Making Microbes Explicit

People in food studies, along with others who like to eat, have long been aware that microbes make our foods tasty—for what is koji, kombucha, wine, dosa or a slice of brie without microorganisms? People also have known that these microscopic organisms spoil our food, but it’s also a process that microbes might consider their bacchanalia. Microorganisms are taste-making and rotting agents and so much more; they are as diverse as they are ubiquitous. Despite their influence in everything from farm to fork to feces, microbes for the most part have evaded food studies as a focal point in its scholarship.This collection of papers, which spans two special sections (issue numbers 26.1 and 26.2), places the spotlight on microbes to explicitly draw our attention to this invisible layer of life in foods and food systems. With topics ranging from fermenting to farming to philosophical musings, we showcase the breadth of interdisciplinary approaches including anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, rhetoric, philosophy, and environmental humanities. Across all research articles, we highlight how focusing on microbes reveals a set of assumptions that come with being human in a more-than-human world.Why should we care about microbes? All people interact with microbes, often through food. Our bodies are teeming with microbial life, including in our guts where the foods that nourish us also provide sustenance to microbes. Many support our wellbeing—just ask any health influencer about gut hacks, or look up “mindful eating for your microbes.” Some microorganisms are undeniably harmful, like the Salmonella on unsuspecting salad greens that have been contaminated during processing, or the C. botulinum in dented cans whose toxins can be both difficult to notice and dangerous if ingested. Though most of the time, these organisms are simply there, co-existing with us, on a register we cannot detect.As intimate as they are, these relationships stretch beyond the individual to affect whole communities, populations, and sectors. For instance, growing research on human-microbial relationships show how microbes are not one thing but are complicated, even political. Consider the sobering reality of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. A surge in antibiotic (mis-)use from individuals to industries has led to some pathogenic microbes evolving to resist the medications invented to keep them in check; these so-called superbugs are no longer responding to modern medicines and at an alarming rate. Also, not all people have equal access to the conditions that support beneficial relationships with microbes. A diet high in ultraprocessed foods, for example, can increase the proportion of gut microbes that are connected to poor health outcomes. Meanwhile, some people are profiting from microbes, by isolating, commodifying, and packaging strains taken from someone, somewhere. This leads to a form of extraction that sidesteps questions of equity, reciprocity, and justice. When thinking about food and microbes, it is therefore important to pay attention to systemic power, histories of power, and ideologies that continue to hold power for an elite few.The questions of what to eat and how are as much a health concern as they are environmental, and both domains are pregnant with microbial innovations waiting to turn a profit. This collection gathers some of the latest challenges in trying to theorize and enroll microbes in health, sustainability, and innovation. All papers examine the microbial layer of a case study and make apparent power relations or tensions operating across scale. Across a variety of writing styles and cases, the papers are held together by the common topic of microbes, who are made explicit as both problem knot and purported solution for the contemporary challenges we face.Microbes are an invisible center of food systems. Spanning bacteria, yeasts, viruses, molds, and more, micro-organisms permeate all terrains at all times, sharing only the commonality of size. Since they are mostly invisible to the naked human eye, they tend to be overlooked as integral beings in living networks, that is, until their havoc becomes noticeable or too late to intervene. (Think of foodborne illnesses or spoilage; everything seems fine until it is not.) From the historic work of Louis Pasteur and his namesake heat-sterilization technique, to relentless attempts to contain infectious diseases in animal husbandry and plantations, microbes have and will continue to shape regulations, infrastructures, and our day-to-day social practices with food.Regardless of our attention to them, microbes are involved in all aspects of food, from the growing, harvesting, raising, slaughtering, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, purchasing, cooking, cleaning, and consumption of foodstuffs. In fact, modern food production has made it so that we can (mostly) afford to pay little attention to their presence. Microbes thrive in spaces ranging from laboratories, soils, fields, farms, kitchens, restaurants, markets, waste facilities, and more, with frequent movements from one place into another (e.g., lab to field, field to kitchen, kitchen to intestine). Microbes