Paper short abstract:

Through my Ph.D. research, I aim to understand how sustainability is tied to human-animal and environmental health. To do so, I aim to study a Sardinian cheese called “su casu marzu” (“the rotten cheese”) as a product of a multispecies alliance between men, sheep, microbes, and Piophila Casei flies.

Paper long abstract:

What does “sustainable food” mean? And how is it tied to human-animal health? To answer these questions, I set to reflect on how ethical and instrumental practices are embodied in multispecies assemblages, both through intensive and extensive breeding methods. Sardinia represents an excellent case study due to the continuous translational processes between capitalist and local practices for animal breeding and food production. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I aim to apply Haraway’s symbiogenesis to the relations that bind together the different species gravitating around cheesemaking in Sardinia. In particular, I will investigate a Sardinian traditional cheese called su casu marzu (“the rotten cheese”), produced through an alliance between men, sheep, microbes, and the maggots of Piophila Casei flies. This cheese embodies a set of nutritional, reproduction, and caring practices of different species: its supposed sustainability is impossible to separate from its embeddedness in multispecies life and death processes. Multispecies assemblages express these trajectories through their interactions with ecosystems and often materialize them in the form of food products. Anna Tsing’s matsutake mushroom is an example of such co-dependency: its life is dependent upon sociopolitical as well as environmental forces, among which human disturbance is but one of the factors. Through such understanding, I intend to contribute to the reflection about human-animal health, highlighting how one-health approaches cannot ignore local multispecies configurations. Specifically, I am to observe the links between different practices of human-animal health and food sustainability.