This was a delightful read. Modern eating really feels like an exercise in alienation by contrast: I try to be mindful of the things I purchase, and even still I barely understand how the ingredients are formed into the final product.
Unless you're saying that even for raw ingredients like eggs and potatoes, it's hard to know what's in them, in the sense that modern agriculture is a complex affair.
What I meant was most prepared foods, even ones that are ingredients themselves: our entire food supply chain is built around uniformity, shelf stability, etc. constraints in ways that have fundamentally changed how things combine into final edible products. Tomatoes that are all the same size, for example, or the fact that I can leave peanut butter in a humid cabinet for months without worrying about it going rancid.
As such, in the US, farmer markets always feel like a scam to me.
In the US, I live about 100km outside of a major city, so the farms are next door and the food is tasty.
That said, it's really difficult to convince someone to drive 100km to get a normal ordinary head of lettuce with dirt attached to it so they set up stalls inside the city for top selling 'organic artisanal' items that come in nice display cases.
A lot of farms have stands set up on the road unattended, with a price list: you buy eggs, veggies, etc. on the honor system.
For example when I buy milk, I can find versions that are from cows not treated with rBST, and those that are. Is there much of a difference for consumers? The government doesn't think so, but certainly some producers do.
Same thing with meat. You can buy meat from animals fed with ractopamine, and those that aren't. Some governments (such as the European Union) believe it's harmful and they ban it; others (U.S. in particular) don't. What do you choose?
And there are many, many more similar choices.
My dad's family didn't raise cows for meat, which might explain the (in)difference to ractiopamine, but fortunately it seems like major producers in the US are trying to get away from it so they can continue to access foreign markets (Tyson pork at least). I imagine it'll take time, but fingers crossed it'll get phased out entirely.
1. The cattle have visibly lower welfare. They carry heavier bags, they have more frequent infections.
2. The farmers are already in a situation of low bulk milk price and high cost. Margins in dairy farming are frequently negative. This increases cost to try to produce more output per cow, which is a beggar-thy-neighbor approach. If everyone does it, milk prices go down even further.
I don't know enough about ractopamine to have an opinion.