Often, it's the act of preparing the meal by hand rather than pressing a button on their hypothetical Food-o-matic that makes the biggest impact. We can certainly scale the provision of needs otherwise. I agree with the author on their assertions about what it means to care and actually connect with people.
I'm not talking about food preparation, but food systems. E.g. look up the concept of a food desert. Preparing a meal by hand is one thing; having access to quality affordable ingredients is another. A food desert is what you get when the system that would enable care is deficient.
And even in a "food oasis" with adequate quality, yes, if you yourself cannot prepare a meal, or have nobody to do that for you, that's a failure of a different kind.
I tend to consider food deserts just cheap/fast transportation or personal mobility deserts seeing as they tend to "lack" a whole bunch of other things in addition to food. They lack these things not because people can't get them, but because the cost in time or money of going whatever distance one needs to go to get them makes it not worth it. Food doesn't ship well or keep well in individual use volumes so it is particularly impacted.
