Eating beside Ourselves

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Introduction

EATING BESIDE OURSELVES

Eating is a liminal activity, occurring at the threshold between “inside” and “outside” the body. ... As such it represents both opportunity and danger, and so it stands to reason that it would be freighted with significance that bears upon values and the relative worth of different ways of life.

—CAROLYN KORSMEYER, “INTRODUCTION: PERSPECTIVES ON TASTE,” THE TASTE CULTURE READER

TRANSFORMATIVE ACTS AND PROCESSES OF EATING—TASTING, ingesting, digesting, metabolizing—serve to nourish bodies, but they accomplish much else besides. They nourish relations and in this way share features with acts of care (Abbots, Lavis, and Attala 2015). They materialize social differences and in this way participate in gendered (and sexist), racializing (and racist), and classed (and classist) body politics (e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Counihan 1999; Witt 1999; Williams-Forson 2006; Bobrow-Strain 2012; Tompkins 2012; Garth and Reese 2020). They take forms understood to be “normal” or “abnormal” and in this way contribute to the stigmatization of conditions that interfere with “ordinary” living, whether these conditions stem from disability (Lance 2007; Taylor 2017), chronic illness (Solomon 2016; Moran-Thomas 2019), or acute poverty (Fitchen 1997; Mansfield and Guthman 2015; Bowen, Brenton, and Elliott 2019). Building on and expanding the work of food studies, this volume approaches eating and feeding as sites of transformation across a variety of bodies and selves, not only among but also beside ourselves, as humans.

Eating, after all, is not strictly a human activity. Eating beside Ourselves asks what can be learned by recognizing that what makes food food, in both substance and significance, concerns its relation to a myriad of eaters—not only human eaters but others besides. In turning organic substances into food, acts of eating create webs of relations, interconnected food chains organized by relative conditions of edibility, through which eaters may in turn become eaten. “As a mode of doing; note Sebastian Abrahamsson, Filippo Bertoni, Annemarie Mol, and Rebeca Ibáñez Martin (2015, 15), “eating crucially includes transforming: food into eater and eater into a well-fed rather than an undernourished creature. But, as it is through eating and feeding that diverse beings or substances fuse, in the end you never quite know who or what has

«ce done it? Hannah Landecker (2015, 257) writes similarly, ““You’ and ‘what you eat’ are difficult to define, if you contain both generations and multitudes, and what you eat turns out... to itself contain worlds of industry and production” As both myriad and cumulative, the eating self recalls the digital self described by Brian Rotman in Becoming beside Ourselves. In the digital age, he writes, “Self-other boundaries thought previously to be uncrossable” are increasingly breaking down; the “T” of the digital self “is porous, spilling out of itself, traversed by other Ts networked to it, permeated by the collectives of other selves. Plural and distributed, the “T” is “becoming beside itself” (2008, 8). For Rotman, becoming “beside oneself” is “a form of temporal change, becoming party to a condition other than one’s own” (103). The digital self is a condition of living at the threshold of self and other(s), present and future. The condition of eating, we propose, is similar.

Eating beside Ourselves explores how acts and processes of eating partake in the ongoing making and unmaking of ontologies (the body, the self), taxonomies (food/not-food, raw/fermented), and judgments (inedible, delicious, disgusting). To bring to the center of our analyses the various forms of ingestion enacted by other-than-human animals, plants, and microbes—as well as by a diversity of humans—we must expand our view of “eating.” Eating, in this volume, may not always enlist mouth or tongue. Eating, for example, may in placental mammalians take place within a pregnant body, across the threshold of the placenta (Yates-Doerr, chapter 6), or it may transpire across the fungal matrix providing the rootstock of grapevines access to minerals in surrounding soil (Heath, chapter 7). Eating may extend, too, to unexpected and even counterintuitive processes, describing, for instance, how trauma or COVID-19 patients may be “fed” oxygen through a ventilator (Solomon, chapter 5).

