When I think of my food culture, I think first of my beloved Australian grandmother, who had a meal for every night of the week. Sunday was roast lamb, roast potato, carrots, parsnip and soggy cauliflower. From there, she ranged through a predictable menu, which I adored.

In my Singapore-Chinese grandparents' household, it was my grandfather who did a lot of the cooking because he ran the well-respected Polar Cafe in Singapore until his retirement. He also went shopping daily, but he went to the wet markets, sometimes taking my father to help carry the goods home.

In our own home in suburban Sydney, the fusion of a Singaporean-Chinese father and an Anglo-Celtic mother on very low wages mashed together these two food cultures. Lots of wok business, stir-fried anything, including spam, curries and fried rice, and whatever could be bought in bulk.

I share those stories because the food system is so much more than the stuff that ends up on your plate. Food is simple. We can't live very long without it. Our health depends directly on its volume and quality. Wars are fought over food and its lack. Think of any revolution and it usually starts with famine or shortage.

Food is also complex. On a daily basis, it creates space for human connections and, increasingly, it speaks to our identity. We obsess over what we are prepared to eat and what we won't eat. Many of us now use food as a marker for our values: carnivore, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, gluten-free, paleo. We eat based on price, or our wish to mitigate climate change, or to have an effect on land regeneration, local producers or the price of milk. Yet so many of us take the supply of our food for granted, particularly in a high-producing country like Australia.

The modern food system is vast, taking in animals and humans, their cultures, their governments, the natural resources of soil and water and the climate, global supply chains. The interactions between all of these elements would create a flow chart that circles and then scatters, like a mob of lambs. While these are global themes, they lie at the heart of our strategic national interests and are particularly central to the future of country Australia.

At the same time, just like eaters, farmers are fracturing into tribes. We often talk about multigenerational farmers because it seems to matter to us that there is a historical lineage - notwithstanding the much longer line of generations of Indigenous people who were driven off their land. Indigenous Australians practised light agriculture and land management in a way that respected the natural world's connections. We now have to feed a much bigger population but there are elements of this Indigenous legacy we could draw on. We have been too slow to acknowledge this.

All children begin life as little David Attenboroughs, chasing lady beetles and knowing the best places to find the turtles and hunt for tadpoles and look out for water rats. And many people I know who are born and work on the land always have that connection to nature and place.

But, even if they pursue a career on the land, others might have that view of the world drummed out of them at university, particularly in an agricultural degree. The rules of the economy, the policies laid down by our governments, are set on turning little David Attenboroughs into Farmer economicus - maximising economic profit as a food producer.

Governments and large agribusiness constantly tell farmers to grow more food but rarely focus on the range, quality or health outcomes of the food grown, or the production impact of pushing the landscape or its inhabitants (human and otherwise) to produce food en masse for the lowest possible price.

No doubt, all that production has fed a lot of people and pulled a portion out of poverty. But the world currently wastes one-third of all food grown, while 2 billion adults are overweight. Another 690 million are going hungry. The food system is out of whack.

And while the price of food is historically low in richer countries, the price of conventional farm inputs is rising. As a result, the only way most farmers can increase their pay packet is to increase the amount they grow by doing more with less.

The focus on growing more has made agribusiness input companies and food processors rich, but keeps many farmers chasing their tails, which can result in their land condition going backwards. Buy more land, buy more machinery, take on more debt, require more inputs and then buy more land. Ad infinitum.

The looming problem is that the price of food is not sufficient for land and waterways to be cared for properly, even though land and water care become ever more critical as the climate changes.

A lightbulb moment for me was realising that deregulation is a misnomer. Farming wasn't so much deregulated as it was reregulated - to favour the interests of investors, traders, private equity and banking. As a result, many farmers can make more money out of trading water than they can growing food. That is a problem.

In the process, mid-sized farmers are hollowing out. Foodie-focused farmers markets favour small, niche producers who know the names of their sheep and can turn up on weekends to talk to their customers. That is harder with a flock of 5000, let alone 50,000.

At the same time, large consumer markets, the big supermarkets, favour cheap food at scale such as that produced by large corporates or corporatised families.

So what do we want farming to be? The headline answer, if you ask the major farming advocacy body, is in dollars. The National Farmers' Federation (NFF) and the federal government want Australian agriculture to be a $100 billion industry by 2030. That means adding another $40 billion worth of value from 2021.

The way we farm can create better environmental outcomes but the current food price is holding a portion of farmers back from making bigger shifts. In the end, someone has to pay for impacts that travel far beyond the boundary fence - the farmer, the worker, the eater or the environment, via the price of food. The NFF's plan would see 5 per cent of farm income come from payments for environmental services provided by the farmer.

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The binary either/or debate that says we either have pristine wilderness or we have slash-and-burn farming is crap. Humans are part of the natural world. We shape landscape, to a greater or lesser extent, for better or for worse.

How we do that is a value judgment. Historically, that decision has been ordained by governments. We have come to this point in the cycle of nature and economics precisely because government has mostly directed land use. In Australia, we have focused solely on growing more and more to earn export income.

Given that governments have much of the control over the direction of land use, we need to work out whether export is the key reason to drive farming. We need to decide what successful farming and landscape management looks like, and what we are prepared to trade off in the process of growing food.

If governments want to feed a nation and have viable regional populations and cities that are less crowded, we have to come to an accommodation on how we live on land and use it in the Anthropocene.

It is not enough to say, "I live in a city, it's up to someone else." If you eat, you have a stake in how and where food is grown. You have a stake in who grows it, how it gets to you and who profits.

Equally, as a farmer it's not enough to say, "I am the owner of my land and it's nobody's business whether I rip and tear." A land manager's actions have consequences.

We have to ask, "What is the best way to farm for our local places?"