Pasturing dairy infrastructures in Northeastern Turkey: Pasture-cheesemaking,dairy technosciences and the Kars Kaşar Cheese

Abstract

This article investigates the infrastructures of dairy farming and artisanal cheesemaking in rural Kars, Northeastern Turkey. Based on my 18-month ethnographic research on dairy farming and dairy sciences of pasture-cheeses of Kars, I conceptualize these dairy infrastructures as the material web of relations, which makes dairy production possible through sociotechnical practices of obtaining milk in pastures and crafting it into cheeses. The national food safety regulations (and its underlying Pasteurian technosciences) prioritize industrial dairy infrastructures at the expense of “unsafe” dairy production in pastures. I focus on an unlikely collaboration between scientists and small dairy farmers in the design and implementation of the Kars Kaşar Cheese geographical indication, which has altered dairy infrastructures in rural Kars in the last 10 years through practices of, what I call, “pasturing.” By analyzing how pastures appear in the milk and cheese, I argue that practices of pasturing the kaşar cheese challenge the industrial dairy infrastructures by prioritizing pasture-milk in the spatial arrangements across pastures and dairies, as well as by calibrating dairy craft and technosciences to sense pastures in the everyday life of dairy farming and cheesemaking.

Introduction

In 2016, shortly after the official registration of the Kars Kaşar Geographical Indication (GI) cheese by the Turkish state, a group of dairy farmers, cheesemakers, state officials, and academics organized a series of cheese tasting workshops in Kars, a northeastern border province of Turkey. Professor Ferda, ¹ a food engineer working in a public university in Ankara, directed these workshops to prepare a list that later became a standard “sensory evaluation form” that a panel composed by the organizers review every year after their own tasting of kaşar cheeses in Kars. Ferda had initially developed a list of criteria, primarily based on international examples of sensory evaluations (also referred to as “organoleptic analyses”) of cheeses. During one of the meetings, cheesemakers disagreed with one of the entries on this sensory evaluation form that listed “animal-like smell” as an undesired scent in cheese. According to the cheesemakers, “animal-like smell” can name both a desired and undesired smell for kaşar cheese. When the professor asked how one could distinguish between the two odors, Halim, an experienced master (usta) crafting the kaşar cheese for more than 40 years, explained that the desired animal-like smell would correspond to a “nice smell of cow” in the milk, which later appears in the cheese. He described this smell as almost the same smell one gets while milking the cow:

When you sit on that small stool to milk the cow, your head is almost at the same height with her udder, while the milk fills the bucket, you usually sense a nice animal odor, that may come from the teat of the animal.

This particular description and the others the cheesemakers provided in that meeting drew attention to the act of milking cows to discern “animal-like smell.” According to them, “pasture-milk” carries this nice smell to the cheese. In contrast, they associated the undesired animal-like smell with cowsheds (ahır). Cheesemakers explained that in large and closed barns, the milk usually absorbs the smell of the environment that later appears as an undesired animal-like smell in the cheese.

After this discussion, the “animal-like smell” on the list bifurcated into two smells. The desired smell was called “animal-like” (hayvansı) and the undesired smell on the form was named “cowshed” (ahır). Discerning this nuance between the two quite similar odors was crucial according to most cheesemakers who argue that this ability needs to be cultivated in tasting workshops if the latter would make claims on the proper kaşar cheese. One of the crucial characteristics of Kars Kaşar Cheese according to the issued GI legislation ² is the use of milk from animals grazing on pastures, i.e. pasture-milk. Cheesemakers’ olfactory experience of animal-like smell in the kaşar cheese is one among the many properties that rely on dairy farming in pastures (mera hayvancılığı) in Kars. This was not only an instance when I realized how the sensorium of cheesemaking extends beyond the dairy, to the pastures, animals, sheds, and milking cows, but also an indication of the complex relationship between pastures and dairy infrastructures in Kars. While technoscientific processes such as “pasteurization”, “homogenization”, and “deodorization” performed in industrial dairy factories might extract pastures from the milk to produce a standard kaşar cheese, cheesemakers in the small rural dairies craft pasture-milk by using techniques that are calibrated to keep a smell that could be translated into animal-like smell of Kars kaşar cheese.

This article investigates the dairy infrastructures in Kars as the material web of relations, which makes dairy production possible through sociotechnical practices that start with obtaining milk in pastures and crafting it into cheeses. Scientific controversies on the safety of raw-milk cheeses, and the relation between pasteurization and pathogens have long been under critical scrutiny by microbiologists, historians, anthropologists as well as cheesemakers (Atkins, 2000; Donnelly, 2019; Montel et al., 2014; Paxson, 2008; Percival and Percival, 2017). While legal food safety requirements are varied in different countries, the use of raw milk in dairy production is either strictly banned or considered as an exception that requires additional safety measures such as 60-day or 4-month aging periods. Similarly, other important components of artisanal cheesemaking such as the uses of wooden equipment and ageing shelves have also been declared inappropriate by official inspections due to their potential for contamination. In this article, I focus on an unlikely collaboration between scientists and cheesemakers, which emerges from both the controversies in dairy sciences and the transformations of pasture-cheesemaking practices in the last 20 years in Kars. Using animal-like smell as an entry point, I analyze the spatial and sociotechnical arrangements that connect pastures and cheese. I argue that throughout the last 10 years, this collaboration and the resulting technosciences and crafts of the Kars kaşar cheese have altered the dairy infrastructures in Kars by making pastures present in the cheese, which I call “pasturing” the kaşar cheese.

