I dissagree. I know of a number of famillies who used to have a small business, grow their own veggitables, and sell some vegitables on the side. However, the price of food, and the simple services of that these people provided has dropped, due to mass production, and those famillies were forced by lack of money, to change their lifestyles. They had to either sell land or take up a full time job elsewhere which meant that they no longer had time to live the way they used to.

And even if it is caused by choice, I still think that it is better to look at reality than to look at choice. For example, during the totalitarian "comunist" state in the Czech Republic (I live here now) there were many free or low cost oportunities to join youth groups and play sports, go sking ect. and yet people still felt very restricted in their ability to do activities they enjoyed. It was illegal to "gather" in any more than a small number of people, and so planning a hiking trip with your friends could get you a visit from the secret police. Isn't it mearly a matter of choice that many people chose to skirt the law, rather than taking advantage of the many publicly planned youth outings?

No doubt the economy has been hard for small farmers, but that's not why people aren't eating fresh food or exercising enough.

As you said, the price of food has dropped, and exercise is free.

The price of food has dropped, but the price of fresh food has risen.

If you live in LA, unless you have the time to go out to one of the farmers markets, its not even possible to buy fresh food. The "fresh" food in the stores isn't fresh. It is usually weeks or even months old. Sometimes it has been on a ship across the ocean stored in a special atmosphere, maybe it "looks fresh" but it isn't. I grew up in Seattle, things are a bit better there, but you still have to drive out of your way to find fresh food. The concept of fresh and the concept of supermarket are just incompatible.

But as you said, fresh food is available in farmer's markets. And if the price of fresh food has risen, it should be possible to make a living growing and selling it.

Except that the majority of people don't seek out fresh food.

It might be possible to make a living growing and selling it, but it is actually quite unrealistic that a sizable portion of the population could choose to start doing so. %100 of the land in the US is owned now. Its not like the fronteir days when anyone who wanted to start a farm could just go out west. If 1 million americans wanted to start a fresh foods farm within driving distance of a city, that wouldn't be possible. The price of land would skyrocket. And that would only be one third of one percent of all Americans. Not even a significant shift. What if 20 or 30 million Americans wanted to make that transition. Is that economically possible in todays world? What if the government were to give anyone who wanted to start a familly farm a million dollars to buy land. Would it be possible then? I don't think so. I think that it isn't about choice. I think that it is litterally impossible for our society to change without the fundamental ideas regarding property rights or urbanization changing.

You just said you know families who owned land who couldn't make a living growing and selling it anymore.

So it's not lack of land that stopped them.

"So it's not lack of land that stopped them." You're missing a sense of timescale here. For a long time the number of familly farms has been decreasing all across the country. Recently, it has become possible to make a living selling fresh food if you live within driving distance of a city where you can sell the food for a premium. The high cost of a fresh head of letuce in LA in 2016-17 doesn't help a small time farmer in rural Colorado in the 90s.

Still leaves the question of why people in the 90s weren't buying fresh food from the small farmers.

That's true. It is a good question. And its the question we should be asking. We should be trying to debug this problem, rather than pretending that it is a non-problem.

I personally don't see my own anti-capitalistic views as being a matter of politics or political direction. I see the problems posed as being similar to aging or the need to find better forms of transportation. No one argues that aging is good. Everyone agrees that the outcome of aging is bad, people get slower, less inteligent, suffer and die. That is bad... I see the current outcome of American globalist capitalism to be similar. Obviously, the outcome sucks. Most people are unhealthy, unhappy, there are advertizements everywhere, we are destroying the earth, and living in smelly toxic concrete filled cities. I'm not a communist, or a socialist, or a progressive, I'm an engineer who is baffled by a huge problem that I don't know how to solve. I am totally baffled by the huge number of people who seem to question whether these problems are real. Its like if this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419352 was full of people writing that "well you can point to some problems with aging, but really, we're all better off getting old and dying". My response would be similar, it would be like WTF? I don't have a solution to American corporate globalism and the problems it causes, I don't have a solution to aging either, but I want a solution to both.

I'm not pretending it's a non-problem.

It's a much much bigger problem: human nature leads us to make bad choices, willingly.

But short of a miracle pill or a totalitarian regime that forces us all to live healthy lives, I don't see a solution.

You are also not the OP who I origionally responded to. thisnotmyacc wrote "By almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone." And that is pretending we have a non-problem and that our society is functional.

Edit:

I think that it is worse than just a problem with human nature. As I wrote, previously, I think it is economically non-possible for Americans to choose to go back to growing local food. %100 land is owned, and most owners are not selling, the price of land is high, and most Americans cannot afford to buy that land. Perhaps charging large farms land rent (aka, only charging land rent to large corporations) would help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism but I'm not sure if I believe that democracy is capable of implementing any sort of reform non-corruptly.

I think we're talking about different things. You're talking about being self-sufficient small farmers; I'm just talking about eating healthy and exercising.

People could certainly choose to do that if they wanted to.

I don't think that they could. Because in order to be able to buy fresh food, you need a suply of fresh food, and where is that fresh food going to come from, if not from small time farmers? And if it is impossible for a large number of people to become small time farmers, then if more people choose to eat fresh, the price of fresh food will only rise to the point where they no longer have the choice to do so.

If enough people wanted fresh food, more would be grown.

No one likes to die after years of diabetes either. Our brains aren't the best compass, and society relies on shifting it as much as possible.

Not many people make decisions today based on what's best for them in the long term.

Certainly society could impose choices on people that would be better in the long term, but is that compatible with freedom?

Freedom in today's society is pretty laughable. You don't have time to know, learn or experience a lot; how can you choose ?

How does that make freedom laughable?

You can't do everything (you never could), but you can choose what to do.

Who's this third party feeding you your definition of freedom?

You could stop listening to them and choose to do what you want.

I guess we're listening to different people, because society seems to be telling me that watching TV all the time is bad.

People do it because it feels good, not because they're told it's good.

Most scientist agree that smoking is dangerous, yet they are still sold everywhere and lots of people smoke.

Yes, because it's a free society.

Society tells you the consequences, and you still have the choice to do it if you want to.

It's an acceptable argument at a small scope, not at a global level.

Nobody wants to be addicted.

What's the alternative?

Lots of things are addictive - should they all be banned?

You seem to think that laughing at freedom = imposing dictatorship. I just mean contemporary notions of freedom are weak and fake.