Fermentation in Post-antibiotic Worlds

Abstract

The ethnographic focus of this paper is a group of sourdough bakers based in Finland, with a specific view on a fermentation workshop in 2019. In this workshop, emerging human-microbe relations were drawn, bringing attention to a post-antibiotic world. Studying bread making necessitates a more-than-human analysis that foregrounds microbes as central characters situated in the political climate of increasing populism and the Anthropocene. In this paper I describe bakers, termed microbiohackers, putting forward critiques of capitalism that link ecological extraction, political oppression, and industrial food production. Crafting an alternative to the dominant public health narrative of microbes as a threat and antimicrobial resistance, I use the notion of diffraction to discuss the complex entanglements of the microbial/material and social/political. In the hands of the bakers, fermentation, sourdough, and antimicrobial resistance present an opportunity to question dualisms of how microbes are thought about and to create emergent post-antibiotic futures.