re: Many food and agricultural varieties going "extinct"?

The notion that we've outgrown our ability to produce quality food is simply false. I can go on and on, but I'll only attempt to make a few points.

1.) Only 2-3% of US farmland is growing fruits and vegetables; and about 60% is growing commodity crops. Much of the later is animal feed, which is a poor substitute for ruminants. It would be more efficient to simply let grazing animals graze, instead of using a ton of synthetic nitrogen to fertilize commodity crops and then shipping them to feed lots.

2.) Quality farmland and pasture is being used, increasingly, to build Mcmansions.

3.) Who even attempts to grown food anymore? Sadly few people. Instead, people obsess over lawns and flower beds. If the average household just planted some lettuce, etc think of how far we could stretch the food supply. As recent as WW2 a great deal of produce was produced in home/community gardens. Now we have huge sections of quality land producing nothing. This was once considered a sin in America, akin to draft-dodging.

There are a ton of options to produce enough quality food. But when we accept the premise that we are supposed to rely on mass agriculture produced 1000's of miles away, we create our own fate.

Rant ended. TLDR.