The older I get – and I seem to have got much older since it started – the more I think that beneath all the proximate causes of Brexit (xenophobia, lies, loss of sovereignty, Bruxellian overreach; delete according to taste) lies the deeper, simpler one of complacency. Life got too easy, too cushioned, too safe. We had no idea what it takes – took – to maintain it. No idea of the vast web of interconnections supporting our daily lives, no appreciation of the safety net underneath us, not even the slightest sense of the invisible hands working to keep us fed, watered, healthy and provided for in the most privileged time in western history to be alive. If we had, perhaps everything would … Well. Anyway. We are, very much, where we are.

I’m not sure if What Britain Buys and Sells in a Day was supposed to have such an emotional effect on viewers, but I have my suspicions. It was on the wrong channel (BBC Two) at the wrong hour (post-watershed) and fronted by at least one of the wrong presenters (former shadow chancellor Ed Balls) to be entirely what it purported to be. Namely, one of those cheery documentaries that amount to an hour-long version of the Sesame Street clips that showed you how rubber bands were made – a straightforward invitation to gaze in awe at man’s ingenuity and the vast scale of operations we can now command.

Yes, it gave us plenty of sights and statistics to goggle and boggle at. The ship laden with 17,000 of the 3m refrigerated containers circumnavigating the globe at any one time, containing 30 tons of goods each. The 4,500-hectare (11,000-acre) tomato farm in the Netherlands, with greenhouses so big that standing inside you cannot see one end from the other. The fact that vineyard owners in Kent are growing their grapes along the same geological ridge that dips under the Channel and resurfaces in Champagne, France.

But it was also an hour in which Balls, Cherry Healey and Ade Adepitan traced the routes, processes and interdependences upon which Britain’s imports and exports of fruit and vegetables depend. And, not incidentally, outlined the major crimp that would be put in the step of everyone from shoppers to avocado farmers in Peru if these things were to be interrupted by – say – a sudden proliferation of border controls, new tariffs, trade deals and the like.

It was made explicit that we are not self-sufficient. The disparities between what we import and export were bell-like in their clarity. By 7am, £5.5m worth of fruit and veg has arrived on our shores and less than half a million quid’s worth gone out. By 2pm, we have generally taken in 4.4m apples and sent out about 250,000 (a lot go to the Middle East, where they prize a larger size than we find convenient. Yes, you may indeed take a moment to ponder the level of decadence we have all reached and wonder if it would be so bad if everything were razed to the ground and we were given no choice but to start again and do better next time. This is another of the glorious tensions provided by our liminal times.)

It was explained that our climate means we will always depend on imports. That efficient logistics are vital to our economy. A few minutes’ delay on each lorry crossing our borders in the wake of new rules will soon translate into supply bottlenecks and increased prices. They didn’t touch on what would happen when no one is clear about a damn thing, which may of course be our situation this time next month.

This three-part series will no doubt be dismissed by some as mere propaganda. But if so, God, how I would welcome some equally sights-and-statistics-based propaganda from the other side to redress the balance. Rebut anything thus, leavers, please. The fact that you cannot, will not do so is what has me most convinced that we are about to be trapped on starvation rations on an island that didn’t know how good it had it or how much silent effort went into making it so. Haven’t we all been shaken out of our complacency sufficiently now?