My personal first "contextualisation" about the food industry was a book called "A Diet for a Small Planet" (the reedition, not the original one). I liked it because it was the first time I saw some data and graphs about how and why (hint: profit) our food production is plain wrong.

Now, I try to be as cheap and sane as I can, mostly by cooking more stuff myself and eating more vegetables (non-industrial whenever possible).