Paper short abstract:

This communication presents a general panorama of raw milk cheese resistance in Brazil, their organization and flux, through content published on social networks and websites.

Paper long abstract:

The most recent text governing raw milk cheese by the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture classified in 2015 this product as high risk for public health. Nevertheless, supported by an "epistemic community" of consumers, chefs, researchers and civil associations, small farmers still resist and continue transforming raw milk. They claim that risk can be successfully managed by preserving the microbial environments in which cheese is produced. Arbitrary acts, such as the public destruction of 13 tons of artisanal raw milk cheese Canastra, in the state of Minas Gerais in November 2015, led to a revolt in social networks and emerges as a "sanitary-political-act". A Facebook post of SerTãoBras (an ONG that fights for raw milk legalization in Brazil), with a photo from this episode showing a truck full of cheese on its way to a landfill has been viewed by more than 2.4 million people, has been shared 24 000 times and has received over 2800 comments. Using Netvizz tool and the data from this post, we collected all comments and identified food safety and public health controversies. A large majority of people question the credibility of federal regulations and express the intention to continue consuming raw milk cheese and its original bacterias. The theoretical framework adopted is the Actor-Network Theory (Latour). The methodology of mapping controversies is used to explore the complexities of scientific and technical debates around Brazilian raw milk cheese.