In the next section, I situate this argument in relation to the relevant literature on infrastructures, technosciences, and artisanal cheese, especially around the highly contested association of place and taste when it comes to “local food”. In the third section, I describe how pastures have been infrastructured for dairy industry in Kars, Turkey in the last 20 years. While the food safety requirements marginalized rural dairies and pasture-cheeses since the early 2000 s, I focus on a group of rural cheesemakers who actively shaped the design of the official GI legislation of the Kars Kaşar Cheese in collaboration with a web of dairy scientists who study the biochemical worlds of traditional cheeses crafted in Kars. In the last section of the article, I analyze particular sociotechnical arrangements, namely dairy technosciences, pasture–dairy connections, and practices of crafting the kaşar cheese, which I argue, “pasture” the dairy infrastructures in Kars. This argument posits “pasturing” as a particular set of practices, which alters the spatiality of the milk flow from pastures to the dairies and the resulting senses of place in kaşar cheesemaking.

This article relies on an 18-month ethnographic research between September 2017 and February 2019. ³ I conducted in-depth and semi-structured interviews with 50 dairy owners, 80 cheesemakers, 20 state officials, and 13 food scientists on dairy farming and kaşar cheesemaking in Kars. ⁴ I visited all the registered dairy facilities in the province, I accompanied many dairy farmers in their everyday life, traveled in the many milk-collecting vehicles of different dairies across pastures and villages, worked regularly in three different rural dairies for more than two months, and observed crafting pasture-milk into kaşar cheese for innumerable hours. In addition to my research in the pastures, villages and dairies of Kars, I visited veterinarians, microbiologists, and food engineers who study Kars kaşar cheeses in three different universities in Turkey. I audited two classes on dairy farming and technologies, and observed scientists in their labs when they analyzed whey or cheese samples shipped from the dairies in Kars. My involvement in several local, national and international organizations around dairy farming, pastures, and cheesemaking enabled me to follow the ongoing legal, scientific, commercial, and practical controversies. Since 2009, I have been a volunteer for the pioneering village association of Kars in organizing dairy farmers and cheesemakers around the Kars kaşar Cheese GI, which kept me informed on the dairy farmer experiences, demands, and struggles around pasture-cheesemaking.

Infrastructuring pastures and pasturing dairy infrastructures

Dairy infrastructures, as the term is used in the industry, refer to the technological equipment that makes possible processing milk into cheese and other dairy products. This narrow definition of infrastructure is limited to the dairy production facilities (as built environment and machinery) and leaves outside the processes of milk production and transportation, legal food safety regulations, as well as the know-how of cheesemakers. I conceptualize dairy infrastructures as the material web of relations, which makes dairy production possible through sociotechnical practices of obtaining milk in pastures and crafting it into cheeses. This broader definition of dairy infrastructures allows me to take into account pastures as the crucial sites for milk production, which are materially connected to the dairies through the flow of milk. I investigate spatial arrangements of pasture-cheesemaking that sustain these infrastructures.

Recent studies on infrastructures remark that nature has been heterogeneously infrastructured to create favorable environments for particular human activities (Anand et al., 2018; Harvey et al., 2017; Hetherington, 2019a). Studies on water provision services (Anand, 2017; Morita, 2016), energy (Mitchell, 2011) or waste (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019) infrastructures among others have shown that technological investments and systems are co-constructed by social, political as well as natural, ecological forces. Following these studies on how environments and living beings are made into infrastructures, this article focuses on making pastures infrastructural to dairy production. Scholars investigated the everyday sustenance of particular infrastructures through infrastructural work (Carse, 2012), work of maintenance (Barnes, 2017), modes of infrastructuring (Morita, 2016), moral ecologies of infrastructures (Scaramelli, 2019), and forms of narration and ordering (Wakefield, 2020). This article focuses on the spatiality, technosciences, and sensorium of everyday practices of dairy farming and pasture-cheesemaking in Kars, as they enact sociotechnical arrangements that sustain modes of infrastructuring pastures for dairy production. “Pasteurization” – that has become the generic name for the heat treatment of milk to kill potential pathogens, and a productive concept to analyze the transformation of landscapes, crafts, and knowledge production (Atkins, 2000; Latour, 1993) – points to a particular mode of infrastructuring pastures where milk and cheese production conform to the industrial food safety measures. In this article, in contrast with the practices of pasteurizing dairy infrastructures, I suggest “pasturing” as an alternative mode of infrastructuring in Kars where spatial and sociotechnical arrangements aim to ensure the presence of pastures in cheeses. Hence, while resulting in pasture-cheeses that embody the taste of pastures, Kars kaşar cheesemaking also alters the dairy infrastructures.

Geographical indications are place-based denominations that define a collective right of people who live in a particular place (boundaries of which are determined in the GI legislation) and produce goods that have a distinctive cultural and territorial quality and fame (that is scientifically “proved” in the legislation). GIs have become an important tool for the Turkish state development politics in recent years. ⁵ While GIs used to be seen as important mechanisms in the creation of alternative food solidarity networks, there is a growing critical literature on their design and implementation processes around the world (Besky, 2014; Bowen and Zapata, 2009; Fonte, 2008; Nizam, 2019). In the following sections of this article, I introduce the dynamics that shaped the GI legislation of the Kars kaşar Cheese in order to analyze how farmers, cheesemakers, and scientists collaborated to make the GI into a tool for pasturing dairy infrastructures. I bring the critical approach on GI together with the studies that have focused on the materiality of agriculture and “local food” in feeding various controversies about science and technology (Grasseni et al., 2014; Heath and Meneley, 2010; Heller, 2007). Many of these studies focused on cheesemaking in particular and discussed the connection between scientific controversies around the safety of raw-milk cheeses, and the recent increase in production and consumption of artisanal cheeses (Donnelly, 2014, 2019; Grasseni, 2016; Paxson, 2013; Percival and Percival, 2017). The scientist–farmer collaboration I discuss in this article, and the enactments of dairy technosciences that aim to ensure the presence of pastures in kaşar cheese also rely on this recent scientific controversy by problematizing what anthropologist Heather Paxson (2008) calls “Pasteurian microbiopolitics”. Rather than isolating and then identifying microorganisms in milk or cheese according to whether they foster or harm human populations, post-Pasteurian microbiopolitics focus on the dynamics of microbial communities (that already exist in unpasteurized milk or artisanal cheeses), to assess whether they can enact or inhibit a healthy microbial life for humans and their entangled life with nonhumans such as cows, bacteria, and pastures (Paxson, 2013). Akin to post-Pasteurian approach, pasturing dairy infrastructures in Kars also requires proliferating and working with microbial communities that would be eliminated when milk is pasteurized. This approach and the collaborative practices I investigate in the article reveal the ways in which experts – scientists, dairy farmers, or cheesemakers – can engage with each other’s know-how in the technical, scientific, sensory, and more-than-human processes of cheesemaking. ⁶

