Why does it matter where stuff comes from? I haven't the foggiest idea where my wood flooring came from, where my windows came from, or where my TV came from, nor my water, electricity, or the waste disposal guys who pick up my garbage.

Yet for some reason it matters where my food comes from? Really, why?

I don't think it matters to the point you may be thinking. Global collapse where everyone has to grow their own food but as a programmer one of the natural instincts is to be curios and I would imagine you could be somewhat curious to understand where your food comes from. You may also not care at all which is OK.

My wife just the last few years started to grow some food in our backyard and at one point we had chickens, granted our family would not survive on the small crop we gathered or the few eggs we got but seeing our kids (and ourselves) learn what it takes to grow a tomato or a carrot is priceless. Seeing our kids wake up in the morning and take the time to check on the seed they planted or go out to the yard and get their own lettuce and cilantro for their sandwich is priceless. Have our kids see the chicks we bought into full grown chickens and learn where the eggs come is priceless.

We don't expect our kids to become farmers, heck we don't expect us to become a full farming family but it has been great to share moments as a family and learn in the process. It is ok for us to go out to a restaurant once in a while and for a moment not care where the food came from or where our leftovers will end up at.

Take it this way. While playing a computer game, my non-technical friends don't know how the game was written, how the buttons were designed, how the server is handling all those multiple players, or how the protocol handles all the communication.

They don't try to see behind the scenes and so they just appreciate the game and nothing more.

As a software engineer with whatever limited knowledge I have about those things, I'm able to appreciate the game at even more levels. When I see a perfectly flowing graphic I wonder how the coding was done and how much effort the developers put in for creating it or how did they even come up with such a use case.

Or take the case of movies. Once you start understanding about the planning that goes behind the scenes and how such a great movie was made, you start to appreciate it even more. Whey did they keep the camera there ? Wow, they could have changed the lighting to this corner....

Same with life. The more you understand, the better you appreciate it.

The more you understand, the more you realize that most people aren't very good at what they do. Not that they are bad at what they do, either. It just takes the magic away.

"Same with life. The more you understand, the better you appreciate it."

fair enough. "learn farming" is not necessarily the next logical step though.

food is more important and under greater threat (see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary...) than your TV, electricity, wood flooring, or windows.

You might want to keep an eye on the slowly collapsing US electrical grid. The number of annual major blackouts has skyrocketed over the last 20 years.

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...

Because you can live without all of those except for one.

No intelligent person thinks food magically pops onto shelves. It is not necessary to play farmer in order to know where food comes from. Do you know how make your own steel? Neither do I. I'm not worried about it.

"You never know". But guess what - the apocalypse is not coming. It didn't come in the 20s, 30s, 40s...you get the picture. There's never an apocalypse coming. And even if there were - you probably won't live through it. And if you do...then the better question is why didn't you stop it in the first place?

Farming today has to be a large scale, highly studied and high-yielding enterprise. There's lots of room for improvement, but very little benefit to it on a microscopic scale (put seeds in ground, water, hope they grow).

Actually apocalypse did come-- in the last century there was mass starvation in Russia, China, Ukraine, Ethiopia, North Korea and more....literally tens of millions of people starved to death within living memory. Plus, large scale factory farming is not necessarily the economically optimal way to farm. We can't know because the US and other governments MASSIVELY subsidize factory farming...the market is extraordinarily distorted. Even further, there are questionable regulatory burdens foisted on small farming operations.

Lots of civilisations have collapsed throughout all of history. Millions of people have starved to death as a result. What makes you think we're somehow immune?

Sheer arrogance makes these people think they are immune.

Plenty of people are starving today even probably less than a mile away from anyone eating well.

The system does not serve everyone equally and ultimately we may all suffer one day.

People starving today aren't doing so because there's not enough food nor because people don't know how to grow it.

Today, yes. Tomorrow?

We're 3 days from no food at any time.

You remind me of a story: Inner city school starts a garden. At some point, a teacher pulls a carrot (or whatever) out of the ground, washes it off and eats it. School kid who observed this starts wigging out: Did you see what he just did?! He pulled something out of the DIRT and ATE it!! Ewww!

I will add that it causes big problems when decision makers have no clue where stuff comes from, what the world's limits are, etc.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." In that sense: learn to farm. And to Code.