are many and they’re constantly on the move, crossing borders and boundaries in ways that we cannot easily notice.In a Western context especially, microbes tend to be slotted into binaries that mirror their value in relation to us. Soil microbes affect agriculture but whether for better or for worse depends on which microbes are where, and in which compositions. Microbes in waterways drive nutrient cycles and flows, which can be as positive as microalgae that feed the rest of the aquatic food chain and as fatal as outbreaks of E.coli-0157 from contaminated waters spilling into areas that grow food. Even household microbes steer ferments in ways sometimes tasty and sometimes terrifying, independent of one’s intentions. They teem in communities, mixing and covering every surface of every food, body, and place.In each of these examples, microbes do not hold watertight identities as good or bad agents. They can make and break our food systems depending on the contexts provided. As food philosopher Lisa Heldke writes, “a microbe that contributes to the thriving of a human in one context […] might be deadly to another person, or to the same person in a significantly different context; context, in short, matters tremendously” (Heldke 2018: 256). Take the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus as another example. It lives with a third to half of the human population, usually on our skin or in our airways in an unremarkable manner. In some people, having these bacteria protects them from autoimmune diseases, while in others, the bacteria can become a full-blown staph infection for which antibiotics may no longer work (i.e., MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). With food microbes, binaries like helpful or harmful become moot with examples like Lactobacillus delbrueckii, which can be necessary for yogurt production but also a contaminant in beer brewing (Hey 2022: 30). That the same microbe can act differently depending on context troubles our longstanding reliance on boundaries and binaries.For food microbes especially, context matters because environmental factors and our daily practices can shift microbial populations, often inadvertently. We might open a window, sweep the floor, or spritz our hands with rubbing alcohol; these mundane gestures change the composition of which microbes occupy that space, and do so in a way mostly unbeknownst to us. Mundanity aside, these practices nevertheless affect microbes in very real ways, which, for better or worse, can affect all other future encounters with microbes. Now imagine these practices at the scale of households, communities, and entire industries. They add up.Our point isn’t to fearmonger or sound the alarm, but rather the opposite: this has been our terms of engagement with microbes for millennia, of living and dying together, some more acutely than others, in and through food matters that cross health and environmental concerns. In this regard, context matters, and practices matter, but so does our history. As we look down the dire pipeline of climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction, war and pollution, microbes will continue to cross boundaries and find ways to adapt—and we will need to do the same with our food practices and food systems. Since every context is a microbial context, our relation to our food is inherently a relation to microbes in a material world that is all-too-rapidly changing.Where there is food, there are microbes. Naturally, the field of food studies has focused on the foodstuff more than the ways that microbes have affected foods’ materiality or meaning. This explains, in part, the wealth of literature on fermented foods from beverages (Brice 2014; Nemser 2011; Pilcher 2024; Siimes 2023) to cultured dairy (Jasarevic 2015; King et al. 2024; Morrow 2021; Mutlu Sirakova 2023; Stoilova 2015; West 2020) to breads (Arantes 2020; McConnell 2023; Pintér 2025; Siragusa 2021) and more (Hasinoff 2021; Hendy et al. 2021; Modi 2023; Nygaard 2019; Tompkins 2024). Due to food studies’ strong origins in the anthropology of food, common analytical framings of this literature demonstrate how the fermented foodstuffs broker cultural identities, reflect the significance of a community, or carry meanings for people of particular genders, classes, or ethnicities. Colleen Myles’s edited collection (2020) also examines ferments but through a geography and political ecology lens, examining the construction of terroir and the particularities of place. Although microbes are responsible for transforming foods into ferments, they are usually implied or become subsumed as part of the broader human-to-human or human-to-land constellation of relationships.Heather Paxson’s Life of Cheese (2013) exemplifies a food-centric ethnography with a microbial focus, turning our attention to the ways in which raw-milk cheeses are made, policed, and sought after. Raw milk has not undergone pasteurization, a process that would have obliterated all microbes in the name of food safety. Here, Paxson draws out the tensions between safe food production at scale and the desire for taste, because the gambit with raw milk is that its microbes are worthwhile and even necessary for artisanal production. Paxson