The processes of acquiring a GI and enacting new sociotechnical arrangements to challenge food safety legislations that marginalize rural dairies made visible new “communities that coalesce around infrastructures” (Carse, 2019: 105). Ashley Carse (2019) highlights that the modern infrastructures of the Panama Canal and the constantly manicured cultural landscapes such as mowed lawns in Colon through which these infrastructures are maintained attach people’s commitment to particular enactments of the environment.Similarly, Nikhil Anand (2017) conceptualizes “hydraulic publics” as the populations socially and materially emerging with the everyday flow of water through the pipes. While a particular network of dairy farmers, cheesemakers, and scientists in Kars is formed through everyday practices of pasturing dairy infrastructures, their collaborations are deeply entangled with pastures, dairy animals, milk, microorganisms, and the pasture-cheese sensorium that encompass this more-than-human ensemble. As Kregg Hetherington (2019b: 10) emphasizes, people’s “life projects are no longer human-life projects” in time of the Anthropocene; more-than-human projects are being forged where the art of living in a damaged planet reveals multi-species entanglements (Haraway, 2016; Tsing et al., 2017). Practices of pasturing I discuss in this article are not simply about making life better in rural Kars for small farmer families or protecting the heritage of pasture-cheesemaking against industrial dairy production, but they are also about thriving more-than-human communities which sustain both everyday life of dairy farming, cheesemaking in pastures, and scientific research on various forms of milk.

Pasture-cheesemaking and dairy technosciences in Kars

Kars is located in the northeastern border of Turkey, neighboring Georgia and Armenia. It encompasses high-altitude plateaus, which constitute one of the most biodiverse regions in Turkey thanks to the transition between Anatolia and South Caucasus. While the border between Armenia and Turkey has been closed for dozens of years, Kars province is also at the northern frontier of the Kurdish region in Turkey where an armed conflict between Turkish army and Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) has been ongoing since 1984. Affected by the conditions of depopulation and armed conflict, and in line with the industrialization of dairy production in Turkey, rural dairy production has declined sharply in Kars in the last 20 years. Cheesemakers remember the 2000 s as the worst years of their business. Rural and semi-industrial dairies in Kars were not economically competitive with the increasing number of industrial dairies in the country. The number of animals and the quantity of available milk decreased together with the shrinking pastures in Kars. Pastures have always been fundamental for dairy farming in Kars where farmers and their herds reside in these high-altitude (between 1700 and 2600 meters) grasslands that are covered with snow during the harsh winter conditions for seven months each year. From April until October, animals are fed in the open-air pastures according to different regimes of management in different villages.

Throughout my fieldwork, the cheesemakers in Kars told me that kaşar cheese no longer tasted like it used to be before the 2000 s. When I inquired about the factors that impaired the taste, the first crucial aspect they mentioned was the time of milk processing. One of the old cheesemakers, Mustafa who has his own dairy in his village for more than 30 years explained that the milk that farmers get from their cows should arrive to the dairy as soon as possible to be crafted. “The cheese is not the same as when we made the curd (baskı) in the pastures, and then brought it to the dairy in village,” he added. When farmers and their herds move to the higher altitude pastures during the appropriate season, the cheesemakers used to have a mobile dairy (usually a dairy-tent) where the milk could be collected and processed. This baskı technique ⁷ produced the curd-like fresh cheese that was later taken to the main dairy by the cheesemakers to be processed in the form of a kaşar cheese. It constitutes a crucial sociotechnical practice that connects pastures and artisanal cheesemaking. If infrastructuring pastures for commercial dairy production involves spatial arrangements of the milk flow from animals in pastures to the cheeses crafted in dairies, mobile dairies and baskı techniques used to be fundamental to the sense of place in crafting pasture-cheese. This process was declared dangerous to human health in the food safety regulations of 2004, and state inspectors strictly banned the technique almost explicitly for kaşar cheesemaking in Kars.

In 2004, the Turkish government legalized new food safety reforms and regulations in European Union membership negotiations. Hygiene was an essential keyword of this reform, together with pasteurization. The new criteria make it very difficult and costly for mobile dairies in pastures or small dairies in villages to obtain official production permits (üretim izin belgesi); yet, more than half of the total milk production in Turkey does not end up in formal dairy industry. Turkish state attempted to formalize commercial milk and dairy production by distributing milk subsidies to the farmers through a re-institutionalization of the dairy sector through local breeder unions. ⁸ This new institutionalization favored factories (located in the industrial zones close to urban centers and inspected regularly to enforce safety standards) over the rural dairies in pastures (where cheesemaking is assumed to be performed under unhygienic conditions with traditional techniques). By the mid-2000 s, a significant portion of commercial dairy farming was pushed outside formal dairy economy in Turkey.

