Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how European Union food safety regulations have helped to homogenise human-microbe relations in local cheese production in Croatia. It argues that one consequence of this is that some cheese cultures may die out, and asks how these human-microbe relations might be reanimated.

Paper long abstract:

Concerning human-microbe relations in food production, European Union legislation predominately places its focus on keeping those microbes that are harmful to human health under control. As such, this legislation takes a Pasteurian approach whereby human-microbe partnerships such as the ones Paxson (2008, 2013) has described in her writing about post-Pasteurian cheese makers are absent. Based on fieldwork on human-microbe relations in dairy production in Croatia and building on work by scholars working in similar ‘post-socialist’ contexts (Dunn 2003, Jung 2014, Mincyte 2014), I describe how this approach taken in EU legislation serves to homogenise human-microbe relations: to work legally, farmers must follow these regulations and employ the food hygiene technologies they proscribe. One effect of this is that it has the potential to contribute to the homogenisation of the local microbiome, since cheeses that are made using “traditional” techniques are no longer legal. These starter cultures are not being nurtured by farmers in the same way as they were before, where there is less and less interest in making cheeses using these now "illegal" methods. In this paper, and in response to this, I consider from a number of different angles how human-microbe relations in cheese-making in this particular social context could be reanimated.