Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces the panel, drawing on our respective fieldworks with ecological engineers and cheese makers. We attend to the contradictory impulses of utility and attachment in making with microorganisms, and to the effect of sanitary norms and the emergence of a 'second modernity.'

Paper long abstract:

We draw on our respective fieldworks with ecological engineers engaged in constructing soil, and raw-milk cheese producers to show how the story of making soil or cheese is a process of struggling with materials and microbes, and how makers learn to take the life of microbial communities seriously. Ecological engineers attempt to grow fertile soil in order to cope for global soil loss. They refer to microorganisms as 'collaborators' in making soil, and describe them as 'fellow ecosystem engineers'. Humans 'indirect action' to fertilize soils consists not in bringing nutrients to plants, but in feeding the microorganisms which in turn transform unaggregated materials into well-structured soil. In this, humans find themselves caught up in two seemingly contradictory impulses: selecting 'useful' types of organisms and framing the construction process in a robust way, versus the constant opening up of new attachments to microorganisms.

The contradictions brought about by attempts to enframe microorganism's action are also palpable in the case of the modernization of raw milk cheese production. Here, the electrification of farms and the European sanitary norms resulted in a drop in raw milks' microbial richness. To cheese makers, this milk is 'too clean', or even 'dead'. Because milk does not ferment as well, they need adding commercial starter cultures, which results in less typical and tasty cheese. Cheese producers, technicians and scientists thereby cultivate or promote a new attentiveness to microbism, which Demeulenaere interprets - following Ulrich Beck - as the invention of a second modernity for raw-milk cheeses.