The persistence of informal dairy markets not only obliged the authorities to partially revise food safety measures after 2016, ⁹ but it also sustained an “infrastructure of taste” (Blumberg and Mincyte, 2019) for pasture-cheeses and other local-traditional dairy products. While the flourishing supermarkets of the 1990 s and 2000 s did not accept these cheeses due to food safety related concerns, smaller grocery stores and local marketplaces (pazar) dominated the dairy markets. As İlhan, a fourth generation cheesemaker and an important figure in artisanal cheese trade in Turkey, expressed in 2016: “Dairy farmers and rural cheesemakers, although fewer in numbers than ever before in Turkey, continued to make cheeses thanks to the people’s eating habits.” ¹⁰ This, İlhan said, made possible the sustenance of pasture-cheesemaking in rural Kars, and by 2014, supermarket chains started to find ways to buy and sell dairy products from local cheesemakers.

Most of the small rural dairies in Kars seasonally operate on pastures (or in villages close to pastures) to make kaşar cheese. ¹¹ Scientific controversy around the raw milk has been central to the legal infrastructures that regulated dairy production in pastures and factories. According to food safety standards the environment that these mobile dairies provide for cheesemaking is not suitable for dairy production, and the technique of baskı that is designed to process raw milk quickly in pastures fed the existing controversy on the use of raw milk in cheesemaking. Ministry officials, food inspectors, and dairy scientists explained that baskıs that come from different pastures to the same dairy increase the risk of contamination. Their reasoning relies primarily on the unhygienic conditions of the dairy tent, where different materials like wood and plastic are used instead of “stainless steel”, and no standard cleaning protocols can be performed. Yet, beyond all the hygienic problems (that could be fixed) the major problem for most of the scientists and inspectors is the raw milk that cheesemakers use for dairy production in pastures. Animal diseases such as tuberculosis or brucellosis that can be carried by dairy products are considered endemic and widespread in rural Anatolia, especially in Kars. The bacteria causing these diseases are assumed to be present in raw milk whose microbial composition worries scientists. During our conversation with one of the founders of dairy factory of the only university in Kars, the professor highlighted the very high counts of somatic cells in raw milk and dairy products collected from pastures. She added that exceptions to some industrial safety standards only work in countries such as France or Italy where the raw milk itself is much safer than the one produced in rural Kars.

Since 2010, small cheesemakers in rural Kars have collectively negotiated with government officials both for “exceptions” (to their pastured cheese) and for development aid programs to renovate their dairies. One of their means was the Ekomuze Zavot, a cheese ecomuseum that was founded in Boğatepe village famous for Gravyer cheesemaking in Kars. The ecomuseum and this village quickly became an important node in the organization of dairy farmers and cheesemakers in Kars after 2011. Dairy farmers and cheesemakers organized many events in which various aspects of the artisanal cheesemaking (that are considered illegal according to the food safety regulations) were discussed with state authorities, inspectors, and scientists. In the course of various negotiations, encounters, workshops, and projects, cheesemakers started collaborating with a small group of dairy scientists who formed a minority in their own disciplines (veterinarians, food engineers or microbiologists). Through these interactions, Kars kaşar cheesemakers created new connections that enabled them to participate in designing the legislation of the GI that was finally issued in 2015.

The GI legislation is registered by the Kars Kafkas University; it is administered by a committee that consists of representatives from the university, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Regional Development Agency, Kars Industry and Commerce Chamber, and Boğatepe Environment and Life Association. Yet, the design of the GI legislation included many crucial details small farmers brought to the meetings. Pasture-cheesemakers found GI legislation an important tool to maintain their rural dairies since it recognizes pasture-milk as the necessary ingredient and describes traditional techniques of crafting cheese. Due to fact that the Turkish Food Codex is binding for all GI legislations, making baskı in mobile pasture-dairies to process it later into kaşar cheese is not part of the legislation. But the necessary use of pasture-milk in kaşar cheese not only enabled rural dairies to comply with the criteria of using milk instead of baskı, but also provided legitimacy for the proximity of dairies to the pastures, i.e. rural dairies. Similarly, traditional techniques described in the legislation required sociotechnical arrangements that are different than the industrial dairy factories. Hence, GI legislation leaves room for pasturing dairy infrastructures as I elaborate in the next section.

Pasturing dairy infrastructures

Pasturing dairy technosciences

The collaboration between dairy farmers, cheesemakers, and scientists in Kars targeted to identify the distinctive characteristics of the kaşar cheesemaking in order to enable crafting practices that ensure both safety and taste of this pasture-cheese. Hence, making pastures present in the kaşar cheese requires scientific knowledge production and technologies of pasturing cheese. Veterinarian and microbiology professor Mehmet who directed the microbiological analyses of Kars kaşar cheese in 2014 for the GI legislation had told me that the analyses aimed to unravel “the fingerprint” of the cheese. The unique fingerprint would scientifically describe distinctive microorganisms and aroma of kaşar cheese, which necessarily includes the properties of pasture-milk according to Mehmet. While he was disappointed when no significantly local (or “indigenous”) microorganism was found in the PCR results of the kaşar samples he collected, he remains committed to studying the microbial diversity of artisanal cheeses in order to create regional and national databases of locally found microorganisms in traditional dairy products.

Mehmet’s approach, although very minimally supported by his institution (the public university in Kars), was influenced by a handful of food engineers in Turkey, who persisted in doing research on local dairy products when the majority in their disciplines worked on issues related to industrial food processing. These studies revealed not only the entanglement of physical, chemical, and (micro)biological transformations of milk in the course of its transubstantiation into cheese, but also how techniques and traditional methods were intrinsic in the governing of microorganisms that make the cheese (Kamber, 2005, 2015; Yasar and Guzeler, 2011). This in turn enabled them to collaborate with rural cheesemakers, especially in discussing the logics behind food safety measurements and formulating convincing claims to the state authorities especially in terms of public health concerns.

