the world wars.
More importantly, I'd want people to want this world.
People are reading way too much into my comment here. I agree with you, it's idealistic and that was actually my point. It's not going to happen and, for better or worse, I don't think most people want it to.
That said, you have no way of really knowing how poverty or starvation would change. There isn't even enough context here to attempt to estimate such a thing and doing so isn't useful.
The sheer cost and time it would take to actually show with a high level of certainty that a chemical liner layer is safe won't work for the commercial food industry. It's much easier to claim some new process or packaging is totally safe, send that to regulators who largely outsource safety testing to the industry itself, and move on selling what is potentially toxic.