Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, stories proliferated across social media with images of newly started sourdough and other fermentation projects as shutdowns and quarantines led to a kind of (re)newed form of urban homesteading. Linked both to product shortages and the way in which those privileged enough to abide by stay-at-home orders relieved boredom and anxiety through “procrastibaking,” glass and ceramic containers of sourdough starters and regrown ends of vegetables sprouted up on windowsills and counters and in refrigerators. As these projects took off, those new to fermentation baking sought help online, forming communities to discuss successes and failures and generating memes devoted to creating, maintaining, and using sourdough starters.Footnote 1 The efflorescence of these pandemic fermentation projects deserves more than our passing attention even if they stand as a proxy for only a small and relatively advantaged portion of the global population. These fledgling efforts, after all, rely on the same basic interactions (flour and water coming together with yeast and lactobacilli to leaven bread) as the earliest known sourdough preparations used, underscoring fermentation’s preservation of heritage practices as well as food resources.
Though COVID-19 cultivation projects may fade, documenting these and other experiences of the pandemic and its socio-material effects for future generations appears critical, which is highlighted in our collective return to the history and media in this period to examine how people managed the 1918 influenza pandemic and other outbreaks prior to the advent of vaccines and other therapies. The preservation of our experience, of course, is not our only goal as we look to recover and address the loss of life and lifeways under the pandemic. With a history of balancing this dynamic between preservation and loss, we can begin to see various possibilities for applying a heritage-driven perspective as we readjust to a post-pandemic life. By the same token, attending to the destruction of particular lifeways alongside the loss of life highlights issues of memorialization and representation and their practical and ethical challenges with which heritage policy already grapples. Perhaps most importantly, the revitalization of fermentation projects links these traditions to the pandemic and underscores our need to engage heritage practices as a form of care that functions as both a method of safekeeping and a practice of empathy, attention, and affect.Footnote 2 While tempting analogies exist to millenarian movements and desires to reach back in the past to grapple with a new virus and deep uncertainty about the future, it is worth considering in what other ways heritage ferments prove “good to think” about themes of loss and preservation, the interpretation of novel viruses through traditional food practices, the coupling of heritage to microbes, and what these examples might suggest about this moment as we look toward an ambiguous future.
Microbial lineages and grieving for a cheese
Food writer Ruby Tandoh published the recent piece “How a Cheese Goes Extinct” chronicling the disappearance of an heirloom cheese in Britain and explaining the pandemic’s specific economic effects on small-scale artisanal cheese producers. Tandoh’s quote from cheese monger, Ned Palmer, is illustrative of the dynamic between affect and conservation, stating: “[W]hen a cheese is lost, ‘Your grief reaches back into the past – into decades and centuries and millennia of culture. You feel all of that.’”Footnote 3 Among other things, talk of grieving for a cheese reminds us of the kinds of lineages or inheritance that comes with the passing down of making particular styles of cheese, the precarity of these lifeways, and the fact that the loss of a cheese means not just the loss of ways of knowing and doing but also the possible species-level extinction of the microorganisms necessary for converting milk safely into cheese. This talk of lineages, grief, and destruction is also a reminder that the impact of these losses are felt within networks or assemblages of care involving objects (animals, lands, businesses, cheeses, cultures, and so on), subjects (farmers, politicians, restauranteurs, and others), and practices (pasteurization, methods to make particular cheeses) – assemblages already recognized in more expansive understandings of heritage that include a wide range of things tangible and intangible.Footnote 4
Several months prior to Tandoh’s piece being published in the New Yorker, news swirled briefly on social media about a preprint article that suggested countries with high levels of fermented food consumption appeared to have lower mortality rates than countries with lower consumption levels.Footnote 5 Connecting a general trend away from heritage food practices with increasing industrialization and standardization across food industries, the researchers speculated that decreasing microbial diversity in our guts might be making us more, or at least differently, vulnerable to viruses like COVID-19. If the study’s hypothesis was confirmed, as one reporter noted, it would be “the first infectious disease epidemic to involve biological mechanisms that are associated with a loss of ‘nature.’”Footnote 6 Around the same time, researchers Christy Spackman and Sara El-Sayed used speculative fiction during the Association for the Study of Food and Society’s annual conference to consider the potentially devastating consequences that our changing food practices and increased sanitation during the coronavirus pandemic might have on the relations we have with the communities of microorganisms living in, on, and around our bodies. These microorganisms not only contribute to fermented foods like cheese, but they also form a necessary component of human health and well-being.