This kind of collaborations is akin to what anthropologist Heather Paxson calls “Post-Pasteurianism” (2013). Opposed to the Pasteurian microbiopolitics that involves making microscopic agents visible through technosciences, and that perceive the microbial abundance in milk and other dairy products as dangerous for humans, post-Pasteurian microbiopolitics approach the microbial abundance as offering many possibilities for humans in their relations to microorganisms (Paxson and Helmreich, 2014). This view highlights that humans work with the microbiological communities in milk while crafting cheese. Pasteurian approach consists of isolating microorganisms in milk and ensuring the elimination of the harmful ones before dairy production. This approach aims to kill the possible pathogens by standardized procedures to replace “raw” milk with pasteurized milk, whereas a post-Pasteurian view seeks for ways to work with the dynamics of microbial communities that can inhibit microorganisms humans know as pathogens, and that can also enable distinctive smell and taste of pastures. The latter approach requires conducting thorough research by following the milk production from farms, sheds, pastures, cows at each step as the cheese is crafted and aged in the dairy; and this enables scientists to reveal the dynamics of microbial community formations in cheesemaking while also (partly) satisfying food safety concerns (see for instance Montel et al., 2014). As I elaborate in the remaining part of the article, scientists and farmers collaborated in Kars to collect samples at different stages of pasture-milk and analyze physical, chemical, microbiological, and sensory compositions (and decompositions) of pasture-cheeses. These samples made possible many studies that highlighted not only safety concerns unfairly associated with pasture-cheeses, but also how certain characteristic aromas in kaşar cheese originate from pastures, from the proximity between pastures and dairies, and from particular techniques of dairy craft in its co-construction with technosciences.

The most common technoscientific practices once the raw milk reaches the dairy include analyzing the samples collected from farmers when they pour their milk into the common tank at the back of the trucks. Small machines that are called “milk analyzers” are commonly used in rural dairies to identify the percentages of the components in milk, like fat and dry matter. In my visits to the diaries in Kars and Ardahan, I also encountered antibiotic kits, and small incubators in some dairies to make more detailed microbiological analyses of pasture-milk. These technologies have gradually become important in the relationships between dairy farmers and cheesemakers, while everyday encounters between the two have decreased due to the change in the dairy infrastructures of collecting milk. It is not surprising that these technologies shape the kind of trust in their relationship. When I started my fieldwork, I expected to observe how the use of new dairy technologies reduces a relationship of trust between the farmer and the cheesemaker to the “technical” matter of analyzing milk. A technical expression of the composition of milk becomes part both of a commercial agreement and of a new space of negotiation between farmers and cheesemakers on the determination of milk prices, effects of the weather conditions on milk quality, or how the dairy can collect milk better. In other words, the technical evaluation of the milk by the machines does not necessarily imply that the relationship of trust between the farmer and the cheesemaker, whose interactions are shaped by everyday life in the village, would result in the transformation from personal trust to be mediated by a technical process or to the composition of the milk as it is revealed by dairy technosciences. Collecting samples, analyzing milk, discussing the analyses as well as crafting techniques are always subject to the everyday conditions in pastures where sociotechnical arrangements are constantly calibrated to the necessities of the particular pasture-milk collected twice every day. For instance, when farmers skim the milk before selling it to the dairy in order to make butter to their guests, or when it rains too heavily, the percentage of fat in the milk can decrease significantly. However, cheesemakers usually learn this from farmers or shepherds in the village. Hence, their milk analysis in the dairy usually takes these conditions into account both for adjusting expectations on technical results and also for balancing these problems with other farmers’ milk as much as they can.

The collaboration also made cheesemakers committed to the scientific understandings of pasture-milk and cheesemaking. They work with food engineers to design scientific studies that aim to identify the distinctive properties of pasture-cheeses. For instance, in a study conducted in 2016 and 2017, samples of cheeses were collected and identified with their production places as “mountains” or “plains” of Kars, which, according to the scientists and cheesemakers involved in the study, could partly correspond to the crucial distinction between cheesemaking in rural dairies (in villages or pastures) and organized industrial zone (OIZ). Similarly, another researcher collaborated with cheesemakers in Kars dairies to collect whey samples from different batches of coagulated milk by categorizing them according to the altitude of the pastures where they originated. These studies have also affected cheesemaking craft in rural dairies where the masters embraced the idea that the microbial abundance in pasture-milk is not a danger but a site of opportunities. As İlhan puts it: “Our job is to provide the conditions for the living beings in the milk, to help friendly bacteria win the war against those that are harmful for people who will eat this cheese”. He emphasized that pasteurizing milk is to kill the harmful bacteria without enabling other potentialities of the microbial diversity in milk. In his view, traditional methods of crafting involve working with the milk, including its microbial abundance. Hence, İlhan’s perspective and sensory know-how of the invisible agents that are involved in substantiating milk in different forms combines what anthropologist Christina Grasseni (2016) calls post- and pre-Pasteurian attitudes. Artisanal kaşar cheesemaking have always been attuned to the presence of pastures in the dairy crafts, and to the senses of place (taste of pastures) while crafting and eating. Hence, when scientific research links the materialities of pasture-milk and of cheese in new ways, crafting involves pasturing technosciences of dairy infrastructures. In other words, pastures are made technoscientifically along the spatial movement of milk from grazing cows to crafting people.

