There's an active market for small numbers of near perfect fruit attractively packaged and sold for use as gifts.
$5 is still on the high-side. But a pack of perhaps 8 fruit for 30USD is pretty normal. You'd actually find that in a lot of supermarkets in Tokyo and beyond, not just very high end places.
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/19/c4/53/19c4...
It means an experimental, short-term foray into something very few people are doing and which is currently non-sensical or unprofitable and whose near-term potential is unknown.
That experimental willingness for a small group to take something on without knowing always been a feature of humanity and the essence of the hacker spirit.
If one wishes to abstain from any such trend, it's certainly their prerogative to dismiss it simply as a "hipster thing." There is little need for than a few rare people to try it out. This doesn't mean that anything "hipster" should ever be taken as a shorthand for "bad," which often happens in poor sources of information.
We tend to dismiss "hipsters" because we deride their lack of cohesion and perceive it as an assault on our values. Finally, our derision is ironically necessary because it gives the hipsters the necessary challenge to evaluate an idea, process, technology or way of life from a non-idealized perspective. "You may like that fixie, but it is good enough that when everyone is laughing at you, you'll still ride it?"
Anyway: vertical farming in urban centers is foolishness. The real estate is simply too valuable. NYC already has a 10% tax. This is a grad school trope and NGO scam with base-level appeal to hippies
The greens thing may not scale. With salad greens, most of what you grow is salable product. With most vegetables, you grow a lot of plant that gets discarded.
There have been companies doing vertical farming in Japan for a few years, but they're mostly lettuce factories. There's one operation in Japan growing strawberries, but "they are currently selling their medium size strawberries at around $5 per berry, not per package. They only sell through their own channels or at high-end department stores in Tokyo, and they admit that their product is not for people to purchase at supermarkets for daily consumption, but a luxury product for gifts."
There's talk of vertical farming for tomatoes, but nobody seems to be doing this profitably on a significant scale.