Yet we find ourselves at a precipice where we potentially face untoward microbial loss as the result of human practices. This situation spurred Spackman and El-Sayed to pose an alternative future – one where public policy shifts from engaging microbes using Pasteurian logics focused on the eradication of microbial life in our food and broader health regimes to one that instead engages microbes as co-collaborators within a broader ecosystem.Footnote 7 In their reimagining, the cultivation of heritage fermented foods becomes central to our future selves as households embrace the kind of urban homesteading described at the beginning of this piece to ward against antimicrobial resistance and industrial consolidation. If we meet the causal claims between consuming fermented foods and mortality with reservation, these connections to heritage microbes do highlight the current attention to the microorganisms around us as a means to solve so-called “diseases of modernity” (from metabolic disorders and allergies to antimicrobial resistance and possibly novel viruses).
Microbial heritage
While the recognition that microbes are central to human health concerns is relatively recent, humans have fermented a wide range of products for millennia, and, currently, more than 3,000 traditionally fermented foods remain actively produced across the globe.Footnote 8 A number of these fermented food processes have been inscribed on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) lists of intangible cultural heritage. Traditional and artisanal fermented foods rely on natural or spontaneous fermentation, often using a starter culture and “back-slopping” – a practice whereby a portion of material from a previously fermented batch is mixed into new or unfermented raw materials, dependent on the biodiversity of organisms around them to work. While intangible components in the material practices and knowledge needed to create these foods are somewhat protected through their status on lists like UNESCO’s, the tangible components that help create these products are in a much more ambiguous state as, for example, some microorganisms have long been patented.Footnote 9 Yet microbial and social cultures are codependent – a threat to one extends to the other.Footnote 10 If there is a protective force in labeling fermentation as a heritage practice (conferring political and legal force vis-à-vis meeting UNESCO’s definition of intangible cultural heritage in the material practices and knowledge needed to create these foods), these examples that center on microorganisms prompt questions about what happens when we label microbes as such.
Cases are being made for microbes to be considered a material resource to be managed, circulated, and consumed like other forms of (in)tangible heritage.Footnote 11 One of the few groups to clearly connect the idea of heritage to microbes, archaeologists Christina Warinner, Jessica Hendy, and other members of the Max Planck Institute’s Heirloom Microbes Project define heirloom microbes as those “bacterial strains present in traditionally manufactured [non-industrial] … products” that humans have “cultivated and propagated since prehistory.”Footnote 12 This definition underscores how fermented foods come to us today through past practices and shared microbial inheritance – one that ties microbial diversity to fermentation practices past and present. In this sense, heritage or heirloom microbes are heritable, transferred from one generation to the next with their own “microbiological heritage” that should be researched “as we study our genetic, linguistic, and cultural heritages.”Footnote 13
Fermentation quite literally creates chains of intergenerational inheritance both through the efflorescence of microbial activity and the manner in which these foods get passed on and passed down, in the process, bringing together material and social worlds.Footnote 14 Like other kinds of heritage projects or cultural property, this kind of culinary knowledge and the microbial forms on which it depends are also potentially scarce.Footnote 15 This latter point feels particularly acute during COVID-19 when our antimicrobial actions to ward off catching the virus may accelerate rapid, if unpredictable, change and come with a sense of imminent loss tied to increasing death tolls and precipitously shifting lifeways. This impression of impending catastrophe may be doubly so in the case of fermentable foods because they require tending, feeding, and care of a variety of sorts to prevent their extinction – processes that have only become more precarious for some during COVID-19 as is the case for Tandoh’s farmers and other craft-oriented producers whose small-scale practices are more buffeted by the pandemic’s economic winds.
