Eating is essential to life (as we know it) but I don't think that really creates a significant indicator for whether or not you will develop culture. After all

Eating is essential to life (as we know it) but I don't think that really creates a significant indicator for whether or not you will develop culture. After all, all creatures have a need for the energy required to survive. Not all of them develop a culture, even if they live in communal groups. Bacteria, I suppose, if you don't mind some equivocation. The causes of the agricultural revolution, OTOH, are debated. I'm not clear that it was simply a solution to population density. It came after animal husbandry. We know that. But the reasons that have been claimed have been anything from "population pressure" to "we discovered how to make alcohol" to "it was the only way to make enough food for our animals" to "climate changes." It's almost certainly more complex than any one factor because you need a lot of knowledge and technology to make settlment a feasible means of surviving year over year. Food preservation is a major hurdle. It doesn't really matter if you can grow more food than you can eat if you only have that food for six weeks during the fall and then it all rots. Clothing however? There are plenty of creatures we know of that don't require body protection beyond what they natively possess. Why would every sapient creature do so? The truth is that we don't know how another culture might develop into a civilization because we've only ever seen ours. The number of unknown priors that might allow the creation of a different way of advancement is the core problem. Ours is fundamentally built on working together. Is that necessary? Ours is built around the temporal nature of human life. Is that universal to all life? The only reason we assume so in our literature is because there's no real way to tell a story about something unknown, unimaginable, or incomprehensible. Until we experience it, it will simply lack verisimilitude.