Digestive Belonging

Milk is a food rife with meaning and thick with lively possibilities. “Raw,” or unpasteurized milk, has played a particularly contentious role in food safety efforts in the United States where legal frameworks vary by state and raw milk drinking is on the rise, despite the consequent increase in foodborne illness. While current debates about raw milk drinking tend to feature raw milk influencers and state agents, with polarized positions in relation to food safety, dairy producers offer another perspective. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with dairy farmers, dairy experts, and community members in and around the state of Wisconsin, this article shows how raw milk is an embedded food in dairy production ecologies. Through attending to the intimate labors of milking and working with cows, I argue that raw milk and the microbes therein reconstitute bodies and relations in an ongoing and embedded landscape of encounter. These reconstitutions contribute to digestive belonging, an embodied connection to place that takes terroir beyond the palate and into the gut. Centering the ways that microbes shape everyday work, human digestion, and farm ecologies, reveals the capacities of microbes to forge connections and shape social life in dairy worlds.