Parents are too busy or too uninformed to lead by example. Children need to learn how to make better food selections to nourish themselves, to avoid processed foods, to resist food as entertainment, and to share food around the globe and not just with family at the dinner table of each individual household. The economics of feeding a planet full of busy people is that we need to effectively mass-produce nutritious, ready-to-eat foods. Realizing economies of scale will make our meals less expensive.
For best results, we need to stop asking the food industry to entertain our palettes and find other ways to pamper ourselves. We want our kids to know better, to continue to demand that nutritious, natural foods are made available in every market around the world and not just to privileged communities.
The over-processing of actual plants into "food" with little to no nutritional value leads to even the wealthy becoming malnourished. The lack of nutritious food leads to poor brain development, psychological disabilities, and eventually to personal incompetence and political instability. The story is that Rome was brought down by toxic lead, a "new-and-improved" material that unfortunately made its way into the food chain, poisoning its residents. Our modern civilization could be brought down by malnutrition caused by the successful marketing of non-nutritious substitutes for real food.
Instead of studying flavors, dough stabilizers, and shelf-life enhancers, "food science" should concentrate on how to retain nutrients and get real food to everyone's table quickly. I don't want anyone's food choices to be a craps shoot: hoping for the best that what they are buying to put in their mouth will keep them alive and in good health.