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Paper short abstract

We chart the evolving role of the digital in cheesemaking discourse over four decades of articles from the trade journal Profession Fromager. Through computational controversy mapping, we discuss how cheessue publics are sparked through cheese-related issues and their digital melting pots.

Paper long abstract

The notion of digital foodscapes invites interdisciplinary reflection on the confluence of wider societal discourses and mundane practices of food production and eating that has taken place through the mediatization of both over the past four decades (Allgaier et al., 2025; Schneider et al., 2025). One way to invite such reflection is to ask how the digital has manifested itself in changing ways as a factor and a concern in the professional discourse of a particular agricultural situation. In this paper we draw on the archives of the major francophone trade journal for cheesemaking, Profession Fromager, to map the evolving issuescapes forming in and around caseiculture from the birth of the World Wide Web in 1991 (first website) until today. Using methods from digital controversy mapping (Venturini & Munk, 2021), particularly computationally assisted semantic mapping, we conduct a quali-quantiative analysis to identify major changes in the way cheese has been issuefied (Marres, 2012) and the shifting ways the digital has figured has part of this issuefication. This allows us to locate the effects of digitalized food and eating in the professional discourse of a specific agricultural situation where we know that controversies over issues like raw milk, climate change, cultural heritage or microbial diversity have become key factors of digital foodscapes. We coin the phrase ‘cheessue publics’, a spin on Noortje Marres’ issue publics (2007), to underline the fact that cheese sparks publics into being in ways that are particular to the situation and its digital media.