In an ideal world perfectly healthy and tasty food would materialize in front of us whenever we were hungry :)
In an ideal world sentences are never the most intelligent ones. Being able to directly get food from those who produce it removes some obstacles (like maintaining the technology for safe distribution) but adds others. For one ecnonomies of scale won't come to play. And I would think that's a rather big thing. At least if we want to maintain the status quo. I don't know whether feeding seven billion people with local food is possible. I don't think it is.
I don't believe this. Yes, short on average. But I doubt the nasty, brutish part. H-G burnt out. Farmer faded away. Overall I think there are pro/cons between types different societies: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/10/farmers-war.html
I'd say it was indirectly because of that. Economies of scale have made growing food far easier and cheaper, which allowed humans to spend time on other things, like discovering penicillin. We could probably go back to buying food directly from the people who grew/raised it without sacrificing much of our current quality of life, but the money we'd spend on that would've been spent on advancements in other areas of life. At this point, such a shift would probably be a net positive in terms of improving health in the near term.
No, going back to buying directly from the producer is horribly inefficient. Consider just the additional travel required between:
(a) Each producer sells their goods to a central location (say, your local Walmart). Each consumer goes to the central location to purchase goods.
(b) Each consumer goes to each producer he/she needs goods from and purchases those goods directly.
(c) Each producer goes to a central location (e.g., a farmer's market) and directly sells his/her goods there to each consumer.
Scenario (a) is closer to current practice (it is missing many more levels of aggregation). You're proposing something like (b) or (c), as far as I can tell.
Hypothetically, assume you want to have milk, eggs, toast w/ jam, and apple for breakfast.
In (b), you wind up making several trips: one dairy farm, one chicken farm, one bakery, one orchard, and maybe one more for the jam. This multiplies by number of consumers. Also, farms are fairly distant from population centers, so this is a good deal of driving!
In (c), you only make one trip, but the problem winds up being on the other side. Each producer needs to drive all the way from the farm to each farmer's market and spend all day there. You wind up with number of producers times number of markets, and still a fair bit of driving (though nowhere near as bad as b!)
We haven't even considered the difference between growing produce in CA and shipping it in bulk vs. growing it in a heated greenhouse locally. Otherwise you're giving up a lot of wealth by having very limited selection during the cold months (or driving the CA to deal directly).
Nor have we considered other transaction costs of having to deal with many more vendors. For example, if you think of a checkout aisle, there are variable time sinks (vary basically linearly w/ number of items) and there are fixed time sinks (same for any number of items, e.g., credit card processing time). Those fixed time ones are going to be a problem.
Directly dealing with producers just doesn't scale.
It turns out that fuel and time is a actually pretty expensive, so every part of the supply chain is very efficient.
I agree. Smaller scale agriculture seems like it might result in better health, but directly purchasing the goods from producers isn't necessary for that.
We already had that world, and life was nasty, brutish and short.