Modern agriculture is astonishingly good at producing enormous quantities of food, but it has achieved much of that efficiency by making things the same.
A supermarket does not want seventeen kinds of locally bred courgette arriving in unpredictable quantities. It wants a recognised variety that can be grown by the hectare, harvested together, packed to a specification and delivered by the pallet. The same pressures apply all the way down the chain. Large machinery prefers uniform fields, wholesalers prefer large consignments and supermarkets prefer products that can be treated as interchangeable.
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