Microbes change the way you understand the world. As scholars of food and food systems, we’ve been centering microbial questions in our research. We’ve argued for making visible the microscopic life that is, for the most part, invisible to the human eye. These are lifeforms that, until recently, have been largely sidelined in academia outside of fields like microbiology and infectious disease.As we explored in the introduction to the first edition of our two-part special issue in Gastronomica, making microbes explicit in food studies complicates normative ways of thinking that position humans as separate from the material world (Hey and Elton 2026). It’s not that microbes have been completely overlooked. Everyone knows that cheese and wine and miso and kimchi are the product of microbes in fermentation—that microorganisms turn carbohydrates and other sugars into lactic acid, producing the flavors so many people relish. Also, anyone who has been told to wash their hands before dinner or got a stomach upset from something they ate that was contaminated by certain bacterial strains, knows microbes intimately. But going beyond an acknowledgement of their existence to instead center them raises many questions that are relevant to the commitments of food studies—namely, about agency, scale, and power.Importantly, focusing on microbes fundamentally challenges human exceptionalism. It forces us to look at the ways in which relationships with other species, operating across different scales and outside of human timeframes, co-produce our food, food systems, and everything else about the world that we experience day-to-day. In focusing on microbes, the human becomes fuzzier, as if bringing the microscale into focus pushes the human into the background, the contours of their personhood diminishing and blurring. In food and food systems, making visible these more-than-human agencies complicates who is the protagonist.Microbes call into question who has agency. Centering microbes in kombucha brewing, for instance, draws attention to who and what makes the beverage come into existence. Inside the kombucha jar floats tea, sugar, biofilm. Food studies scholars have explored the colonial histories of kombucha’s ingredients—see Jayeeta Sharma (2011) on tea and Sidney W. Mintz (1985) on sugar. In the kombucha jar, these ingredients come together with microbes and enact other agencies. Christy Spackman (2018: 60) centers microbes in an analysis of a kombucha controversy in the United States. Spackman finds that microbes and people in brewing are co-partners arguing, “Microbes open the doors for a proliferation of possibilities beyond production. Without living microbes, kombucha becomes just another slightly sweetened, acidified, carbonated beverage imbricated in capital-intensive systems of production, distribution and consumption.” Thinking about the human-microbial partnerships across scales that produce the drink builds on the food studies canon to deepen an understanding of what tea and sugar have done and can do with different microbial entanglements.Further, microbes call into question who is in control, who is responding to whom, and who is tasked with metabolic and reproductive labor. Centering microbes in narratives of supply chains and culinary infrastructure (Pilcher 2016) changes one’s understanding of how food systems work. Knowing that humans make yogurt with lactic acid–producing bacteria, for example, is different from thinking that the human and the microorganisms together make the yogurt. Or, going further, is it more accurate to say that the microorganisms in the yogurt in fact make the yogurt for the humans? In the case of yogurts in Turkey and Bulgaria, the question of who is making the yogurt is complicated even further in cases where home production involves yet another species, the ant (Sinotte et al. 2025). Scholars have called this ant yogurt. Should we name all the species involved in production?In increasingly precarious food systems, innovations and so-called nature-based solutions are moving toward using microbes in lieu of macro-organisms like cows and other mammals to produce food (Folkers and Opitz 2022). The critiques of this kind of technosolutionism are clear (Guthman 2024), highlighting just how logics of exploitation persist. Yet, as food scholars, we must still grasp just where exactly microbial agency sits. As food studies continues to explore microbial research questions, we implore scholars to examine microbial agencies and unpack microbial involvement in power relations.Centering microbes also reminds us that scale does not equal significance—just because we’re bigger doesn’t make us more important. The ‘micro’ prefix given to microorganisms only designates a threshold of size. So, the very tiny, from our point of view, reflect back onto us the differences that matter at meso, macro, and meta registers. Work on the microbiopolitics of artisanal food production (for example, cheese, as per Paxson 2007) or the spread of antimicrobial resistant genes in microbes globally that is fueled in part by antibiotic use in livestock industries (Landecker, 2016) reminds us that small can be mighty or that small can provoke mighty responses or outcomes.In the scaling-up and industrialization of food systems, relentless standardization and hygiene rhetoric to keep food