This is a question that I always address when I teach history. It applies both to ancient civilizations and to the impact of agricultural improvements on our own more modern society.
The major reason to me that food is necessary for civilization (other than that food is necessary for any life at all) is that civilizations need surplus food so as to support all the people who perform the various tasks that make a people civilized.
In order to have a civilization, you need to have government and education, you need to have scribes and merchants. If you have no surplus food, if your farmers produce only enough food to feed themselves, how can you feed scribes and teachers and merchants? All you can have is farmers struggling to stay alive (or hunter gatherers doing the same).
So, the way I always teach this is that surplus food allows for people to do specialized jobs. These specializations allow civilization because these specialized jobs make complex civilizations possible.
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