Microbial shepherding: The creation of culture(s) at the more-than-artisan scale

Abstract

In the cultural world of fermentation, pasteurization is often positioned as a point of no return through which living foods are transformed into dead, less valuable, “industrial” products. This is especially true in the world of artisanal cheese, where “raw milk” has become synonymous with environmentally conscious, community-oriented foods that demand more skill and labor than industrial, pasteurized cheese but yield higher levels of deliciousness—a dichotomy amplified by the foci of social science and humanities scholarship. Mid-sized artisanal producers, such as Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont, challenge this distinction. We use a case study of this creamery, which produces and widely distributes both raw and pasteurized milk cheese using semi-automated processes to elucidate “microbial shepherding” as an organizing principle for microbe-human relations across the raw-pasteurized divide. Microbial shepherding is an actor's category that appeared throughout our interviews and participant observation. Across farms and cellars, cheesemakers and managers explicitly and implicitly used microbial shepherding to characterize connections to the landscape, the value that human and microbial workers brought to their products, and company culture. We offer this operational metaphor as a useful analytic for characterizing more-than-human work beyond normal binaries of wildness/domesticity or collaboration/control, while still noting the asymmetry of power within this relationship. We then use this concept in conversation with other modes of configuring microbe-human relations, such as “microbiolitics” and “microgovernmentality,” and ultimately signal how pasteurization may not necessarily be the singular defining moment for organizing such relationships that it is often taken to be. Instead, we argue that microbial shepherding indicates how the company tries to hold the variously “heterotopic” visions of itself together as it works to create various, unified cultures of valuable labor.