Shifting agrifood systems: a comment Michael M. Bell Published online: 30 July 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008 Call me a grouch. But as much as I admire the energy, creativity, and insight of the work represented in this special issue, I am irritated by a word common to all these papers: system, and its plural form, systems. Somewhere along the line, agrifood studies (or agrofood studies, as we used to call it in the US before we finally started reading, and became capti- vated by, the excellent European literature) became the study of agrifood ‘‘systems.’’ I have been part of this linguistic tide myself, along with my irreplace- able colleague at Madison, the late Fred Buttel. Back in 2003, we renamed our local weekly seminar on the topic SociETAS, for Sociology of Environment, Technology, and Agrifood Systems. Societas is Latin for fellowship, community, and society—clever, we thought, certainly in comparison with the old name STARE, for Sociology of Technology, Agriculture, Resources, and Environment. We also liked having an S-word on the end to complete our acronym, I must admit. But we were also trying to update our seminar with the current lingo. And if this special issue is any measure, the word system is very much in vogue in agrifood research. It not only appears in the name of the issue but also in every paper: 19 times in Valerie Imbruce’s contribu- tion, 21 times in Chris Rosin’s, 24 times in Sandy Brown’s and Christy Getz’s, 26 times in Sophie Dubisson-Quellier’s and Claire Lamine’s, 43 times in Amy Trubeck’s and Sarah Bowen’s, and a whopping 76 times in Pierre Stassart’s and Daniel Jamar’s. The editors use the word system 18 times in their short introduction. 1 Wow. As I said, I have been part of this tide. But recently I have been thinking a lot about the word ‘‘system’’ and what we try to do with it in studies of environment, food, and agriculture (Bell 2005; Bland and Bell 2007; Bland and Bell, forthcoming). At the risk of being a Canute, I would like to step out of the tide and interrogate the word, asking us to reflect on whether we really need it or want it. There was a time, not too long ago, really, when the social sciences were choking on the word ‘‘system,’’ and pretty much decided in the end to spit it out. I am referring to the debates in the 1960s and 1970s over functionalism, widely voiced in sociology, anthropology, and political science, and to a lesser degree in geography. The work of Talcott Parsons occasioned special heat in sociology, the social science where I received most of my training. Parsons’ notion of a ‘‘social system,’’ with his neat M. M. Bell (&) Department of Rural Sociology and Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 340C Agricultural Hall, 1450 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706-1562, USA e-mail: michaelbell@wisc.edu 1 I am counting appearances of ‘‘system’’ or ‘‘systems’’ in the abstracts, main texts, and notes, excluding the references, and using the drafts that the editors made available to me. The counts might be somewhat different in the published versions. 123 GeoJournal (2008) 73:83–85 DOI 10.1007/s10708-008-9180-6