Therefore, immediately, Hashem “sent him [Adam] from Gan Eden to work the land from which he was taken.”
This ‘work’ is the process of spiritual refinement of the physical world through seeding, plowing and harvesting, until grain and produce are ready for consumption.
Then, afterwards, when one eats from that food and uses the energy to say, “Hear Yisrael, Hashem is our G-d, Hashem is One, and you shall love Hashem...” he refines and elevates that food and the entire earth that the food is derived from.
At that point, he [Adam] needed to physically traverse the “earth which he was derived from,” and to refine the sparks of holiness that fell into it from his sin by eating there from its produce and using that energy to serve Hashem.
Originally, Adam and Chava were lived in the semi-spiritual place called “Gan Eden,” and didn’t need to work the “land” of that place for it to produce food. After the sin of the Tree of Knowledge, the entire world descended spiritually and the earth became coarser.
Because of his sin, Sparks of Holiness fell into everything in the physical world, including the physical earth. In order to extract the Sparks of Holiness from the earth, this process of working the ground to produce food was needed, so that by eating the produce that came about with his effort and sweat, and using that energy to serve Hashem in prayer would elevate those sparks.
