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Food has become marginalized from discussions of agriculture and rural development, due partly to a division of labour within the discipline which treats agriculture as part of the sociology of work and production, and partly to the acceptance by rural sociologists and policy makers that the task of farmers in the contemporary developed world is less to produce food than to produce the countryside. Using ideas from the organic farming movement in Ireland, the paper argues that food is still a highly significant issue for both consumption and development, and needs to be conceptualized in rural sociology in more holistic ways. It also suggests that if food is not treated as central to the rural environment, organic farming will tend to be assimilated into environmental conservationism and its critique of conventional productivist forms of agriculture undermined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]