Actually healthy food can taste really good. But a true great tasting healthy meal must be fresh and it is relatively hard to prepare, making it expensive.

Most Americans have negative feelings about vegetables because the average American gets vegetables that are either old or have been frozen or have been bred or genetically modified for long shelf life and thus bad taste. There are a million of children's stories about how gross broccoli is or brussels sprouts or peas, but all of these things can taste amazing if you get the right fresh ingredients and prepare them well.

Food is bulky and it goes bad quickly. This makes it challenging to have a long supply chain in food. The answer of modern industry to this challenge is to have a long supply chain anyways but to change food so that it does not go bad for a long time. This involved making food taste bad and then adding a bunch of refined sugar to mask the bad taste. This also involved replacing vegetables (which go bad quickly) with meat (which tends to last a while when refrigerated).

The cheapest way to get a food to taste ok is to add refined sugar to it. This is also a very cheap way to make food last longer and thus make it cheaper for it to be delivered to you from far away.

I am writing all this because there is an important lesson here many Americans do not get. The problem is the supply chain. To solve the problem we need to drastically change the supply chain. We Americans seem to have this fatalistic belief that healthy food tastes terrible, so it is better to enjoy life and eat great tasting food rather than suffer, so lets eat all these sugar covered processed meat products and die young. Unfortunately, usually the result is you get fat and miserable, so you do not get to enjoy life much.

But this is not true. Healthy food can taste much better than your sugar covered processed food. Sure if you get the salad at McDonalds, it will taste even worse than their horrible burgers. But if you go to a good locally sourced organic restaurant you can have better tasting food than all the harmful food you tell yourself "oh this is so bad for me but i might as well eat it because it tastes good and life is short". Of course that organic restaurant will be very expensive. This is because organic locally sourced food is a niche product with low volume high cost supply chain.

If we radically change the supply chain, we can all eat great tasting healthy food for a reasonable price. It will never be as cheap as processed food (it is hard to compete with a food item that can stay on a shelf for months at room temperatures without going bad); but it is possible to get good food to a more reasonable price. And of course even if you pay a little more for healthy food you will save ten times that in hospital bills.

Unfortunately this is a difficult task. Even the more popular companies that aim to revolutionize food tend to try to operate within the existing supply chain. Thus, for example, the "revolutionary" beyond meat aims to supply vegetarian burgers that are designed to neatly replace meat burgers in the supply chain without any change of the supply chain itself. As a result beyond meat burgers last a long time and do not taste very good.

But it is possible and it can be done.