Quoted By:
You have decided to <span class="mu-i">undercut the real food sellers</span> by mass producing your own real food- and transitioning away from the biocubes rationing. Doing so will require a substantial effort and budgetary cost... but there are some ideas on how to make it cheaper.
Firstly; you have several habitable planets which you can make use of. While Xin is still in the process of being terraformed and Vetuck is still inhabited by iron age kingdoms; Andoen is a potential breadbasket. However, the 9 light year journey of about seven or eight months with migrator navigation means that directly transporting food from the planet in any significant scale is just untenable- all but the most dry of dry goods would rot away on the journey back. You could try building farms on the ships themselves so they arrive on the peak of freshness; Your ships can get pretty big, but not <span class="mu-i">that</span> big. Your Tritium costs are already going up high enough.
However, there are methods. For each load of colonists brought to the Andoen colony, a shipment of biocubes are returned. You order the creation of biocubes made of fast growing weeds and native vegetation grown on Andoen, which will be later broken down into fertilizer and used on Jaxt to increase farming, while Andoen itself works on its own food infrastructure. The biomass is essentially transferable as food anyway. Eventually, canning and long-term food factories on Andoen will relieve the pressure on Jaxt as your main homeworld. Not to mention; less people there mean more room for farmlands. Already, you are looking at permacultures and ocean-surface habitats as grow stations...
This, along with your other improvements and your efforts to legalize and conscript the realfood merchants into legal vendors- though naturally, with much less profit for themselves- has lead to the defeat of the Nouveau Riche before they became too big a problem. It only took a good part of your budget to move away from cheap, recyclable, endlessly scaling superfood to "luxury" in the form of natural foods... but oh well. It also took about <span class="mu-i"><span class="mu-s">five years</span></span>.