Paper Short Abstract:

The paper focuses on skyr as biocultural heritage and skyr-making practices. I explore how skyr-makers see their skyr practices considering past traditions and future prospects for sustainable living, and how community, identity and emotional bonding is achieved through multispecies interactions.

Paper Abstract:

This paper focuses on the sour dairy product skyr as a biocultural heritage and the maker cultures that skyr-making practices engender. In recent years, skyr has been propelled to international dairy stardom and labelled as national food heritage. Slow Food added skyr to its “Ark of Taste” in 2007 and emphasized that the main differences between traditional skyr and its industrialized counterpart are, first, the use of a pinch of older skyr to make a new batch and, second, a lengthy preparation time due to older methods of straining.

The live cultures of skyr provide an excellent example of symbiosis between microbial cultures and human cultures through their respective histories, constituting long-standing “cultures of cultures”. Indeed, the resilience and adaptation of the microbiomes of skyr, their natural and cultural selection over time, together with the constant introduction of new bacteria and yeast, fostered great microbial diversity. As a result, these microbes constitute a unique part of biocultural diversity in Iceland.

Through interviews and participant observations, I investigate how practitioners see their skyr practices in light of past traditions and future prospects for healthy sustainable living as part of the “probiotic zeitgeist”, and how sociality, community, identity and emotional bonding is achieved through these ecological interactions.

The paper thus examines the value of human-microbial collaboration and how microbial cultures engender and maintain human cultural practices. Skyr making highlights the social value of inter-species symbiosis between humans and microbes, or the reciprocal, co-evolutionary relationships between life forms.