Paper short abstract:

Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with traditional food practitioners in Turkey and Bulgaria, this paper focuses on the old practices of yogurt-making to demonstrate how fermentation constitutes a plot where ants, plants, and rains emerge as the protagonists.

Paper long abstract:

In my search of diverse yogurt-making practices, I noticed that some of them were already at risk of being lost as they were hardly practiced anymore. My intention with this paper is to record and thereby preserve by sharing the multispecies stories of three old methods of yogurt fermentation before they are totally forgotten. Each of these practices has a different mediation of fermentation. The first involves collaboration with an ant colony; the second uses the root of nettle (Urtica dioica); and the last one gets the help of springtime rains. These practices illuminate how people cultivate diverse and localized modes of multispecies collaborations in their daily lives to enhance nutrition, taste, and other properties of their staple food.

Although this paper takes fermentation and specifically yogurt as its starting point its broader ambition is to trace lost interspecies relationships and the “socio-natural” connectivity of food. Here I believe fermentation provides a fertile ground to grasp how we are made and unmade by the relations we cultivate with other species. From a multispecies perspective, these practices call for an ecological approach that puts practitioners in the context of an active engagement with beings around them. By thinking with fermentation, it provides insights on how localized foodways create the interdependent flow of relations and multispecies collaborations which differ substantially from one place to another like the indigenous tastes each location holds.