It’s not because we want that kind of relationship, obviously. We want healthy relationships with a variety of species. But with seven billion people on the planet, all of them clamouring either to get or to keep an unsustainable westernised lifestyle, there are just too many of us, and our needs are too large, to use even a modernised pseudo-hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

If we work on a relationship with the semi-wild greens that you mention as a species, rather than on a very small scale as a few individuals, how will we make sure that we don’t simply denude all the ‘waste’ land of these plants and destroy them? If one child picks a wildflower, that’s not a problem, but if every single child picked a wildflower, there would be no more flowers.

Intensive farming of domesticated species is a logical way of making sure we have enough for everyone, including enough to re-seed the plant for next year. It may not be a good thing, but until we can reduce our own neediness – ie. reduce our population – to levels that can be sustained without intensive farming and associated codomestication, we can’t hope to fix the relationship. And any new relationships we start without fixing that underlying problem, falling in love with Moringa or Castanea or any other lovely species, will simply start falling into the same old patterns and bad habits once the relationship gets serious.

I’m sorry, corn, I know you’re trying. It really isn’t you, it’s me..