safe from microbial pathogens has standardized microbes themselves. Now yogurt made in a factory has less microbial biodiversity than yogurt made in other settings (Mutlu Sirakova, 2023). Scale also exposes tensions related to standards, resources, and time. Microbes decenter human years and show us the importance of considering radically different timescales (Hey, forthcoming). Attention to scale thus brings into view questions of (bio)diversity, globalization, and more-than-human temporalities.We do not aim to celebrate the smaller scale one-sidedly. There is a reason we want to keep pathogenic microbes out of our food. On the one hand, microbes may be necessary, as in the soil and water systems that undergird food systems, in livestock, in food production, in our bodies. But on the other hand, it is important to recognize that microorganisms are not wholly benevolent either. Further, microbial centering should not undermine what humans can do to, and in the place of, microbes. We dump nitrogen that we’ve synthesized onto six thousand acres of soil at a time, rather than waiting for clover and microscopic lifeforms in the soil to fix the element. We refrigerate foodstuffs to reduce reproduction of bacteria and fungi on fresh produce long enough to transport food from farms to consumers without it going bad. People pasteurize milk to guarantee that it doesn’t carry disease, vanquishing pathogenic microbes. These are just some examples in food systems where humans assert their power over microorganisms. Microbes don’t just do things to us. They are subject to our will too. So centering microbes does not minimize the power that people have over these microscopic lifeforms. This approach does not nullify human agency.Thus, in centering microorganisms, we do not aim to diminish the power that human actions have over microbial life. Rather, we aim to show that microbes make visible just how inextricable we are from microbes, at scales that span individual bodies, communities, regulation-bound regions, and our damaged planet as a whole. Scale can also show us how human agency is bound up in microbial agency—and vice versa. It reveals how dependent we are on them and how they in turn are imbricated in systems of power and privilege, liberation and oppression. Certainly in food systems, human and more-than-human agencies are bound up together (Elton 2025). So, just because microbes challenge the idea of the human being in charge does not dismiss politics from analysis and let people off the hook. It is also important to recognize that the (microbial) world around us is indifferent to humans and simply act upon, or with, what’s there.One cautionary note is worth spelling out. Attention to scale cannot flatten all microorganisms into a single category. Microbes span different kingdoms and phyla. “They” are many and diverse embedded in all sorts of relational tangles. This is why we argue for a focus on power relations and the particular configurations of person, place, microbe, and foodstuff. In this way, a shift toward a relational understanding of microbial worlds becomes a portal into a different way of doing research, raising ontological questions (as seen in schools of thought like object-oriented ontologies, or OOO, and actor-network theory, or ANT). Also, political, economic, and ecological stakes make social theory good company in analysis.As the second instalment of our two-part special issue, we add to the discourse on fermentation (see the recent special issue of Food, Culture & Society, Stern and Gill 2025) in this edition with two pieces. Syama Wynn explores fermentation at two sites, an urban fermentary producing different edible ferments and a farm where fermentation is part of agricultural practice, including making compost tea. Drawing on research conducted in a multispecies ethnography, Wynn finds these practices offer an example of resurgence amid a food system characterized by elimination and control. The paper ultimately explores how fermentation today offers a response to the industrialization of food systems. In another paper, Molly McConnell, who comes at the topic from rhetorical studies, writes about failure and fermentation. Understanding failure in the context of lacto-fermentation pickling in the domestic sphere, argues McConnell, is “ripe with meaning.” Failure asks that we think of microbes as relational actors without policing them.The issue also casts light on the new ways that microbes are imbricated in seemingly ever-expanding forms of capitalist extraction, including in food systems. Mariachiara Ficarelli digs into the financialization of animal waste in northern Italy. The burgeoning biomethane industry enlists microbes in producing a commodifiable and thus valuable gas from the manure produced by meat and dairy livestock. Finally, Elisabeth Abergel and Daphne Esquivel-Sada bring to light how extremophiles—microorganisms that can live in the most hostile of environments that are currently being harnessed in biotech—are being constructed to be “drivers of food futures.” These four articles leave us at a juncture, at the end of our two-part series. They elucidate the wildly different paths that food systems and therefore food studies research can take in the future as more and more scholars center microbes too.
Elton et al. (Thu,) studied this question.