Transfer from pastures to dairies

After 2004, state subsidies for new investment in the OIZ and the use of new machinery in the semi-industrial dairies altered dairy infrastructures that connect pastures and dairies in Kars. The dairy tents in the pastures ensured short physical and temporal distance between milking cows and crafting pasture-milk. From the perspective of food safety measures and mainstream dairy sciences, the bacterial communities in the milk do not have enough time to proliferate before coagulation. However, the milk that travels all the way from pastures to the modernized dairy in the industrial zone right outside the city center risks carrying more pathogens because of the proliferation of bacteria that exists in the (raw) milk. Cheesemakers usually use the word ekşi (sour) to call the milk that is not suitable to craft properly without pasteurization. Since cheesemakers are used to working with raw milk and their traditional recipe does not include pasteurization, they prefer making cheese out of pasture-milk when they sense that the milk is not too sour (ekşimek) due to travelling. Some cheesemakers’ decisions on the batches of milk to be pasteurized were based on their sensory know-how of kneading curds in the later stages of dairy craft. The infrastructural change in the transfer of milk from pastures to dairies led to the new sociotechnical practices where kaşar cheesemakers had to work with the materiality of the milk that has traveled (rather than the curd as it was the case before 2004).

As I described in the Introduction section, pastures can be transferred to the cheeses through a smell, which particular dairy technologies aim to eliminate in the production process. Following the discussions of the animal-like smell, I asked many questions to food scientists and cheesemakers, about the ways in which their senses are attuned to crafting milk. Scientists’ answers revealed that most of them associated the desired smell of pastures only with flowers and grass. For them, the smell of the animal is an undesired side-effect of pasture dairy farming: “animal-like” smell is about the milking conditions in pastures where lack of hygiene causes contamination from udder, hands or buckets that brings an unpleasant animal odor to milk and cheese. The director of the dairy factory of the university in Kars explained that the deodorization machine eliminates the odors from the environment. She said: it “purified” all “foreign” odors away from milk. This process enabled to keep the milk with the original authentic smell: a product of the flora of pastures. Hence, deodorization is a process that prevents the animal-like smell in milk. The resulting olfactory sensorium of cheese would not include pastures-as-animals.

Cheesemakers, however, emphasized that this machine also eliminates other unpleasant odors that may result from industrial dairy farming practices (like that of the feedstock, corn silage, or large cowsheds). Once the milk is “purified” and made odor-less, whether the cows are milked in pastures or sheds becomes irrelevant. Deodorization nullifies this distinction between the conditions of the milk production, and the connections through which milk flows from pastures to diaries. In this sense, deodorization can be seen as a technological fix that allows dairy industries to cancel concerns about the olfactory sensorium embodied in the relationship between (raw) milk and humans. Thus, cheesemakers emphasized that the process of deodorization takes away the smell of animals from milk. For dairy farmers and kaşar cheesemakers in Kars, cows are not only machine-like transmitters between the pastures and milk they produce. Cows and pastures are inseparable entities. The animal-like smell in the pasture-milk and pasture-cheeses corresponds to the olfactory expression of this symbiotic relationship, and of pasturing dairy infrastructures.

In 2018, two years after the first workshops I mentioned in the beginning of this article, I attended the third yearly tasting workshop of Kars Kaşar GI. The animal-like smell had become one of the crucial markers in the taste of kaşar cheeses, especially for women in the village who had attended the tasting panel meetings each year. Hayriye who was taking care of a dozen cows and calves in Boğatepe village, told me that she enjoys smelling milk when tasting the cheese in these workshops.

They say that we need to recognize different smells, colors, and texture … I can understand different smells very easily because I live in pastures and I know how my animals (mallarım) smell. They are my daughters! I also know how they make the shed smell, especially in spring … Of course, I know how milk in that dirt (o bokun içinde) can smell! But it was very strange to me when I first smell it in a good-looking kaşar cheese. I immediately said this milk has some odor from the shed.

Hayriye’s life in pastures with her cows and her experience of milking them in the shed inform her discernment between animal-like and cowshed-like smell, as well as her sensorium of pasture-cheeses. In April, as Hayriye and other women’s daily practices of taking care of animals and shed make clear, animal bodies produce a very stinky manure since they start eating fresh grass for the first time after months of harsh winter conditions. It takes time for the grass to grow after months of snow; the flowers start to appear almost a month after the end of snow. Seasonal conditions affect not only the living conditions in pastures and sheds, but also the properties of the pasture-milk that can embody various odors coming from animals, manure, humans, and pastures.

Boğatepe village and its surrounding pastures are situated between 2200 and 2600 meters altitude. Cows walk approximately 10–15 kilometers every day during the pasture season, including their trip between pastures and sheds twice a day to be milked. When herds arrive from the pastures, farmers outside their cowsheds wait for their animals. Usually, the men take the animals inside the shed, count them to make sure no one is missing, the women are occupied with milking. The calves arrive first and they go to their own place at the back of the shed. Then the cows arrive and each one takes their spots. Farmers who recognize all their animals “take attendance” and make sure that everyone is well placed in the shed. Hayriye ties the cows to the iron rounds on the walls with ropes that are attached to the neck of the animals. Then she opens the door of the small part at the back where the calves excitedly wait for their turn to get milk. She lets a few calves pass, and then closes the door again. Her son helps the calves find their mothers whose udder they suck for a few minutes. Then Hayriye starts milking. I am surprised that the calf stands next to Hayriye who is underneath the cow on a small stool.

