Food Systems in Transition: Sociological Insights for Turning Complexity into Clarity

In the context of increasingly erratic climate, energy, and economic landscapes, significant changes to our food systems are inevitable. It is conceivable that we could navigate those changes gracefully, proactively mitigating harm and maximizing positive effect. For best results though, those efforts must be informed by a reliable and widely shared understanding of socio-environmental systems, which they currently are not. There are fundamental problems with the ways food systems are envisioned and modeled, adding to the difficulty of effectively addressing long-term concerns. This chapter highlights common problems with how we think about food systems, introduces a theoretical framework helpful for understanding them better, and applies aspects of it to food systems to demonstrate its value for understanding, anticipating, and guiding changes in them.