With children, and adults, becoming ever more disconnected with the source of their food, a series of photographs by the artist Carl Warner gives a refreshing take on this tricky subject. Ok, mountains aren’t really made of bread; brocolli isn’t trees (although that’s how we first got our children into it); and you can’t lay a table with a slice of cheese beneath the plates, but at least it makes people think?

Food is central to our lives in so many ways: we eat it, often to excess; we fight wars over it, and the water needed to grow it; we throw it in landfill to produce earth heating methane; we cut down forests to grow it and graze it. Rarely do we connect the food on our plates, bowls and hands with its origin, and so we perpetuate the problem of civilization, where the dense population takes from outside its boundaries and strips the land and the sea bare of its riches, out of our sight.

Take a look at Carl Warner’s photos and you realise that food really is the stuff of life.