Every civilisation eventually discovers the same uncomfortable truth. Supermarkets are not farms. Packaging is not agriculture. Loyalty cards do not photosynthesise. Every meal, whether served on fine china beneath crystal chandeliers or eaten from a paper tray on a retail park bench, begins in a field. Somewhere, often out of sight and increasingly out of mind, somebody has spent months gambling against weather, disease, markets and government policy so somebody else can complain that carrots have become twenty pence more expensive.