Hogwash. If you have the good grace to eat food that makes up half the joy in your life, then you have a good life indeed.
In my experience, good food is everything that joy intends: gardening, growing food from nothing, spending time outdoors, connectedness with the land, creativity, quality process, science, creation, enjoyment, collaboration with others, socialization (especially when combined with good booze of many varieties), nutrition, survival, health, and certainly joy.
In fact you could say that eating and everything that goes into it makes up the a good chunk of life, and a good life at that. Certainly a hundred years ago, if you could do everything required simply to eat and eat well, then you had a life better than most. And in fact, you could certainly say the same today. Eating is a luxury, and the choice of what to eat an even greater luxury. You are lucky for it, and you should be damn joyful.
Doing that when you want to, and to the extent that you want to, is enjoyable. But subsistence farming is not. There's a middle ground, you know? It's nice not to be forced to think about your next meal several times every single day. You can relax and focus on a few meals a week that you actually care about instead of being stressed about food all the time.
True, that's a luxury too. There is balance in all pursuits.
All I know is that my favorite memories and the most joyful times in my life were camping in Yosemite, where the only concern of the day is where we were hiking to, and what we'd eat when we got there, and when we'd hike back, and what we'd eat for dinner.
That's about half of the concern dedicated to the food of the day. And it was joyous.
I find that lack of concern for food is generally caused by a lack of joy, or a lack of freedom; and in cyclic turn also results in it.
