> if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food?

Nope, doesn't work.

> There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two.

You could say this about anything, you can either have cheap, good, and, say, extremely light-weight office-chars: pick two. That's absolutely orthogonal to what I said, and still applies to making your own vs. buying one that was made a lot cheaper be economics of scale. That trade-off applies in either case, so your comment is a complete no-op.

Why are so many things cheaper and get ever cheaper, while things like food, housing, education, medicine don't? Why does productivity rise so much faster than wages? Because there are no adults you can even discuss this with without their uneasiness forcing them to blurt out something, anything. Because people in golden cages can't even sit with what is. That's a provocative claim, an invitation for me to be proven wrong, but at least it actually relates to proceeding and surrounding comments and isn't just something out of a farmer's calendar.