Contributors to this volume build on their own previous work on the sciences of food and nutrition to think through questions of difference-making and boundary-crossing. Amy Moran-Thomas, Harris Solomon, and Emily Yates-Doerr have all studied manifestations of the global diabetes epidemic as a metabolic condition, without presuming the matter to be a problem of overconsumption or “poor dietary choices.” Hannah Landecker, Alex Blanchette, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, Deborah Heath, and I have written variously about agriculture’s or aquaculture’s manifold, multispecies ecologies of food production, including its “nested metabolisms” (Landecker 2011, 187). As part of the 2016 Oslo symposium “Food’s Entanglements with Life,” the idea behind the workshop “Human/Non-human Boundary Work,’ from which this volume emerged, was to bring together insights about the transformative agency of metabolism with the holistic perspective exemplified by multispecies ethnographies of agricultural relations. What resulted from that workshop, as our ongoing discussions have made clear, is a keen sense that eating is not a singular thing. Our contribution to food studies goes beyond bringing to it a multispecies approach inflected by science and technology studies (sts). Our intervention, instead, is to call attention to the many kinds of ingestions and transcorporealities that are often overlooked when we think of eating as thoughtfully deliberate, a fundamentally cultural matter of intention and meaning.

Consider the notion, by now a commonplace, that eating is an act of incorporation, of taking into the body elements of the surrounding world. As Anna Meigs observed in her 1987 article “Food as a Cultural Construction,’ anthropologists have often presumed that what food is, culturally speaking— what makes substances edible and palatable to some but not to other groups of people—has largely to do with cultural perceptions of those intrinsic qualities, material and symbolic, that are understood to be incorporated through eating into bodies and selves (e.g., Fischler 1988). Human commensality, the collective experience of “eating at the same table,’ has thereby been taken to suggest that such incorporation is at once individual and corporate: “If eating a food makes one become more like that food, then those sharing the same food become more like each other” (Fischler 2011, 533).' But if, “for us humans, culture means that “eating is never a ‘purely biological activity” (Mintz 1996, 7), eating is never a “purely cultural” activity either. If the human body of anthropology in the latter half of the twentieth century was “a recipient body that can be acted upon, rather than a dynamic site of interspecies mutuality and evolutionary change” (Lien, Swanson, and Ween 2018, 12), today’s anthropologists increasingly perceive “a fluidity between bodies and worlds that foregrounds relations instead of entities” (Ford 2019); on this view, “humans are inseparable from surrounding environments and also function as environments themselves” (Ford 2019). Questions of eating, then, expand further to probe the uneven metabolic and epigenetic inheritances from generations of industrial farming and food production; the gut microbiome’s connections to infrastructures of hygiene, sanitary water, and pharmaceutical care as well as to the predigestive role of fermentation; and bodily embeddedness in chemical ecologies that contribute to health risks and life chances.

Inside the body, too, as Annemarie Mol (2008, 30) observes, “the absorption of particles into its bloodstream is selective” but not as a matter of custom, volition, or personal taste: “I will never master which of [an apple's] sugars, minerals, vitamins, fibres are absorbed; and which others I discard,” she writes. Biting, chewing, and swallowing may bring food substance into the (human) body via the threshold of the mouth, but further, involuntary activity by stomach acids and gut bacteria is required to break down that substance into small-enough bits to pass across the lining of the bowel and to complete the excorporation that is required for proper digestion and absorption. The digestive tract is, perhaps surprisingly, the largest endocrine organ in the human body, lined with cells bearing “taste” receptors that sense what is ingested, triggering manifold digestive responses and shaping appetite, nausea, and satiation, all well beyond conscious perception (Sternini, Anselmi, and Rozengurt 2008). This amazing gut lining, assisted by its more-than-human microbiome, is a body threshold, serving as much as a selectively protective skin against internalized elements from the outside as it is a site and means of absorption of welcome nutrients. The multifarious digestive tract is also asked to do cultural work. Pointing to a shift in “culinary imperialism” from advancing the cultural distinction of taste (Heldke 2012) to the privileged imperative of health, Hiʻilei Julia Hobart and Stephanie Maroney (2019) analyze, for example, how Indigenous “cures’—from Hawaiian Taroena marketed as an easily “assimilable” superfood to the promotion of “ancestral” fecal microbiota transplants derived from the excrement of Hadza people “hunting and gathering” in East Africa (see also Rest 2021)—draw on primitivist ideologies in promising to soothe dyspeptic or revive dysbiotic “white digestive systems” degraded by a “modern” diet of highly processed foods.

