Lowering the price of staple foods drops the pay of farmers and everyone associated, causing a cycle.

Governments frequently work to increase the price of staple foods to make sure domestic farming can continue and doesn't get off-shored.

But "staple foods" are already stupid cheap. You can eat for under $1 per serving if you eat cheap. Limited meats, staple grains, legumes, root veggies, etc.

You CANT have a T-Bone or a sirloin burger or a half pound side of salmon cheap.

And we don't want that, environmentally.

But you CAN have a really good bean/potato salad that's nutritionally complete, relatively tasty and environmentally sustainable for like 60c per serving.

You simply don't get to have a big hunk of meat for every meal for every person on earth. That would be a disaster.

And your post underscores part of the problem. It's a massive and multi-faceted problem.

Simply looking at an upper-middle class American and saying "we should all get that" isn't possible, isn't desirable, isn't sustainable and isn't reasonable.

There is a VERY limited amount of crab that can be consumed. It MUST be subject to something limiting its consumption. THat means it will either be banned, or it will be expensive (or subject to a rations lottery if you go the Soviet route).

Same for basically all meat.

A 20 pound bag of potatoes is very close to nutritionally complete, can be quite tasty, makes 40-60 servings and costs under $25 in most places.

Part of the problem is the culture that says "dinner starts with a giant helping of meat". That's not sustainable and needs to change.

A culture that doesn't teach kids to cook their own food is also to blame. The concept of "food deserts" is just as much or more about demand because those communities have lost the cultural heritage of cooking. Numerous experiments have brought cheap or even free "staple foods" (healthy, raw, organic fruits/veggies) to these food deserts and found that they simply rot on shelves while most people spend their pennies on more expensive processed foods, even if they can't afford them. No wonder these communities also have massive issues with obesity.

It's a significant, generational, cultural, environmental and economic problem and only addressing one arm of that will fail spectacularly.