ON THE FINAL evening of our week away, I took a plastic bag bulging with broad beans out to the veranda of the holiday house. There in the twilight I set to the fiddly task of separating the pale fleshy bodies from their fibrous green envelopes. As I dropped the beans into a metal bowl, my thoughts drifted to questions that would have made no sense at all to generations past. I can’t imagine that my great-grandmother or her friends would have stopped to contemplate the merits of growing and making their own food. It was simply a matter of necessity.

As the bean skins began to pile by my feet, I wondered why so many people are returning to growing their own produce, whether in backyard, community, guerrilla or tree-change gardens. It’s surely no coincidence that this is happening as supermarket shelves buckle under a dizzying range of foods, or at least products pretending to be food.