This was also the period when the food system a term used to describe all that lies between seed and grocery shelf began to take on its characteristic"hour shape, referring to the highly concentrated"middle" that connects farms with consumers(discussed in much greater length in Chapter 3) But even before this, in the early 1970s, a growing chorus of criticism was directed at what was perceived as an unjust, unsustainable system. Critics took aim at things like the green revolution, the environmental impacts of conventional farming, the growing grip the agribusiness complex had over the food system, and the perceived role that land-grant universities had in promoting agricultural technologies to the detriment of the family farm(famously encapsulated in James Hightower's[1973] Hard Times, Hard Tomatoes. From this point on,"the sociology of agriculture became an important focus in rural sociologists' research" (Friedland 2002: 353). It is from this point that I pick up discussion in the following chapter