Cupertino is at one edge of the Santa Clara Valley, one of the best places on the continent to grow fruit.
This display is in our Whole Foods, one of the (if not the) largest stores they have. All of the brands are local and don’t exist any more, because we paved them over in favor of single-family homes and office parks and fucking *lawns*.
It’s really sad, and would have been easy to avoid, too, by building **up** instead of **out**. Instead, there are always new ballot measures in Cupertino to try to limit the “scale” of building – in other words, to prevent building up – and ensure the sprawl stays. And I expect that applies to the rest of the Santa Clara Valley as well, and a huge percentage of the United States as a whole, everywhere a “subdivision” has replaced farmland.
Even if we could build high-rise apartments and offices, it’s not certain that the land we’ve covered with little shitbox houses, chemically-maintained lawns, and asphalt could even be used for agriculture again. The land may well be “used up” and require extensive rehabilitation to even support parkland, much less farming.
Someday people will look back on this as a monumental disaster, an utter failure of urban planning ands demonstration of our society’s lack of any capacity for forethought. Probably once all of humanity is facing permanent food and water shortages, later this century.