Until the 1960s, methane fracking led to widespread land subsidence in the Polesine in northeastern Italy. While this form of methane extraction has since been banned, the region today is a site for expanding and developing biomethane production through the anaerobic fermentation of animal waste. Based on ethnographic research around biomethane facilities in the region, this article traces how a diverse and messy array of animal substances is rendered through industrial logics into stable and purified energy. Drawing on literature from multispecies anthropology and food-system studies, this article unfolds through three microbially saturated vantage points: the proxy discourses used by biomethane entrepreneurs promoting renewable energy solutions; the experiences of rural residents navigating uncertain environmental exposures; and the leaks from containment architectures that purport to separate farmed animal matter from their wider surroundings. In so doing, it examines the implications of the shifting distinctions drawn between edibility and inedibility, safety and toxicity, value and waste, in the name of a European energy transition.
Contemporary industrialized food systems are facing multiple and complex crises. In part, these can be attributed to overzealous efforts to manage, reduce, and simplify nonhuman life in landscapes, foodscapes, and bodies. In light of this, a search has been underway for alternatives to dominant foodways, and fermentation has been highlighted by many scholars as having radical conceptual, ecological, and political potential.
As climate changes disrupt ecosystems and threaten food systems across the planet, extremophiles, organisms able to withstand unhabitable environmental conditions, stand out as resilient life forms that provide a framework for thinking about food futures and about nature and its boundaries. Given the absence of social studies literature on extremophiles uses in the food system, our paper sets out to map the role extremophile microbes play in the food system today, and how they reconfigure biotechnological frontiers. Combining a critical biocapital and biovalue approach and the concepts of sympoiesis and holobiont which highlight the interconnectedness and multispecies interdependence across biomes, we analyze the use of extremophile microbes in/through food systems across their journey between extreme environments, agricultural soil, food, and human guts. Building on an exploratory theoretical analysis and interdisciplinary literature survey on extremophiles, we show that their use is linked to the expansion of bioprospecting practices and the emergence of new domains for biocapital accumulation, where extreme ecosystems become sites for reimagining food, food production techniques, crop optimization, and manipulating gut metabolisms. We contend that the appropriation of extremophile biology overturns traditional biological categories of life, such as alien life, by altering our understanding of extreme environments as transcending ecological constraints in the context of the Anthropocene. After discussing how extremophiles expand biotechnological frontiers through global bioprospecting projects, our paper concludes that deteriorating climate conditions and ecosystems degradation have fundamentally linked the question of food and its metabolic status with biotechnological innovation and strategies for planetary survival.
This article explores the concept of gastrolinguistics through the examination of Jesuit missionaries’ encounters with Chinese culture during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The research focuses on three texts created by the missionaries for language acquisition: Dicionário Português-Chinês, Notitia Linguae Sinicae, and Instruction pour les visites de mandarins. These texts not only facilitated the missionaries’ Chinese linguistic learning but also deepened their understanding of Chinese cultural values and social norms, ultimately enhancing their missionary work. This finally leads to the elucidation of functions of gastrolinguistics in interculture encounters between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. By decoding how language and food were intricately interwoven in the language learning materials, this article explains how missionaries’ gastrolinguistic experiences conveyed both food and language knowledge. These experiences included intercultural encounters, highlighting how food and language shaped missionaries’ thoughts, feelings, and actions according to the values and traditions of Chinese society.
Using Allison Hayes-Conroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy’s political ecology of the body, this interdisciplinary paper explores what failure means in the context of microbial engagement via fermentation. In the domestic kitchen space, fermentation is what David Pye might call a workmanship of risk, and failure in this context affords new possibilities for engagement with the microbial more-than-human. This understanding is juxtaposed against understandings of failure at larger scales. Ultimately, this paper exposes the difficulty of reconciling these understandings and posits that failure in fermentation at the domestic scale might serve as a model for how to move into new possibilities and realities for our larger food system.
In an increasingly mobile world, people continuously travel to and from their “homelands,” carrying their food, cultures, and dreams with them. This article revolves around the homemade foods brought back by Turkish-speaking communities in Germany during their regular visits to Bulgaria and Turkey. By sharing their stories, it offers ethnographic insights into the role of these portable foods in maintaining cultural and microbial connections amidst circular migrations.
Human-microbial relations have been articulated as a model for envisioning multispecies justice. This vision has been figured according to the way that the dominant Western individualist conception of the human is unsettled by the fact of our dependence upon the microbes present in our bodies, which far outnumber our human cells. In response, in this paper I show that this vision has to contend with the challenge that our microbial encounters in food production are mediated by the technoscientific worldview, which shapes our knowledge and relationships with microbes according to biopolitics of prevention and control. Taking milk as a paradigm of how biopolitics shapes food production practices, I show how the management of microbiota through different milk-based foods—from milk, and cheese, to precision-fermented milk in engineering biology—manifests a biopolitics of control and prevention that is based in dominant gendered understandings of reproductive bodies of women and animals. I then show how Donna Haraway’s account of cyborg politics manifests a subordination of the natural and organic to the technological, and that this presents a paradox for its aptness to envisioning multispecies justice through microbial encounters.
This article examines the socio-cultural significance of cake during the postwar period. I argue that its commercial representation during the 1950s served as a vehicle for Americans to confront the unprecedented contradictions, anxieties, and chaos of the nuclear age. Although visual icons like the mushroom cloud provided a literal representation of nuclear force, cakes—and the private, feminine world they invoked—uniquely signaled the aggression, magnitude, and terror that nuclear power threatened to enact. Through close visual analysis, archival evidence, and historical accounts, I argue that cake imagery recuperates the site of bodies, violence, and loss that more direct references to the bomb obscured.
As conventional agricultural practices reach their limits, humanity is turning to innovative methods of food production. Using Heather Paxson’s concept of microbiopolitics (2012) as a framework that highlights how microbial life is integrated into social governance, particularly in food production and safety, this article explores the role of microbes in cultivated meat and aquaponic farming. It examines how researchers and producers engage with microbes and considers the potential scenarios of human-microbial coexistence in these systems. First, drawing on ethnographic research in Czechia, the article investigates the role of microbes in production processes within the environments of bioreactors and indoor farms. The analysis highlights the contrast between the sterility of cultivated meat facilities and aquaponic systems, which depend on the labor of specific microbes. Second, using speculative fabulation (Haraway 2016), the article explores the broader implications of cultivated meat and aquaponics production for microbial communities beyond the production process. Building upon the two-way dynamics of reduction and amplification (Latour 1999), where diminishing one quality is necessary to enhance other attributes, the article examines possible impacts of these novel foods on the environmental and gut microbiomes. Regarding aquaponic systems, we identify a potential reduction in the microbial diversity in the human diet produced by way of aquaponics, while the transparency of microbial community structures within aquaponic facilities and the soil microbiome outside these farms may be amplified. With respect to cultivated meat in its current technological trajectory, the diversity and functionality of the gut microbiome may be reduced and environmental microbiome regeneration amplified.
