Book excerpt: We have taken our food for granted and most of us have no idea where it comes from. Jennifer Hill from Bristol recalls, “Several years ago I took my daughter and her friend to our allotments. As we left I dug up a couple of bunches of my prized organic carrots and offered one of them to my daughter’s friend. With a look of absolute disgust, the young girl said, ‘My mommy doesn’t get food from the dirt! She goes to Tescos!’ Still, at least she knew what a carrot was.”Ask any child where their food comes from, and the chances are he or she will say the supermarket. And most adults don’t know a lot more about how food ends up on their plate either. Civilization survives on an ample supply of food and all previous civilizations developed near a food source. When farm productivity declined, usually as a result of soil mismanagement, civilizations also declined – and occasionally vanished entirely.