For lack of a better term, I would focus on "median quality" as more important measure than a comparative standards. Our standard of living is so high that abundance is actually an independent problem, in that 34.9% of US adults are obese. Check this out (esp. the parts about gender, income and obesity): http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.pdf
Ph's familiar question of how better to utilize the people left behind by advances in automation and globalization made me think of something that the church around the corner from our house is doing. Since no one has used the baseball field behind their church in 25 years, they plowed the thing under and turned it into a "Grow a row for the hungry" project. People adopt a raised bed and 50% of the production is donated to local charities. This is our first year doing it and I spend about three hours a week there, mostly watering and pulling weeds. It is still early, but some of the things people are pulling out of the ground are nothing short of incredible (and significantly better in quality than you can overpay for at the Whole Foods less than a 1.5 miles away). That last part was what got me thinking: with a relatively small investment of time, space, water and sunlight that each fall freely from the sky, for $10.00 in seeds you can eat as good or better than the vegetable portion of the produce section where the Doctor's family shops. I've tried gardening with limited success in containers for years, but being around a lot of the volunteers (most of whom are retirees and hobbyists without any formal education beyond trial, error and oral tradition) has really opened by eyes to what can be done in the area the size of an abandoned Little League infield.
How many abandoned factories could be converted to working urban farms? I like getting dirt under my fingernails on the weekend and have raised chickens for the last three years for egg production, and have been reading books on dairy goats. If you are so inclined, you can raise poultry for meat and eggs, goats for milk and cheese (two goats require less than 40 square feet of space to range, plus a shed for sleeping), and there aren't many things you can't grow with time, water and space (settle down W&B). You can buy a live week-old chicken from Tractor Supply for $2.00 each, and they eat grass, bugs, rinsed egg shells, and vegetable scraps (and yes, they will eat their own eggs). I don't believe that the answer to globalization is to start a million urban farms, but how much of a difference would it make in terms of the quality of food people in low income communities would have access to if you took one unused manufacturing facility (provided it wasn't on the Superfund list), or some other urban space like a legacy school property or church yard and let people who needed or wanted quality food to farm the place for free do so? The families that don't have time or energy to work there would be great consumers at an on-site farmer's market (which under local law is exempt from sales tax; and gives the people who put in the effort a yield that they can take home with them on top of their production) with excess production being donated to the hungry.
It may not solve every problem, but turning people back towards agriculture certainly moves some of the human capital off of the sidelines, has a barrier to entry that consists entirely of being able to turn the handle on a chain link fence, and presents an attractive alternative to using deficit-financed public assistance to purchase genetically modified food doused in pesticides grown by migrant labor in California, packaged and shipped across the country on trains and trucks running on Saudi oil.
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