Heritage tastes
We might also consider how novel viruses get interpreted through heritage food and food practices. One way in which we come to, or want to, understand novel viruses is through an examination of how they come into being, which is increasingly reliant on narratives that locate potential and emergent “hot spots” in specific places, peoples, and practices that not only create “distinct spatial and material rearrangements” to ward off future pandemics but also seek to interpret during and post-outbreak how these arrangements, somewhat inevitably, have led to its occurrence.Footnote 16 In this respect, certain food practices come under scrutiny, like bush meat in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola epidemicFootnote 17 or the consumption of the civet cat and other wildlife in China during the 2003 SARS epidemic.Footnote 18 As a researcher living in Beijing during SARS, I witnessed the apportioning of blame to people from certain places and the attachment of “being backward” to particular practices that were then extended to the people who were thought to pursue them. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, traditional food production and distribution practices were unsurprisingly implicated – from living too closely to other speciesFootnote 19 to unhygienic places for food procurement like China’s “wet” markets,Footnote 20 despite post-outbreak research and retrospectives that point more explicitly to the fragmentation of animal habitat, population density, and increased pressure on “natural” landscapes as the root causes.Footnote 21 While there is nothing new about this kind of coupling, it is a sharp reminder of micro-biopolitical desires to bracket food practices into “good” and “bad” and ultimately governable buckets.Footnote 22
Considering such desires alongside Heather Paxson’s work on the micro-biopolitics of artisanal cheese makers brings me to the well-established literature on heritage practices and taste, which links the production of value to traditional practices themselves tied to specific places that are believed to impact both the taste and quality of the product produced there. This kind of taste relies, as Amy Trubek and Sarah Bowen note, on the intertwining of culture and environment – a combination of taste, territory, and cultural heritage.Footnote 23 The more we learn about microbes, the more we understand how they too are tied to taste, territory, and culture. If the fostering of certain bacteria, fungi, and yeasts in traditional food ferments helps create food, microorganisms remain invisible to the eye. That does not mean, however, that their presence cannot be otherwise sensed as they work. The process of making fermented foods make microbes visible and, indeed, sense-able, which heritage food practitioners exploit through a variety of sensory activities including touch, smell, sight, and taste. Consumers also claim to be able to taste the microbes in fermented foods as they seek out products that are more “natural” or “real” and produced in an authentic manner as an index of health and therapeutic effects.Footnote 24 Microbiological analyses of traditionally produced foods demonstrate that regional differentiation of the same food product produced in the same way may be linked to regional variations in the microbes at work – a kind of microbial terroir.Footnote 25 If heritage and taste are connected, and taste is connected to microbes and microbes to epidemics, can we make that final leap to epidemics, heritage, and taste? Perhaps. It seems certain that if we cannot quite taste a pandemic, then we can certainly speak of tastes of a pandemic, and these too are tied to heritage practices.
Indicative of the intertwining of heritage and heritability, making sourdough is a set of cultural practices enabled by specific microbial relations that spread across networks of social relations. The common practice of sharing sourdough starters was not entirely curtailed even in COVID-19 times as offers circulated online. Narratives travel with starters, and particularly old ones (think 100 years or more) survive and thrive across generations and possess their own origin stories and genealogies of inheritance.Footnote 26 Sourdoughs also become attached to particular places – most famously, San Francisco – that appear generative of terroir-like associations reliant on microbes produced in specific places. These linkages have even become enshrined in the appellation “sanfranciscensis” to the dominant strain of Lactobacillus found in sourdough produced in the area. Replacing “wild” microbes and yeast with synthetic or mass-produced ones, it appears, cannot reproduce the same flavors.Footnote 27
Working with this idea of a microbial terroir, Aspen Reese and colleagues’ recent study examined the relationship between starters and the environments in which they are housed to further explore and determine the places from which these essential microbes come.Footnote 28 If not framed exactly in this way, the study underscored classic heritage interests in materiality, knowledge, and practice across generations, even if the generations of microbes are much shorter than conventionally understood within heritage regimes. Standardizing the material (flour and, later, other ingredients) and knowledge (the recipe and relative skill levels of the bakers involved) in the production process, the bakers were brought to a single location to create loaves out of their starters. As the researchers anticipated, microbes from the bakers’ hands – but not from the flour – were found in the starters, indicating perhaps that the bakers themselves possess “heritage hands” in their ability to carry and transfer pieces of themselves, or at least microbial pieces of themselves, into the bread. In this manner, bakers might be thought of as a kind of “living human treasure” that is not simply because of the knowledge that they hold about making bread. Noting that the hands of bakers differ in this respect from non-bakers, the relations that bakers have with traditional fermented food practices may literally “remake the baker.”Footnote 29 Our bodies – through our relations with microbes – then become their own kind of record “not just [of] who we are but also how we have lived.”Footnote 30 While most of us will not be making enough sourdough while we stay at home to become our own microbial repository, the memory of the pandemic may live with us, triggered by the taste and smell of sourdough and sourdough starters.