At the same time, Donna Haraway’s (2008, 301) recognition that those with whom we humans “share a table” include other, more or less companionate species leads us to a revised notion of commensality. Commensality, we note, is an ecological concept as well as a gastronomic one. In biology a commensal relation obtains between individuals of two species in which one derives food or other necessities from the other without either harming or benefiting the latter directly; commensal relations are neither parasitic nor mutualist but something in between. Whether species interactions among messmates are best characterized as commensal, parasitic, or mutualist is not always easy to determine (Lorimer 2018). Human “messmates,’ as Haraway names them, include the bacteria that cause fermentation and enable digestion; the pets, vermin, and livestock that consume the scraps of human eating and industry; the mycorrhizal association between fungi and plant roots crucial to plants’ ability to draw nourishment from soils; and the animals, wild and domesticated, that end up on some people's plates. Subject to changing conditions and pressures, relations among messmates are continuously being worked out.

To get at these relations, we aim to link materialist analyses of food’s composition, availability, and accessibility to ethnographic perspectives on how particular foods and other nutritive substances may be understood to nourish or deplete, to comfort or repulse particular eaters—human as well as other-than-human. Our contention is that, by doing so, we can gain greater political purchase on the complex, planetary politics of contemporary food systems, in which living things are variously, sometimes confusingly, implicated as eaters and feeders and as food.

At the Threshold of Eating...

Our key analytic is the threshold. One meaning of threshold, the line crossed in entering a space, signals a border crossing. Eating, in this sense, is readily viewed as a thresholding project: “The act of choosing what to put into our mouths is a kind of ‘boundary-work’ in which’—by differentiating “food” from “not-food”—“we sort out the line between what is us and what is other” (DuPuis, Garcia, and Mitchell 2017, 1; see also Lien, chapter 4). A second meaning of threshold marks a baseline or an upper limit beyond which a particular phenomenon will occur or “characteristic behaviors [will] deviate from known patterns or trends” (Petryna 2018, 571). Concerned more with volumes and intensities than with lines, thresholds of this sort test known limits or capacities—for example, a human body’s limited capacity to “tolerate” an allergen, toxic exposure, or high blood sugar—and they challenge established standards (tolerance levels, baselines) and protocols for standardization (Star and Lampland 2009). Our focus on the threshold is indebted to Amy Moran-Thomas, whose Traveling with Sugar (2019) chronicles diabetes in southern Belize, documenting how patients are able to manage (for a time) to live with off-the-charts blood sugar levels that challenge biomedical thresholds of survivability—a threshold put at stake by other thresholding projects, such as shopping for often unaffordable seafood and vegetables in a so-called tropical country whose local fisheries and agricultural economy have been compromised by ecological degradation and conditioned by a colonialist, export-oriented turn toward the Global North.

Far from being marginal to daily social life, critical thresholds are sites of intensification rather than attenuation, as Arnold van Gennep ([1909] 1960) and Victor Turner (1967) taught us of the limen. They may mark the beginning of transformative change, as in crossing from a state of health to a state of illness, or vice versa. Or they may affirm the limits of transformative potential, the point beyond which accommodation or adjustment is no longer possible, as when falling below a minimum threshold of nourishment to sustain life itself (Gremillion 2003; Solomon, chapter 5)—or to sustain “a particular kind of living,” adequate “for the social, cultural, and personal dimensions of a good life,” as Hanna Garth powerfully demonstrates in her Food in Cuba (2020, 5), or as Juliet Schor (2010) theorizes in terms of “plentitude,’ emphasizing environmental as well as social sustainability. Food sovereignty movements set as a threshold a group’s ability to control the means and mechanisms of their own food’s production and distribution (Mares 2019; Mihesuah and Hoover 2019).

