Are you saying that supermarket vegetables/produce are good?
Quite a bit of it, like Tomatoes and Strawberries, is just crap. Form over substance. Nice color and zero flavor. Selected for delivery/shelf-life/appearance rather actually being any good.
> I was also considering the way the US food standards allows a lot of insect parts in the products, but wasn't sure how to phrase it.
I don't know how the US compares to other countries in terms of "insects per pound" standards, but having some level of insects is going to be inevitable.
For example, how could you guarantee that your wheat, pre-milling, has zero insects in it, or that your honey has no bee parts in it (best you can do is strain it, then anything that gets through the straining process will be on your toast).
You can campaign for your government to set any legal minimum for quality that you want, but it's essentially nonsensical to expect people not to optimise for cheapest given whatever those constraints are.
Your list of winners are optimising for what the market cares about, exactly like the supermarkets (who are also mostly winners) are optimising for what the market cares about. For most people, for food specifically, that means "cheap". Unavoidably, because most people have less money than they'd like. Fancy food is rare treat for many.
Apple software currently has a reputation for buggy UI; Oracle has a reputation for being litigious; that just leaves Nvidia who are printing money selling shovels in two sucessive gold rushes, which is fine for a business and means my investment is way up, but also means for high end graphics cards consumer prices are WTF and availability is LOL.
Quite a bit of it, like Tomatoes and Strawberries, is just crap. Form over substance. Nice color and zero flavor. Selected for delivery/shelf-life/appearance rather actually being any good.