Our media and social media are currently full of images of empty supermarket shelves, and, judging by the reactions to these, this is something most of us are plainly not used to seeing. These images can be seen as a growing body of evidence of the lack of resilience in our current food system – one that apparently can’t cope with the disruption of a few days worth of snow and wind about which we were given plenty of warning.

They also speak volumes about our role in the food system, as well-trained, uncritical consumers whose job it is to shut up and shop, rather than think about the hows and whys of what we eat – to grudgingly make do without milk in our coffee for a painful day or two, and dig out dusty tins from the back of our neglected store cupboards, all the time knowing that somehow the shelves will be magically restocked for us before too long or too late.

The corporate capture of our food supply over the last few generations has trained modern-day Scots to be overwhelmingly dependent on an increasingly small number of mega-companies for what we eat, and when they can’t cope, we go without. The fragility of the supermarket just-in-time model was starkly exposed just days ago when one of the world’s biggest and most sophisticated food distribution facilities of its type in Livingston, which, when it’s working, moves £40 million worth of groceries through 300 deliveries every single day, and supplies hundreds of stores from Northumberland to the Shetland Isles, couldn’t get supplies to a store in Bathgate just two and a half miles away.

Images of empty shelves beside in-store ‘bakeries’ tell us a lot about what happens when pre-made and portioned industri-dough doesn’t arrive from the centralised production plant, yet just yards away there are shelves containing the ingredients required to make bread. When in-store ‘bakers’ can’t ‘bake’ and so many of us either don’t know how to, or can’t be bothered to learn, the simple process of mixing flour with water, salt and yeast and putting it in the oven, we see evidence of how our reliance on the convenience of supermarkets has infantilised us and undermined our personal responsibility for the fundamental act of feeding ourselves.

Over a hundred years ago, Alfred Henry Lewis claimed that civilisation is only ever nine meals away from anarchy. Coincidentally, it’s estimated that the just-in-time system operated by supermarkets means that they only ever hold nine meals worth of food at any one time. The fact that they do occasionally run out of food should act as a warning that we need to move towards, and financially support, more varied, localised, hands-on and resilient ways of feeding ourselves.

Stan Blackley is the Programme Leader on the MSc Gastronomy course at Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University, on which he lectures about the food system. www.qmugastronomy.com.