Edibility nicely illustrates the analytic of the threshold. Consider how both forms that thresholds take—as line crossed and as capacity limit—participate in the making and unmaking of edibility, determining the status of a given substance as food with respect to the identity and condition of a particular eater. The successful passage of a foodstuff across the bodily threshold of an eater, affirming edibility, depends on that eating body’s capacity to receive and incorporate it. A substance’s status as edible food and an organism's status as an eater are thus mutually realized. Eating’s inherent liminality as a process by which edibility is rehearsed, or refuted, through ritual enactment has been much remarked on, as by Carolyn Korsmeyer in this chapter’s epigraph. “During the liminal period; Victor Turner tells us, “neophytes”—or, here, eaters—“are alternately forced and encouraged to think about their society, their cosmos, and the powers that generate and sustain them” (1967, 105). In discerning edibility, palatability, food safety, sufficiency, and the like, potential eaters participate in a variety of gastro-political contests, on materially uneven grounds.

In exploring through the lens of the threshold “food’s power to entangle biological bodies within wider political and cultural structures” (Abbots 2017, 11), our focus is less on bodily incorporation than on mutual transformation, less on the agency of “eating bodies” (Mol 2008) or the philosophical question of what it means to “be human” (Mol 2021) than on processes of world-making (Landecker, chapter 2; Van Daele 2013, 2018; Yates-Doerr 2015)—evoking the worlds of industry and global trade but also the unmaking and remaking of the everyday cultural and ecological worlds of myriad inhabitants (Bertoni 2013). The notion of the threshold, serving alternately as portal and as barrier, reminds us that if food brings entities together—makes commensal—it also delineates, holds apart (see Yates-Doerr, chapter 6). The threshold gives force to the partiality of food’s capacity to make and to relate, and to the messy unevenness of commensality (Abrahamsson and Bertoni 2014).

... Food Is a Medium of Contact

To get at eating’s threshold dynamics, we extend Arjun Appadurai’s notion of gastro-politics, by which he called attention to the ways foods serve as “important media of contact between human beings” (1981, 495), while offering an account of how such contact is socially regulated, policed, and exploited in domestic settings. Our interest is complementary, focusing on how foods serve as “media of contact” at other thresholds besides human social interactions. In particular, we regard food as a medium of multispecies relations, and we consider how food's porosity connects organisms to their manifold environments.

‘The gastro-political thresholds in which we are interested are mediated by social rules but also by (micro)biopolitics, capitalism, and technoscience. The glucometer; the knife; the ventilator; the wood-fired grill; the scientifically formulated feed fed to the hogs destined to be reconstituted as pork chops, pet food, and a thousand other commercial products—such thresholding objects, featured in the chapters that follow, are densely embedded in relations of inequality and constrained choice. The “techno-intimacies” they mediate are not always chosen, or even wanted (Weston 2017). Such mediating devices reveal how eating, at the thresholds of the natural and the artificial, the human and the other-than-human, the individual and its milieu, often occurs beside ourselves, as culture-bearing humans with tastes and appetites, as we become party to the conditions of other transformations, standards, appetites, and forces.

By bringing into focus the fundamental porosity of bodies—be they organisms, social groups, or nations—the analytic of the threshold calls attention to the role of regulatory functions—metabolic, gastro-political, and state enacted—in reinscribing, redrawing, or rending constructions of bodily integrity (Jusionyte 2018). Consider, for example, what food-safety scandals, as evidence of a lack of oversight, or misregulation, reveal about postsocialist states. Elizabeth Dunn (2008) has interpreted botulism-prone home canning practices in postsocialist Georgia as emblematic of the decaying post-Soviet state, arguing that the Soviet decline of centralized, industrial food production left Georgians with a taste for canned foods but not the practical knowledge of how to safely re-create those tastes (and that storage capacity) in domestic spaces. In postsocialist Bulgaria, Yuson Jung (2009, 2016) observed that food shoppers faced with unaccustomed consumer choice approached goods with suspicion, ever on the lookout for “fake” (mente) products, be they cheap knockoffs of name brands, physically adulterated items, or otherwise falsely advertised goods. Such skepticism about the “realness” of their food, in Jung’s analysis, reflects a postsocialist self-perception of marginalization, a feeling of being not fully included in the so-called global economy, and reveals the significance of food as a “medium for social trust and global belonging” (2016).

