Great rundown. I appreciate her making explicit the link between the rise of car culture and suburbanization, and the loss of this type of food infrastructure. It reminds me of the missing middle problem in housing.

The points about costs over time and the current cost of retail food also makes for a good example of how prioritizing economic efficiency in the current status quo makes everything worse. Instead of people living closer together and maximizing the benefits of high-volume, low-cost infrastructure (mass transit, cafeterias, community pools, etc.) they sold everyone a detached house and a car and told everyone to figure out the rest themselves. Now everything sucks and is getting more expensive as the false efficiencies of cheap gas and urban sprawl reveal themselves to indeed be false.

I’m sure she gets into this in other videos, but I’m surprised she didn’t also make a more specific mention of the loss of third places. Diners and cafeterias were places that people could hang out together. You can get lots of relatively cheap pre-made food at grocery stores in various forms, but then you’re eating it at home, at work, in your car, maybe on a park bench if the weather cooperates, but the experience is completely isolated by default. Going to a diner or cafeteria on a regular basis would give you the opportunity to meet other people and create community. It’s really clear when you look at it in aggregate how much our system wants to isolate us from one another at a structural level.