In 1952, portrait artist Robert Thom finished a painting of French chemist Louis Pasteur and his wife Marie. Marie looks through an open door in the background towards her husband who, facing the viewer, holds two experimental flasks to the light and inspects them with sincerity. The painting belonged to a series of similar depictions titled Great Moments in Medicine that had been commissioned by the pharmaceutical giant Parke, Davis and Company between 1948 and 1964. (Note 1) At the height of the Cold War, the paintings celebrated the superiority of Western science and medicine and glorified American enterprises as harbingers of innovation and progress. In a book written by Parke-Davis pharmacist and amateur historian George A. Bender accompanying the series, Pasteur is depicted as triumphant in the battle not only against scientific superstition but also against microbial unruliness. (Note 2) Metaphors of struggle and control—Pasteur “combats,” “persists,” and “triumphs”—reflect the antagonistic relationship between humans and microbes ushered in by Pasteur’s work. It lasted over a century (and, arguably, continues today).
In addition to three standalone articles, this issue of Gastronomica includes a special section (composed of five articles and an introduction) on microbes in food studies. The special section wrestles with the fallout of the Pasteurian antagonism between humans and microbes and examines the “post-Pasteurian” moment that succeeded it. Drawing on anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) scholar Heather Paxson’s influential account of cheesemaking in the United States, the authors of the special section trace a transition: from Pasteurian regimes of microbial control to a post-Pasteurian world in which humans and microbes exist in relationships of collaboration and cohabitation. (Note 3) But this is not another narrative of progress or chronological succession; instead, the authors tease out the complex dynamics between Pasteurian and post-Pasteurian frameworks.
Pasteurian control has allowed us to think little about microbes in our day-to-day lives. And yet, write Maya Hey and Sarah Elton in their introduction to the special section, “microbes are an invisible center of food systems.” They structure the regulation and taste of food and shape food-related institutions, ideas, and practices. They organize power relationships across individual and societal spheres. At the same time, they are intimately entangled with the materiality of food and bodies. Drawing on central food studies concepts such as materiality, embodiment, Foucauldian biopolitics, and Paxson’s notion of microbiopolitics, and inspired by recent scientific insights into the microbiome, the authors make microbes the center of their analyses and invite us “to engage with microbes as a co-constitutive aspect to studying food.”
The articles of the special section bring together methodologies from anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, rhetoric, philosophy, and environmental humanities; they join experienced writers with emerging voices; and they assemble perspectives from Czechia, Germany, South Africa, and the United States. In short, this is food studies par excellence.
Control
The authors of the special section think with Pasteurian notions of control and
post-Pasteurian symbiotic imaginaries, and challenge both in various ways. In “The
Cyborg Politics of Milk Microbiota: Biopolitics in the Technological Frame,” Annie
Sandrussi shows how gendered notions of animal bodies, reproductive processes, and
the fluid nature of milk inform the management of microbiota in milk production.
Gendered notions determine how “a biopolitics of control and prevention”manifests in
microbial management, depending on the type of milk product in question: from milk
to cheese to precision-fermented milk. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s notion of the
cyborg, Sandrussi reveals how microbialmanagement inmilk relies on a “commitment
to a biotechnology of prevention that depends upon the meticulous management of
gendered bodies as ‘natural’ and ‘unruly.'”
By contrast, the biodynamic wine producers in Nikolai Siimes, Nick Lewis, and Emma L. Sharp’s “Probiotic Approaches to Agricultural Microbiomes: Collaborations in Biodynamic Wine Cultivation” adopt “probiotic” approaches to microbes (a term they and other authors in the section borrow fromthe influential work of environmental geographer Jamie Lorimer). These wine growers work with, not against, microbial life, resisting the “eradicatory ethics of violence” of conventional viniculture. But rather than a monolithic practice defined by its antagonism to conventional farming, the authors find a dynamic field with porous boundaries to traditional agriculture. Biodynamic growers prize experimentation and have complex relationships to scientific forms of knowledge production. They are resourceful and adopt a variety of approaches. They place equal importance on values other than financial gain. At the same time, the authors show how multispecies relationships in biodynamic agriculture “must still serve anthropocentric goals,” and farmers balance ecological with economic imperatives.
Microbes are also implicated in the novel vertical farming technologies of Lukáš Senft, Tereza Stöckelová, Varvara Borisova’s “The Microbiopolitics of Novel Foods: The Pro- and Antibiotic Implications of Cultivated Meat and Aquaponic Farming.” But whereas these technologies rely on the collaboration of microbes, the authors show that their microbial relationships to humans are still governed by a politics of containment. Vertical farmers control microbial life in indoor spaces by reducing certain aspects of human-microbial encounters while amplifying others. Such attempts at control replicate the productivist logics of conventional farming “to meet sustainability and efficiency goals.”
Connection and Disconnection
Whereas Pasteurian regimes strive towards distance between microbes and humans,
post-Pasteurianism allows for human-microbial collaborative co-existence. This
special section examines and challenges notions of connection and disconnection
in microbial-human encounters. In her study of homemade preserved foods carried
by migrants between their old and new homes, Sevgi Mutlu Sirakova proposes the
notion of “connected foods” to describe relational processes that determine food
quality through familiarity and direct contact with people and contexts of production.
Her article “Connected Food: Carrying Microbial Relations” explores how microbes
are involved in the making of these foods; they travel with migrants to new contexts
where they shape microbial landscapes and co-create migrant marketplaces. But even
here, Pasteurian notions of control threaten post-Pasteurian regimes of connectedness,
as border controls increasingly restrict the movement of informal foods.
Connection also emerges as a key analytic in Overstreet’s microbial ethnography.
