The Covid-19 crisis is the biggest test in decades of our preparedness for a planetary disaster. As it turns out, it only took a few weeks to expose the vulnerability and deep-seated fragility of our economic and political systems. One of the areas in which we are least prepared for the many complex challenges surrounding us is in our relationship to food. The UK, for instance, imports almost half the food it consumes, and the home-grown stuff is for the most part reliant on migrant workers from eastern Europe. If labour shortages were already a source of anxiety before coronavirus, the prospect that we might run out of food is now very real indeed. On the consumption side, we will remember the bizarre week of empty shelves when rice and pasta were nowhere to be found. Nothing captures our dysfunctional relationship to food as clearly as the phenomenon of panic-buying, where every one of us is made to feel as if we must desperately fend for ourselves.