Recognizing that eating transpires across many forms of ingestion, not all of which entail choosing which foods to put into “our” mouths, this volume focuses on the ways eating and feeding mediate potential crossings and overtoppings at thresholds among (1) different conditions or states of being, (2) organisms of different species, and (3) living beings and their surrounding environment, or milieu (Canguilhem 2001).

BETWEEN CONDITIONS OR STATES OF BEING

Acts and processes of eating and feeding mediate thresholds between different conditions or states of being both for food substances (edible/inedible, safe/ toxic) and for eaters (parasitic/commensal, autonomous/pregnant, healthy/ill, living/dying). Addressing how eating is understood to mediate conditions of health and illness in the human body could fill a volume of its own. By way of illustration, suffice it to point out the flaws of nutrition science’s dominant paradigm, the “energy balance theory,’ in which “healthy” eating rests on a quantitative equilibrium of calories taken in through eating, and calories expended through physical activity (Mudry 2009; Galvez 2018). From research into digestion and metabolism, it is becoming clear that a calorie from fat and a calorie from carbohydrate (sugar) do not move through the threshold that is metabolism in the same way; a calorie is not a calorie. Fantasies of universal exchange are increasingly challenged by the specificity of biochemical action: for example, carbohydrate cooked at high temperatures under dry conditions might ricochet off DNA in a damaging fashion, while fat may feed or suppress inflammatory signals depending on its kind, the relative ratio to other fats in the diet, or the emulsifiers it travels with in any given foodstuff (Furman et al. 2019).

Both nutritional paradigms—weighing all food calories as equivalent sources of potential energy and excess, and distinguishing between the metabolic effects of fats and carbohydrates when ingested by the body—are based on ideal-typic notions of foods. Standard dietary advice consistently “overlooks the chemical composition of processed foods and beverages and the effects of consuming those chemicals” (Galvez 2018, 111). If a fat-free fruit popsicle with added sugars is no better an alternative for weight loss than a creamy ice cream bar, alime-green popsicle might well be a better choice than a cherry pop with Red Dye 40—at least for young eaters with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Nutritionism has yet to catch up with the fact that so much of our food today inescapably contains nonfood in the form of added flavorings and colorings, nutritional fortifications, preservatives, and fillers (Gonzalez Turmo 2007, 45), if not also harmful contaminants, such as pesticide residues or adulterants introduced to processed foods to reduce costs (Yan 2012).

A forceful example of this is given by Emily Yates-Doerr (2012) in tracking what happens when the “nutritional black-boxing” that informs public health campaigns developed in the United States crosses national, economic, and cultural thresholds to reach Guatemala. Nutritionists working in Guatemala present what they imagine to be straightforward lessons in how to identify nutritionally “good” and “bad” foods—green vegetables, since they have vitamins, are good and should be eaten; sugar, because it is sweet, is also bad and should be avoided—and so they are flummoxed when the classificatory reductions (calories, vitamins) of “nutritionism” (Scrinis 2008) fail to take hold. Yates-Doerr not only explains how reductive thinking about food remains disconnected from peoples everyday social and sensory experiences of cooking and eating but also demonstrates how, in Elizabeth Dunn's (2009, 119) words, a “standard without an appropriate infrastructure cannot be put into force without major upheavals in the physical environment and the social organization of production.” The government of Guatemala requires sugar fortification as a means of preventing nutritional deficiencies; the box of sugar found on the kitchen table of most households is thus labeled “Sugar with Iron? Consequently, Yates-Doerr (2012, 297) watched women spoon sugar into their drinks, explaining it was “for the vitamins.”

