What is a good living standard?

In the U.S., people live a good quality of life comparing to most other countries in the world. The GPA per capita of the U.S. is the highest in the world. Most of the luxury brands from all over the world have offices and stores in many different cities in the states. All of these signified the superior status of the country itself, and of course, the people who live in this country are supposed to live a good life.

However, with all these "good stuffs" defined by the knowledge of the broad social sciences, artificial substances, many comparatively basic and natural materials have been deteriorated in sense of quality. Take a look at the quality of food in any store in the NYC, we can't find one with a good quality of food provided to the general public. There maybe one genuine restaurant; yet, you have to pay a lot having a regular meal there.

The reason is the cost. The cost of operating a business in metropolitan areas is so high that a regular owner would not be able to stay in the market without cutting cost of the raw materials of the merchandises. The consequences are foreseeable, and they are certainly in the market. Shopping in a chain-supermarket such as Walbaums, Target, Walmart, etc, food with synthetic ingredients is common and unavoidable. No matter how careful the mothers pick the vegetable, the meat, or the chicken for their families, more than various kinds of chemical substances have been formulated in the products. More dreadful is that food makers in the market have adopted the "modern" and "scientific" ways to produce their food products. It is so efficient to reduce the production cost, so as to maintain the profit of the businesses.

Another argument is that fresh food is generally produced in suburban areas, the transportation is not only costly but also time consuming. Businessman have solved this problem by introducing the pre-cooked and microwave food products, which can be stored for a longer space of time, and can be produced through the mass production process. Another way to obtain natural and low cost raw materials is to use other artificial substances to replace the original materials. For instance, if a pack of sausage found in the supermarket weighted 0.3lbs; it's not unusual to find that the real meat used in the package is only weighted 0.1lbs or less.

Metropolitan areas are always mesmerizing to most people. Ironically, we can't have the good basic sources of life in the cities. How can the general public effectively attack this problem? On the other hand, to balance the values between the economy and health, how can we model the cities in the future? Are we going to construct and to construe "the city" in a whole new way?