She articulates the notion of “digestive belonging,” which describes the processes by
which human guts are remade, “immunologically and biologically,” by the microbes
they enter into intimate contact with in the farm environment. These processes
anchor humans to place and establish links among, as well as between, them and
the animals they care for. By contrast, in Sandrussi’s exploration of milk microbiota,
the degree of disconnection from the feminized body structures different modes of
human-microbial relationships in different forms of milk: milk microbiota are closest
to the feminized bodies of both cows and women, and therefore require greater
degrees of technoscientific control; precision-fermented milk (as well as plant milk)
is furthest disconnected from associations with feminized bodies, and therefore least
in need of mediation; cheese is in between. In milk, Sandrussi suggests, the natural
continues to be subordinated to the technological along gendered lines.
Terroir
The contributions to the special section challenge familiar notions of “terroir.” For Siimes, Lewis, and Sharp, centering microbes invites new understandings of terroir that go beyond notions of soil and land, and take both human and non-human interventions into account. The Anthropocene, climate change, and responses to them (such as biodynamic viticulture), they conclude, demand paying attention to “messy, ambivalent entanglements” between human and microbial life. In her analysis of “connected foods,” Sirakova examines traditional fermented foods as “carriers of bio-cultural diversity” whose unique taste is determined not only by place-specific microbial activity but by the microbial terroir of the hands that make and carry the food across borders. Terroir thus becomes a relational quality in food transfers.
Overstreet’s notion of “digestive belonging” extends terroir “beyond the palate and into the gut.” For the farmers she encountered, raw milk is a product not of the regional climate or environmental conditions, but “of the farm” and of the specific constellations of microbes, people, and animals that inhabit it. By contrast, the vertical farming technologies analyzed by Senft, Stöckelová, and Borisova “reinforce the disconnections between ‘food-making and place-making.”‘ Independence from the serendipities of soil and seasons are what motivates approaches like aquaponics and cultivated meat in the first place, they suggest. But in the end, such disconnection is flawed and illusionary: Seasonal dynamics continue to impact microbial communities, and “new human-microbial natures” are the inevitable by-product of containment regimes.
Together, the papers of this special section critique Pasteurian notions of control, but also assert, in the words of Senft, Stöckelová, and Borisova, that “flourishing with microbes cannot be achieved through a post-Pasteurian understanding alone.” Instead, the section encourages us to view our current predicament as a particular kind of “microbial moment” that, along with other such moments, punctures the history of our relationship with microbes—not in a static series of “Great Moments of Microbes,” but in a constantly evolving and open-ended symbiosis that allows us to develop the adaptable responsiveness demanded by the Anthropocene.
Fear, Freedom—and Cake
In addition to the special section, this volume of Gastronomica includes three standalone pieces that echo some of the special section’s themes, but also introduce new aspects. The postwar anxieties that brought forth the Great Moments in Medicine series also produced US nuclear fears, which Rebecca Burditt creatively reads through depictions of cake. Cake, she convinces us in her article “Sweet Ruin: Cakes and the Visual Culture of Anxiety, 1945–1960,” uniquely represents the contradictions of the atomic age and reflects the complex entanglement of geopolitics and gender politics during the Cold War. In particular, the rise of cake mixes, with their promise of a quick fix to an arduous task, threatened to expose the fragility of postwar gender norms, just as nuclear weapons promised an easy win that masked America’s declining reputation on the global stage. Through close readings of visual sources, historical accounts, and archival documents, Burditt shows how cake imagery “did not aim to realistically portray the nuclear age” but instead “modeled how it would feel to confront the nuclear age” with “an unflinching acceptance of the bomb’s sublime power.”
While the Cold War thus transformed America’s political and gendered relations, it also redrew the map of Americans’ social and culinary relations to the world. Postwar America was a hub of culinary experimentation and transformation, a phenomenon which Minh-Ha T. Pham explores in her article “A Story as Old as Cha Gio”. While a great deal of focus within the burgeoning field of Vietnamese American food studies has been on refugees and on the period after 1975, Pham tells the stories of Vietnamese war brides, diplomats, housewives, students, and steamship workers who came to the United States between 1945 and 1975. She uncovers networks of mutual aid and collaboration—from airport pickups to organized gatherings—that supported the arrival of Vietnamese people in the United States and cemented Vietnamese cooking in the culinary landscape of America well before the first Vietnamese restaurant opened its doors.
The long-term impact of postwar culinary diversification was the free availability of ever more foodstuffs and foodways to those who could afford them. But this newfound freedom of choice also came with new imperatives to exert control and exercise restraint. In “(Don’t) Let Them Eat Cake: The Illusion of Food Freedom” (yet another story about cake, always an apt dish to end with), Phoebe Mitchem takes on the notion of “food freedom” and its ambivalent implications for those who, like Mitchem herself, suffer from severe and multiple food allergies. Recent diet literature has proclaimed food freedom a desirable goal for eaters and offered it as an alternative to what it caricatures as an exaggerated attitude of control towards food. Drawing on her nuanced knowledge of food matters that tends to come with longstanding exposure to nutritional risk, Mitchem explores the porous boundaries between disordered eating and rational concerns over food that might be harmful. While food freedom might be an unrealistic goal for those who—for whatever reason— need to be in control of their food intake, Mitchem offers an alternative in “food fascination”—a balanced interest in what we ingest and in its effects on our bodies. We can have our cake and eat it too.
—Lisa Haushofer, November 2025
Notes
1. Parke, Davis & Co., Great Moments in Medicine (Northwood Institute Press, 1966). The original paintings remain the property of Parke-Davis and are stored in Chicago.
2. George A. Bender, Great Moments in Medicine: The Stories and Paintings (Northwood Institute Press, 1966).
3. Heather Paxson, The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of
California Press, 2013).