Implications for the future
Rather than heritage microbes protecting us from viruses, this renewed attention to heritage ferments emphasizes the need to engage heritage practices as a kind of care that helps us think about why sourdough and other fermented foods matter in a time of pandemic. The very conditions of the pandemic have created new contexts for the socio-technical materialities of fermented food practices. COVID-19 has expanded, or possibly revived, cultural traditions, as we see in the explosion of sourdough starters and the pop-up of regrown vegetables in dishes and containers, while circumscribing or even ending others, as is the case with some heritage cheeses. North Carolina State’s Public Science Lab, the same lab that conducted the sourdough study above, launched a new initiative during the pandemic to collect “wild” sourdoughs and better understand the emplacement of microbial communities.Footnote 31 To this end, these efforts can be considered partially emancipatory. As the study with bakers demonstrates, we (and especially those immersed in these practices) might be carrying heritage microbes with us in unexpected ways that might help prevent or provide strategies to help stave off their extinction. Exploiting heritage microbes as part of the pandemic may also help us better apprehend our own sensory experiences and the links between taste, memory, and place. If we can taste heritage through our microbial relations, we can also perhaps think about what tasting a pandemic might mean.
Yet, conversely, the potential for the pandemic to exacerbate the loss of heritage tastes and heritage microbes is equally possible as we can see in the wake of selloffs by farmers, restauranteurs, and others invested in these practices. The potential absence of taste may come to refer not just to one of the telltale symptoms of the COVID-19 virus but also to the possibility of increased microbial extinction, which, as the Heirloom Microbes Project suggests, may bear more than a passing resemblance to the material loss of artifacts and knowledge. This is not only through the use of antimicrobials but also the potential of quarantine and stay-at-home orders to help “weed” out certain species of microbes because when we isolate ourselves, as Rob Dunn notes, we take others with us.Footnote 32 This should lead us toward caution in employing biopolitical frameworks that reify eradication as the only possibility for coming out the other side of these mass events, which was already demonstrated in the wake of Hong Kong’s H1N5 epidemic and other disease outbreaks that have led to wholesale slaughter of animals in an attempt to completely eliminate entire classes of microorganisms.Footnote 33 Will the resurgence of antimicrobials further push us toward microbial extinction?
Or will, as Spackman and El-Sayed appear to hope, pre-pandemic fears of microbial extinction, and especially antimicrobial resistance, potentially engender a resistance to the normative state and an industrially controlled microbial heritage?Footnote 34 Or, perhaps, heritage microbes as alluded to in the study mentioned at the beginning of this piece will be found to indeed have a palliative effect, leading to their incorporation as a kind of semi-tangible property. Yet, who owns the cultural patrimony of food ferments already represents a site of contestation. We see this illustrated in Korea’s fight with its regional counterparts over the pickled and fermented side dish of kimchi and Korea’s request for international protection of both term and practice through an international standard that hinged on fermentation to differentiate its spicy pickled cabbage from those of China and Japan.Footnote 35 While our collective interest in, or even willingness to consider, heritage microbes themselves as yet another kind of cultural property – and implement geographic indications or other protections to further microbial resource management – still lags behind an industry that already subjects them to patents, the pandemic offers another opportunity for the rest of us to rethink this intransigence.
