If you don't like the supermarket or farm, you can shop elsewhere. The infrastructure that brings food to our tables is roads and railways, the power grid which brings electricity to refrigerators and freezers, and water and sewage utilities.
A supermarket or a farm are not part of our infrastructure. They may be "vital" but they are not infrastructure.
You (as an individual) can't really comparison shop for infrastructure, unless you want to move.
In your analogy, where the grid corresponds to roads and railways, the equivalent of the supermarket or farm is a wholesale electricity provider or power plant, right?
In Massachusetts you can absolutely comparison shop for specific power plants or sets thereof as an individual, at least to the extent of explicitly picking which generation company your money goes to by default. Of course in the end the way the grid works these companies end up effectively buying electricity from each other as needed... So this analogy only goes so far; supermarkets do not usually buy food from each other, I'd think.
Well, "the grid" is not literally like "roads"; they have all sorts of difference in practice in terms of who interacts with them and in what ways... So equating them in some way is absolutely an analogy.
I wasn’t equating them. I think you might be responding to something else in the thread.
I was pointing out that the parts of our food supply chain that are infrastructure and the parts that are market driven are different parts. The problem with thinking that we have “market-driven infrastructure which provides food” is that the system which provides us food is partly infrastructure and partly market-driven, but that doesn’t mean that the infrastructure is market-driven. The infrastructure parts (e.g. roads) and market-driven parts (e.g. farms) are different parts.
There’s no analogy here, I’m not using analogies, drawing comparisons, or equating things.
A supermarket or a farm are not part of our infrastructure. They may be "vital" but they are not infrastructure.
You (as an individual) can't really comparison shop for infrastructure, unless you want to move.