In Traveling with Sugar, Amy Moran-Thomas (2019, 89) reflects on the ironies attached to “normal sugar” levels for diabetic patients in Belize, who often live with levels of blood sugar and pressure “beyond the ranges programmed into devices like glucometers and digital home blood pressure cuffs.” “What does ‘normal’ sugar even mean here?” she asks (90, see also chapter 1), reminding us again that standards without an infrastructure to uphold them lose their significance (Dunn 2009). Jessica Hardin (2021) relatedly analyzes “the problem of vegetables” in Samoa. Grown in household gardens for cash trade and nutritionally promoted as “good” vitamin-rich foods, vegetables register the subjunctive quality of both health and wealth by promising the possibility of health as if they were affordable to eat. “Health” Hardin (2021, 435) writes, “is impossible to achieve because of the doubling of ever-receding thresholds whereby vegetables index both the promise of wealth (despite the presence of poverty) and the promise of health (despite the presence sickness).... As these thresholds shift, their definitions change, making them all the more impossible to achieve.”

Picking up on the involuntary dimensions of ingestion, Harris Solomon (2016, 5), in his study of diabetes and “metabolic living” in India, forwards an analytic of absorption, by which he means “the possibility for bodies, substances, and environments to mingle, draw attention to each other, and even shift definitional parameters in the process.” He writes, “A study of metabolic illness grounded in absorption, in contrast to one that assumes overconsumption as its starting point... can open up key questions in the context of chronic diseases connected to food: Who and what become the eater and the eaten? What is nutrition and what is poison? Who and what set the boundaries of inside and outside, delineating organism and environment?” (5). Such questions take us beyond ourselves, as humans, to consider species and other boundaries.

AMONG SPECIES

Theories of domestication have long grappled with the role of food as a medium of contact among species (Lien 2015; Swanson, Lien, and Ween 2018). Domestication is not taming, nor is it making placid. Domestication is about (unequal) cohabitation within a given environment, including modifications made to the conditions of eating, resulting in the coevolution of species and concomitant transformations of lands and watersheds (Noske 1989; Tsing 2012). Such changes entail not only “biological processes of alteration to organisms’ but also “social and cultural changes in both humans and animals” (Russell 2007, 30; see also Leach 2003; Anderson 2004)—including changes in eating and in producing bodily and other wastes. A multispecies relation, domestication may be simultaneously beneficial and deleterious to inhabitants, for commensal organisms that share environments may have different needs and conditions of flourishing. At the same time, “many of the effects associated with human domestication practices,’ including metabolic effects, “are unintended” and may go unrecognized (Lien, Swanson, and Ween 2018, 17).

We often imagine food as a medium of transmission conveying sustaining matter and energy into eating bodies from the surrounding environment, including the organisms of other species. Yet the scientific term for the assimilation and generation of nutrients, metabolism, is capacious and includes the processing of toxicants and oxygen within and between cells, bodies, and species. These relations are both spatial and temporal; metabolism reformats the matter of living beings in ways that are understood further to impact not-yet-living beings, through epigenetic processes (Valdez 2018). Metabolically speaking, plants and other animals are just as much “eaters” as are people and are equally reliant on the metabolic activity of microbes. What can we understand better about eating “by allowing metabolic relations writ large to decenter human food as the object of inquiry?” (Landecker, chapter 2). One thing we can see is that food chains unfold not only laterally across species but also generationally, mutually transforming bodies and environments over time (Moran-Thomas, chapter 1; Yates-Doerr, chapter 6; Heath, chapter 7). At the level of everyday practice, too, eating and its effects—providing nourishment, producing interconnectedness as well as difference—are similarly species interdependent.

Consider fermented foods. Biological anthropologists and nutrition scientists view fermentation as a form of predigestion, meaning that eaters of fermented foods benefit from the added bioavailability of minerals and vitamins made possible by the prior microbial metabolism (Amato et al. 2021). As Megan Tracy writes, “Fermentation, then, is not simply about converting matter but is also about the transformations it effects on its ‘eaters’ and ‘eatens’” (2021, $277; see also Yamin-Pasternak et al. 2014). Harnessing the transformative agencies of bacteria, yeasts, and fungi, agriculturalists and pastoralists, no less than scientists working in industrial food labs, endeavor to manipulate metabolic processes toward better (human) living through systematically designed and integrated feeding practices for livestock, plants, and microbes (Heath, chapter 7; Lee 2015; Raffaeta 2021). What makes for “better” living through fermentation is, of course, a (microbio-) political question, as Daniel Münster (2021) tellingly demonstrates in his study of how an agricultural ferment (see also chapter 7) popular in South India—concocted from the microbially rich dung of native cows, nourished with “cow urine, ground pulses, sugar, soil, and water”—is employed by farmers both to

Introduction - u revitalize depleted agricultural soils and to make exclusionary, “bionativist” claims in support of Hindu nationalism.