When her bucket fills, she goes and pours the milk in the larger bucket (güğüm) which is placed right at the entrance, next to the large doors of the shed that are wide open. This is the detail Hayriye draws my attention to: Boğatepe women put their buckets at the door and go from their stool to the door each time their small milking-bucket is full. The big bucket is almost in the open air and it does not necessarily absorb the smell of the cowshed. I witnessed this practice in all the sheds in Boğatepe where I attended milking. Apart from occasionally milking the cows, my job would usually be helping women by taking the small bucket, pour it in the bigger one, and giving it back to them. According to Hayriye, in April not even this practice cancels the smell of the shed. She says: “When you spare some milk for yourself to make some butter or fresh cheese, this month is easily distinguishable.” This sensorium Hayriye is attuned to enables her to recognize the cowshed-like smell in the kaşar cheese during tasting workshops. Her olfactory discernment emerges of her practices of caring for “her daughters”, and milking them. I asked if she can make any difference between this smell and the smell of a cheese that is made with the milk from animals that are not fed in pastures. She said that a few such cheese samples she ate in the workshops did not smell at all; they didn’t taste (hiç tatmıyordu), she added. Dairy infrastructures that assemble a particular sensorium of kaşar cheese enable pasture-milk with certain odor and taste to characterize the resulting craft of local cheese.

Crafting pasture-milk

Once the pasture-milk is in the dairy, various tools and machines are used by the cheesemaker to craft the cheese. Dairy technosciences shaped the production sites for more than a century (Atkins, 2007, 2010; Valenze, 2011). From sanitation to physical, chemical, and microbiological analyses, dairy science research contributed to the design of various industrial technologies such as pasteurization, deodorization and dry-boiling machines (kuru haşlama makinası) among others. Yet, this technological infrastructure, as suggested in previous sections, is designed to expropriate pastures from the milk through procedures of standardization. I am rather interested in practices of dairy craft that are attuned to the daily circumstances of pasture-milk in various ways. These practices, I argue, are part of the rural cheesemakers’ attempts to pasture dairy infrastructures that involve infrastructural work performed by humans and nonhumans in crafting cheese.

Simultaneously with the transition to the new food safety regulations, some dairies bought new cheese processor machines that local cheesemakers called ‘robot.’ This is a technology that involves ‘dry-boiling’ the pressed curd to obtain a texture that is close to the traditional kaşar cheese. The stainless steel machine is equipped with a temperature-controlled chamber where the shredded pieces of the curd hold together, and with a cylindrical pipe the curd is pushed outside with a series of rotational movements. Then, cheesemakers put the curd in a mold almost without kneading because this curd cannot be to be crafted at hand. Hence, their name: robots do all the work, almost no handcraft is involved. Since this boiling method makes the cheese standard, kaşar cheeses can have consistent properties in each batch.

The use of robots was what the rural cheesemakers challenged when the GI legislation was designed in the meetings. They emphasized that the craft of making kaşar cheese resides in the traditional technique of “wet boiling” (sulu haşlama). This technique involves using a vat filled with hot brine (usually between 67 and 72°C) in which a large strainer (called sepet-a basket) is used to consolidate the small pieces of curds that are dried and pressed for approximately 12 hours. The cheesemakers use a wooden stick in this process. When they make sure that the curd holds together, the next step is to put it on the wooden counter to knead and make small forms. The kneading technique is called “tying the belly” (göbek bağlama). The real craft is to decide how much to boil, how much to knead, and tying the belly properly. And it is through this process that the cheesemakers sense ¹² the cheese, or rather: what the cheese can become when it starts to be aged. Kaşar cheesemakers told me that the texture they sense when kneading tells them what kind of texture to expect after a few months of ripening. By feeling the curd while kneading, and forming the round wheels by tying the belly of the curd, cheesemakers may also decide on the level of salt that they would like to add for the ageing period. Touching is also feeling the anticipated texture and taste. This synesthetic local experience is crucial for the sensorial know-how of kaşar cheesemaking, and for pasturing dairy infrastructures.

In the OIZ in Kars, the dual dairy infrastructures of pasteurization and pasturing coexist in many semi-industrial dairies. I observed in a few dairies that when it takes more than 90 minutes to transfer the milk that is collected in pastures to the dairy, cheesemakers are more inclined to use industrial technosciences: pasteurization and dry boiling. But when the pastures are closer to the dairy and the milk arrives quickly from close pastures, more experienced cheesemakers craft pasture-milk into kaşar cheese following the techniques indicated in the GI legislation. Kemal, one of these experienced kaşar cheesemakers in Kars OIZ, reminded me the famous phrase I kept hearing in Kars “a funeral can wait but never can the milk” (cenaze bekler, süt beklemez). ¹³ He told me that the real kaşar cheese has to be made from (raw) milk that comes from pastures. When it takes long time to transfer the milk, it becomes impossible for the cheesemakers to craft it as they wish. Thus, raw milk (that is defined in opposition to pasteurization) is not always the same as pasture-milk. In other words, besides the classification of the milk as pasteurized or unpasteurized/raw, cheesemaking practices oblige another classification that precedes this one: milk with or without pastures. Kemal explained that before the robots were introduced, the milk from pastures far from the dairy was not used for kaşar cheese because it was not possible to craft a texture that would hold together. On the one hand this meant that the robots were not simply a more economic, safe, or technological solution, but a necessity for cheesemakers in OIZ. They enabled to process the milk without pastures into cheese albeit its nonconformity to the Kars kaşar cheese sensorium. On the other hand, this also implies that the sensory know-how of young urban cheesemakers has increasingly become devoid of the techniques that can be adjusted to accommodate different materialities of pastures in the milk and in the cheese. In contrast, cheesemakers in rural dairies are well known with their distinctive techniques calibrated to the daily circumstances and particular pasture-milk they craft.

