[adrian_b]

Well, I have already lost the kind of food to which I had access as a child, because now I cannot buy anything similar from anywhere, at least as a city dweller.

When I was spending my vacations with my grandparents as a child, they had a huge garden with an astonishing number of different kinds of fruits. They were planned in such a way that most of the year, from early spring until the beginning of the winter there was at least one kind of fruit that became ready for harvest every week.

Those fruits had flavors that cannot be matched in any way by those that can be bought from a supermarket, which are selected to look beautiful and to have a long shelf life. Not even at the local markets where farmers sell their products can I find anything as good as the fruit cultivars of my grandparents.

Similarly for meat. The meat of the truly free-range chicken or of the suckling pigs that I could eat at my grandparents was unbelievably more tasty than of the industrially-grown animals.

The vast majority of the people living today, who live in cities and eat only what can be bought there, have never tasted anything so good and they cannot imagine such tastes. Even when I have traveled through rural zones, I have never seen again any garden remotely similar to what my grandparents had a half of century ago or any similar fruit varieties.

I would certainly be happier if I could ever eat again such food. Except for food, I agree that everything else is much more comfortable today and I prefer it over what was available a half of century earlier.

[deanCommie]

I think this is the perfect example. You're absolutely right in every example. But what's changed by having these fruits having less flavour but lower costs, and longer shelf life, is that now much MORE of humanity has access to nutritious and delicious fruits the entire year round, with international supply chains resilient to individual incremental weather phenomenon.

I'm not even going to go down the route that most people in the world didn't have grandparents with a huge garden - let's accept as a baseline that maybe there was a time in human history when every human had access to something like this.

Before the modern world, a single frost, blight, or death in the family, could have wiped out an entire harvest and everyone in a community would starve.

That's less likely today.

Result: Probably a net benefit for humanity overall. Worth it? Highly subjective but as a humnist, i think I have to say yes.

[chongli]

is that now much MORE of humanity has access to nutritious and delicious fruits the entire year round, with international supply chains resilient to individual incremental weather phenomenon.

My grandparents grew up on farms similar to what was described above (in the early 20th century). They did not have access to all these delicious fresh fruits year-round, only during the summer. However they did have access to a crazy number of delicious preserves which they dutifully made when the fruit was at peak ripeness. These they were then able to enjoy throughout the winter months.

I also strongly feel the need to bring population growth and the Repugnant Conclusion [1] into the picture. World population was less than two billion when my grandparents were born [2] and less than one billion a century before that. I believe you are correct that more total people (than ever before) have access to nutritious and delicious fruits year round, despite the fruits having less flavour and likely lower nutritional value overall.

However, if the world population were smaller (down to one billion, for example) an even greater proportion of the population could have access to delicious fruits year-round. Then it must be said that what we have gained from technological progress has been offset to some degree by population growth. We of course can expect world population to level off as access to reproductive technologies and education becomes universal. What I am skeptical about is whether we will ever have the technology to give the entire world population a standard of living comparable to an average American today, never mind someone from a century ago (or a person lucky enough to own a homestead today).

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

[relativ575]

Well, now you have access to other kinds of food that you didn't have when you were a kid, such as international cuisines. Who is to say which way is better? Although it's certainly the case that it'd be ideal if you could have both

[DaoVeles]

As a complete aside. To be Malthusian, there is the greater question of long term genuine sustainability of this abundance.

Are we as a global society just spending big on the credit card of energy surplus disregarding the payback, or is this a genuine long term gain?

I guess we will have to wait until the year 2300 to have that answer.