Cheese making is an ancient fermentation-based biotechnology for food preservation. “Whereas industrial cheese makers seal off their productive process from the surrounding environment,’ writes Harry West (2013, 322) “artisan producers seek to engage actively with their environment” (see also Paxson 2013). They do so “in the vat” by adjusting their recipe, tweaking temperature, technique, and the timing of various steps to work with rather than against “natural” variability in both their milk and their ambient environments, conditioned by seasonal, weather-dependent, and climatological factors as well as by the effects of human activity.” In aging facilities, too, artisans manage the microbial environment through control of humidity, air circulation, and temperature to cultivate conditions in which wheels of cheese may grow so-called natural rinds. Created by successive waves of bacteria and fungi colonizing the surface of a cheese, a cheese rind or crust is what microbiologists call a biofilm, or microbial mat (Wolfe et al. 2014). But not all microbes are welcome. Just as organic farmers cultivate the habitats of owls and hawks so that they might take care of rodent pest control in the field, artisan cheese makers cultivate the “good” microbes that might outcompete “bad” ones (not only pathogens but also bacteria judged to produce malodorous decomposition) for nutrients in a cheese, resulting in competitive exclusion. As one cheese maker explained to me, evoking a microcosmic farm, “We want to cultivate the right soil, if you will, for the right things to grow’ I have described this approach to cheese making as “post-Pasteurian” (2008, 2013) to highlight how it takes after and, indeed, carries on the Pasteurian ethos of hygiene by dutifully enacting proper sanitation, while also moving beyond an antiseptic food-safety orthodoxy informed by industrial scales and methods of manufacturing to embrace the aid of ambient fermentative and flavor-generating microbes, including uncharacterized or “wild” ones. Post-Pasteurian cheese making is an exercise in microbial domestication. Harry West (2013) calls it learning to “think like a cheese?

Dairy milk, in turn, is the outcome of domesticated cows, goats, or sheep feeding on dry and fermented hay and pasture grasses containing cellulose, which ruminants (unlike other mammals) are able to digest owing to the metabolic assistance of microbes residing in their four-chambered guts. Thanks to further activity by microbes, the fodder that healthy dairy animals eat and digest—hay and fresh grasses, pulses, wild onions or flowers, fermented corn silage, or total mixed rations—directly influences the nutritional composition and taste of their milk and the subsequent flavor profile of a raw-milk cheese (or the meat of a suckling lamb or calf, known as veal). Ruminating and lactating cows, sheep, and goats are, with microbes and people, symbiotically essential to cheese “ecologies of production,’ assemblages of multispecies, metabolic, social-economic, and political forces that are enlisted into agricultural value-making projects (Paxson 2013, 31). Writing of raw-milk cheese making in the Italian Alps, Roberta Raffaeta details “how fermentation participates in the composition of different human, more-than-human, and microbial spacetimes” (2021, $323)—what she calls utopias, heterotopias, and atopias—through which cheese’s ecologies of production are variously fetishized, valorized, or transcended in the service of distinct ideological visions and economic endeavors.

Beyond what dairy animals eat, the habituated, species-specific manner in which they graze and selectively take in food further contributes to the quality characteristics of their milk (Paxson 2013, 45-46). Goats, I was told by their keepers, are nervous animals; fearful of lacking enough to eat, they wind up eating everything in sight. If the flavor of goats’ milk is of concern, goats’ eating should be monitored. Sheep, in contrast, nibble delicately at the tops of pasture grasses; as a sheep dairy farmer explained, cheese made from their milk thus tends to be uniformly flavored and relatively mild.