The first two weeks of July 2018 in Kars were sunny and with occasional hails. During that time I regularly visited a particular kaşar dairy in a village surrounded with vast pastures above 2000 meters altitude, shared by a dozen other villages. I had learnt that the cheesemakers here encountered a problem in ageing kaşar cheeses. All the three cheesemakers working in the dairy explained that when they boiled, kneaded, and formed the cheese, the curd texture felt like “it doesn’t hold together” (tutmuyor). They did not feel a “strong-enough” (yeterince güçlü) curd. They knew different curd-feelings from their previous experiences and this one was not familiar. Their sensorial know-how contradicted with their feeling of the substance they touch – it seemed to lack the desired level of sourness. When the cheeses were taken out of the molds after one day of resting, they did not show any physical signs of “not holding together.” Only after 4–5 days in the badval (ageing rooms), some of the 15–20 kg round wheels of kaşar cheeses started to crack. Realizing that cheeses risk getting wasted before they age a few months, they got much more concerned and started to try different techniques that would form the “right” texture. One of the cheesemakers, Mezit told me that some of the equipment in the dairy was new, and that it took time for cheesemakers to find the optimum techniques calibrated to the properties of the collected pasture-milk. Cheesemakers, I learned through him, learn to feel different pastures and their milk; place, weather, breeds of animals, feedstock and grass, or transportation techniques can all affect the condition of the pasture-milk. He added that he has a wooden stick (çubuk) that he has been using for years. The use of a wooden çubuk is widespread in Kars as part of the (wet) boiling technique to form a dough-like curd to be kneaded. Mezit said that his stick helps him to get the right texture of kaşar cheese. He thought that the cheeses, which showed signs of cracks but did not end up having cracks, might have been saved thanks to his old wooden stick. He explained to me that the çubuk carries the traces of different pastures, and that it contributes to the new equipment in this dairy with whatever it brings from the previous rural dairies he had worked as a cheesemaker. This was all a transgression of food safety regulations, which mandate that the çubuk should not be wooden. For cheesemakers though, wooden çubuk is part of pasturing dairy infrastructures.

Cheesemakers considered the possible sources of the problem for more than a week. They investigated the condition of the milk by the time it arrived at the dairy. The road to the village took very long for any car due to the large holes in the asphalt. Maybe, more important than the time, the movement of milk in the tank (çalkanlanması) during the transport might have caused the coagulation process not to happen properly. Although all the variables they checked in the milk (like temperature and composition) seemed fine, they tried to slightly change the amount of rennet they used to coagulate the milk. This did not result in the desired texture of the curd either. Then they considered the timing of the cheesemakers to start the process of wet boiling. When the curd was obtained through coagulation, it was left under pressure, usually for about 5–8 hours. I had learned in dairy technology classes that the curd acidifies during this time, and it should have a pH level around 5 when the wet boiling starts. While most cheesemakers have started to use pH-meters in the last 10 years in Kars, many explained to me that the pH-level they look for before boiling the curd might change according to daily circumstances. In some dairies, I had encountered the practice of putting cold water on the curd that was pressed to lengthen the time needed for the desired level of acidity. This would allow cheesemakers to have more time before they come back to the dairy to boil, knead and form the kaşar wheels. In July 2018, three cheesemakers tried different techniques and timings of acidification for a few days at each batch of production until they were able to obtain the “right” texture. This problem cost them a few hundred kaşar wheels that summer until they learned what that particular pasture-milk required from them in the dairy.

Hence, artisanal cheesemaking in rural dairies relies on a constant learning about the milk of different pastures, and modifying techniques to craft proper pasture-cheeses. In contrast to the use of pasteurization and robots that ensure a tasteless but holding together texture of kaşar cheese, wet boiling requires calibration of techniques; adjustments of cheesemakers’ sensory know-hows of the materiality of pasture-milk and its transformations. I suggest that this process of crafting pastures into the cheese pastures dairy infrastructures.

Conclusion

Infrastructuring pastures for dairy production requires sociotechnical arrangements that govern the milk flow from pastures to dairy production facilities. Industrial dairy production relies on the standardization of milk by expropriating the traces of its place-based characteristics such as the entanglements of pastures, cows, milk, and farmers in rural Kars. “Pasteurizing” dairy infrastructures make this expropriation possible by marginalizing pasture-milk and everyday life of dairy farming in pastures (mera hayvancılığı). The GI of Kars Kaşar cheese emerged for dairy farmers and artisanal cheesemakers as a means of infrastructuring pastures differently for dairy craft; i.e. of pasturing dairy infrastructures.

The collaboration between cheesemakers and dairy scientists that made possible the design of the GI legislation highlighted pasture-milk and craft practices calibrated to the everyday conditions. Pasturing dairy infrastructures in rural Kars involves practices that ensure the presence of pastures in the cheese. While scientific research on pasture-cheeses addresses food safety concerns especially around the raw-milk controversy, it also transforms everyday practices of pasture-cheesemaking. Transfer of milk from pastures to dairies becomes pivotal in the formation of a pasture-cheese sensorium in Kars kaşar cheese. Practices of sensing pastures in the milk, curd, and the cheese enable dairy crafts to be calibrated to the everyday conditions of pastures.

Challenging the “pasteurization” of dairy infrastructures involves sociotechnical arrangements attuned to the ways in which pastures are present throughout cheesemaking. The synesthetic experiences of crafting pasture-milk in which smell, taste, touch, and vision are simultaneously implicated, shape the sensorial know-how of cheesemakers. Pasturing, thus I argue is a particular mode of infrastructuring pastures for artisanal cheesemaking in rural Kars. It involves not only the collaboration of dairy farmers, rural cheesemakers, and a group of scientists, but also more-than-human communities that include cows, grass, milk, and various technosciences making possible the emerging pasture-cheesemaking sensorium of the Kars kaşar cheese.