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Paper short abstract

In a Shenzhen urban village cafe, people explore permaculture together. I use ANT to describe how they build the ethics of food care through shared fermentation practices. This cafe is just like a SCOBY, re-embedding and co-fermenting eating in the intimate work of more-than-human communities.

Paper long abstract

This paper grows out of my participation in gardening and fermentation at a cafe in a Shenzhen urban village. Laboring alongside friends on the rooftop garden and tending jars of kombucha, I write from within the practice. We explored how microbial collaborations reshape a community's way of living.

At the center of our activities is an ongoing fermentation cycle. Kombucha brewed at the cafe becomes the base for pickles and breads. Kitchen scraps feed the compost. Compost nourishes vegetables in the rooftop garden. Harvests return to the table as shared meals. This is a more-than-human collaboration involving human participants and non-human actors. The community exhibits a strong ethos of inclusivity. People share food and resources, build relationships of mutual support, and labor and harvest together. In doing so, it embodies what the panel calls a collective, situated, and processual ethics of food care in more-than-human worlds. It re-embeds eating in the intimate work of weaving solidarity ties and metabolic communities that connect bodies, networks, food systems, and ecologies.

This cafe community, like a SCOBY, functions as a fermenting network that continuously recomposes relations between humans, microbes, plants, and urban space. This is precisely the kind of compound food practice the panel describes. The cafe is not merely a site for fermentation. It is itself a fermentation: a living assemblage where care, patience, and multispecies coexistence are cultivated. Here, eating becomes what the panel calls a practice of interdependence, solidarity, and care in a world-in-transition.