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People need to have a basic understanding of the chemical processes involved in metabolizing starch before throwing around terms like "food substitute." Unless you're talking about the yellow clay that peasants would dig out of riverbeds in China to ease the agony of a slow death from starvation, there's no such thing as a "food substitute" - if starch goes in and calories come out, you've got an energy source. End of story.
If we're talking about the quality of your gastronomic experience, the vicious vagaries of market capitalism beat out a barter system any day. Sure, people are shooting each other over their stakeouts in the Alpes-Maritimes, but it puts truffles on the market in a different time zone. Nobody would remember how to dice a fucking onion after three generations of pai mei's ideal society, much less what goes in a basic bouquet garni. Haute cuisine would only be one of the things that went down the toilet - goodbye fine art, goodbye advanced mathematics, goodbye space exploration.
The simple things are great; don't get me wrong - but nobody would pause to enjoy a plain apple and glass of water if that was all they had access to. This "back-to-the-basics" fetishization of primitive cultures is just another side effect of the culture-of-excess that it tries to condemn.
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