Drives me fucking CRAZY how insanely concentrated and stupid the US food supply is.
The average piece of food you put in your body in the US travels fucking 1000km to get to your plate. That is insane.
I think the real reason behind this, speaking from personal experience in logistics, is more to do with the expectation of the consumer for variety at the supermarket. There is significantly more variety available at any large US supermarket chain than any comparable European, Anglosphere etc competitor. When you live or travel in Europe, it's immediately apparent - unfortunately, that variety tends to be in processed foods. In many large European cities you have easy access to locally produced, or at least regionally produced fresh produce (certainly in most cities I have traveled through there, or when I lived there, I can recall open air markets, permanent, semi-permanent, or seasonal), in the US because of the way we farm and how agribusiness works, we tend to import and ship at massive volume with a commensurate decrease in quality. A country with comparable supermarket variety to the US, in my personal experience, is Japan - I think they focus on much more locally sourced products for a homogenous population though, compared to the US or Europe. China has similar issues with production at scale, and the major issue with Chinese chain stores and local stores is quality control, which can frankly be abysmal (they have food adulteration and purity scandals every few years seemingly) but they also have huge open air markets for meat and produce. This would probably also be dictated by consumer preferences and shopping habits, obviously, which I would say are objectively different in the US and Europe.
You can absolutely get fresh local produce, meat etc, but you have to be ready to account for the price difference - and it's not an arbitrary difference, consider that local farmer could be doing a soybean, corn etc contract for higher volume to make that same price point or that local dairy farmer or rancher could be doing contracts with National Beef or JBS or whomever, to sell in volume vs doing individual sales at the point of sale. I live on a farmstead and out where I'm at my neighbor used to do 200-300 acres of apples for decades, about 4 years ago he tore up most of his fields to do soybeans and corn because it pays more with subsidies and for use in ecoplastics.
I would recommend looking for resources to support your local farmers markets, fruit wholesalers, local meat production, but be cognizant that you will be paying more for a higher quality product. You can usually find it at a state and county level (there are co-ops, growers unions, local or state business associations etc with websites and resources to promote their local economies). Even huge chain stores, if possible, when managing distribution for products will always prefer intra-state or local produce if it can be delivered at an appropriate volume and level of quality assuming you live in a state with a lot of agricultural production (Pennsylvania, for example, produces so many finished fruit and bakery products because of their robust local produce production and the sheer concentration of industrial food production in the state, so you can buy local food there fairly easily, vs in large metropolitan areas of major cities or small states, or if you live in like Alaska or Hawaii).
But your assertion as to concentration, it's more to do with the macro level of production than with distribution, which is definitely corporatized - sure you get variety in finished goods but the same handful of companies own all the brands through a seemingly infinite layer of shell companies. I'm not sure what could even be done about that in any meaningful way beyond you as an informed consumer making the decision to shop locally, considering the volume of business we're talking about which is worth trillions of dollars.
I would drive 500 miles, and I would drive 500 more, just to be the man who drove 1000 miles to put cheese at your door 
seems like he’d pull a Wolftone?:
