“Economists don’t generally interrogate why people have the preferences they do or what may cause them to change,” Dr. Helen Scharber, Associate professor of Economics at Hampshire College tells Hopes&Fears. “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum. [There’s no accounting for tastes].”

She guesses that there’s a variety of factors that determine if people are willing to pay so much money for a single product, “including their ability to pay, its perceived contribution to social status or well-being, their values” and because, maybe, “we become used to paying high prices for certain foods and assume that is the ‘right’ price.”

And this 'right' price has a lot of factors that go beyond a food's health benefits, leading to the Marxist focal point of 'the means of production', as “most food is artificially cheap because workers are paid very poorly, environmental costs are not [accounted] for and/or governments subsidize them.”

The hope then would be that, some of these ‘health foods’ are produced in more humane ways and that their high prices reflect their actual cost of production. But while a company like Whole Foods aggressively sells this feeling with in-store ads featuring model happy farmers, the company has been under scruntiny after it was revealed they were using cheap prison labor to produce some of those goods, specifically selling cheese made for $0.60 a day. And recently, their shrimp providers are being investigated for using slave labor in Thailand.

The food industry is frought with labor abuse, with the U.S. Department of Labor citing that 136 different goods from 74 countries are produced with child labor or forced labor. You'll just have to do your own research instead of buying into a corporate image of humanity.