contends that raw-milk cheeses are not simply a matter of food politics but a matter of biopolitics in the Foucauldian sense, where power is used to manage, govern, and control a certain population. She coins the term microbiopolitics (Paxson 2008) to point towards the ways that different stakeholders—from cheesemakers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—exert their control over microbial populations to produce, optimize, and regulate artisanal cheeses.Microbes are targeted actors in Paxson’s analysis, whereby bacteria like Listeria monocytogenes, E. coli, and C. botulinum are met with rules, tests, and tactics to keep them at bay, while lactic acid bacteria are seen as vital and encouraged to metabolize milk into cheese. Rejecting the essentialist trap that sees these microbes as innately good or bad entities, Paxson identifies a shift in foodmaking. Whereas Louis Pasteur’s experiments with meat broths and wine spoilage (which were the basis of today’s pasteurization standards) aimed to eradicate all microbes and produce a so-called germ-free state, Paxson carves out an approach to microbes that tries to intervene in ways that enable certain microbes to out-metabolize the others, which ultimately calls for nuance with microbes both good and bad. She calls this a post-Pasteurian approach that “embraces the idea that ‘real’ cheese, as a fermented food, is (rightly) teeming with living bacteria and moulds: that’s what cheese is” (Paxson 2019: 275, original emphasis). This post-Pasteurian framing directly and explicitly brings microbes as an analytical object into food studies scholarship. These insights have been foundational in this area of research, with terms like post-Pasteurianism and microbiopolitics taken up by authors in our special issues.Elsewhere in food studies, microbes are an active underlayer that shapes food practices and food systems. For example, Alex Blanchette’s Porkopolis (2020) engages with antibiotic-laced feed, a porcine-specific virus, while also holding a hyperattention to hygiene, all of which structures and enables industrial pig farming to produce pork at scale. Hygiene isn’t just cleanliness in the ideal or abstract state; it refers to the innards of an animal where microbes co-metabolized the pig’s feed and helped it become of sizeable worth prior to slaughter. What used to reside “inside” an animal, once released “outside” remains a vibrant entity: microbes on the loose and, in the context of a factory farm, in need of containment. Meanwhile, microbes were always and already outside, but phenomena like slaughter (at the scale of production) and eating (at the scale of a mammalian body) bring incompatible microbes and scales into the same viewfinder. While Porkopolis exquisitely and crucially sheds light on the social, economic, and environmental entanglements that humans have with pigs, an alternate reading of the text shows the microbial throughline that implicitly configures an entire food industry.We are interested in making this microbial throughline explicit. For instance, this could be in revisiting microbially produced foodstuffs like MSG (Laurent 2022; Tracy 2019), in the consumption of raw meats (Schrager 2024), or in minimizing food waste and the race against rot (Weiler et al. 2019). Looking ahead, we’re drawn to the work of Hannah Landecker who formulates eating as a metabolic process across species, cycling across microbes, plants, and animals such that we humans are intrinsically linked to “the food of our food” (Landecker 2023; 2019). We’re also excited by the research of Julie Guthman (2024) and Charlotte Biltekoff (2024: 180–188) which scrutinizes a growing tech industry trying to develop animal-based proteins through microbes. Their critiques are aimed at the promissory note of decoupling protein production from its material, land-based politics (Guthman et al. 2022; Guthman and Biltekoff 2021), as well as the strategic framing of alternative proteins as an investible and incontestable macronutrient (Biltekoff and Guthman 2023; Guthman and Biltekoff 2023). In other words, as life on a burning planet continues to draw in new foods (like the Impossible Burger) or concepts (like metabolic relations) to understand food systems, microbes will continue to play key yet undetermined roles that will warrant food studies’ perspectives.But microbes alone cannot make for good food scholarship. Specifically, making microbes explicit requires additional criticality to food research, precisely because microbial invisibility allows for biases and assumptions to go unnoticed. Without precise attention and active interrogation of race, gender, class, able-bodiedness, coloniality, geopolitics, or placedness in the world, any analysis of microbes/foods simply reproduces the very inequities that characterize our social worlds. Worse, heralding new attention to microbes as a lens risks touting “a critical edge” while obfuscating the all too material reality they bring about, acutely, and differentially, in certain bodies, lands, and industries; and, in this regard, it is quite telling that even the latest special issue on original research on the of microbial food and 2024). 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