Thoughts on food pricing

After many trips to the supermarket with Sinistre. I had a conversation with him about the nature of food pricing:

S*: Why is it that food is cheap, and some foods, expensive?
S: Because of the current state of the economy. What kind of question is that?

S*: It’s a question concerning an explanandum to account for any potential correlations, or lawlike behaviour behind the phenomenon of pricing foodstuffs.
S: What kind of answer would I give? an appeal to the economy is one of the macrostructural arrangement of society that sets the scene of how we organise ourselves to purchase goodsl, rather than grow it ourselves, or eat off the fat of the land.

S*: Could there be any other questions about the pricing of food such that we engage in a talk about correlations or lawlike generalisation?
S: Subjective constraints, I suppose, but what would they be?

S*: Let me frame such concerns in a series of questions: quest the first: do I get more out of more money? Is it more, or less, in virtue of nutritional content? Is it more or less, in virtue of quality? None of these correlates seem sufficient; so how are we to establish something like a formulation of what is rational for a price of x?
S: Perhaps these questions are constrained by the contingent facts of our background society, if we are in a recession, for instance.
S*: I refuse to think that such factors are relative completely, I grant economic and social factors come to play, but also we use the same pricing criterion and rationale across different worlds, would we not?….

Sinistre*