[bamboozled]

That's the reason they are still so expensive.

My observations have been that vegetables are so inexpensive they're often thrown away?

Obviously these cheap crops are often grown in a monetarily cheap but environmentally destructive way but I've no idea where you're seeing these expensive vegetables for sale?

[Houshalter]

I meant expensive in a relative sense. A pound of corn is a few cents, a pound of vegetables is a few dollars (it's far worse when you compare price per calorie.) Maybe expensive is the wrong word to use, but the economic impact of automating this would be quite enormous. And I have seen people complain that eating healthier is more expensive.