Schiffler, Elizabeth. “Microbial Theatricality: Selfmade, Celebrity, and Scales of Hunger.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 6, nos. 1–2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a133
In 2013, Christina Agapakis, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology, swabbed celebrities' armpits, belly buttons, and feet for microbial samples to make cheese. The “human-made” cheese resulted in the art exhibition Selfmade, a sensory installation inviting audience members to confront intimate and smelly relationships between humans and microbes, all through fermented edible matter. Artist Olafur Eliasson, food journalist Michael Pollan, and baker and writer Ruby Tandoh all offered their bodies as cultivators for cheese production. The prominent figures, and their companion bacteria, validate and complicate the relations that Selfmade claims to produce. At first glance, the installation invites a sensory entanglement with nonhuman matter. There is, of course, more than meets the eye. Hunger, eating, and even cooking are not exclusive to humans but perhaps intrinsic to planetary life. Human, celebrity, and microbial actors blur across the many mediums materialized in the food performance. As much as Selfmade is a nonhuman performance, it is also because of its very humanness, celebrity, and theatricality that we find an essential entanglement in food and performance studies: a nearly imperceptible (or non-sensible) proximity of human and nonhuman, at the microscopic scale.
Agapakis is not alone in attuning to the microbial. There has been a recent turn in popular food culture as well as nutrition, microbiology, and science and technology studies to examine the human's microbiome, often through food; think of cheese, kimchi, yogurt, kefir, and other fermented foodstuffs as potential in terms of bodily and microbial compositions. These multispecies studies reveal the human body to be a less bounded, singular figure than much of Western scientific knowledge has previously narrated. As the body yearns for food, the hungry gut reveals the complexities of those bodies entangled in the act of eating. Food scholars and artists affirm the claims posited by countless probiotic supplements: our gut is full of trillions of microbial consumers, and eating food is not a unilateral act. Our companion eaters, those microbes waiting to eat alongside us, fundamentally put the human–and, as Selfmade illustrates, celebrity–into question. Jamie Lorimer has identified the emergence of microbial effects on conceptions, both theoretical and public, of the human in “The Probiotic Turn” in The Probiotic Planet (2020). Lorimer specifies the role microbes play in the larger Ontological Turn. While the nonhuman turn in performance has incorporated a host of new actors, actants, and agents, “the probiotic turn” invites the need for an expanded scalar analysis in nonhuman performance.
The microbial opens up a range of material questions about performance, as microbes are a relatively large category of nonhuman organisms often defined to encompass bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other “living things that are found all around us and are too small to be seen by the naked eye” (“What Are Microbes?”). Etymologically, microbe is composed of the Greek mikros, small, and bios, life: small life. A name developed in relation to the scale of human life. The above definition from the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care is meant to serve as a launch point for a categorization of the mostly invisible nonhuman partners in performance. Rather than hold the Institute’s definition as a given, this article invites performance scholars to consider why and how variations in microscopic life might influence conceptions of what has been a human-dominated form. Scientific definitions change and are not to be taken a priori in determining the life of nonhuman partners in performance. To sense lively variations in nonhuman performance, this article explores bacteria as a particularly active microbial life in food performance.
In what follows, I explicitly consider the emerging hunger to consume microbes in performance as an alimentary act.[1] This hunger occurs on a broad spectrum of scales, with a range of ethical complications. Selfmade, in performing across mediums and bodies, materially links the “zoomed-in” microscopic life of microbes and the “blown up” exaggeration of human celebrity. What emerges is a proposal for a scaled-down analytic to consider a taste for human and nonhuman celebrity as separate, yet at times indistinguishable in the visible realm. Scale is often associated with increased volume, mass, and effect. But as Selfmade reveals, scale is best understood as a tool to put things, even unlikely things, in relation. These works include popular science and food writer Michael Pollan and his narration of microbes in Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (2013), and a person Pollan narrates across media, Sister Noella Marcellino (popularly known as The Cheese Nun). The connecting points drawn between these media are not only in representation but rather material, microbial relations. To consider the microscopic in food performance, scale is rendered a crucial quality that perhaps unexpectedly decenters and re-centers the human; a quality of performance deemed microbial theatricality.
This article considers the role of microbiology in food-based theater and performance and, in turn, how an attention to theatricality shifts our understanding of the study of microbes in contemporary performance. Jens Hauser and Lucie Streker articulate the shift towards nonhuman life in performance through the emergence of microperformativity:
a current trend in theories of performativity and performative artistic practices to destabilize human scales (both spatial and temporal) as the dominant plane of reference and to emphasize biological and technological microagencies that, beyond the mesoscopic human body, relate the invisibility of the microscopic to the incomprehensibility of the macroscopic. (Hauser and Strecker 1)
Selfmade materializes micro and macro relations. While invisible and perhaps incomprehensible, this exploration of fermentation provides a theoretical framing for the complexity of destabilizing performance, something long considered a human practice. Cheese, whether in a dedicated gallery space or a deli counter, is always produced via microbial life, but Selfmade theatricalizes the process. The installation stages the cheese as an art piece and uses bacteria from human bodies"to reveal our myriad present multispecies relationships with microbes. Perhaps Selfmade also materially and microscopically entangles a clear divide between theater and performance: daily iterations of microbial activity within food coincide with the theatrical assertions of the cheese installation.
A microbial entanglement of theater and performance also renegotiates long-held debates within the nebulous field of food studies.[2] As the conclusion of this article will illustrate, Selfmade works beyond fantasies of authentic or the raw and natural processes assumed in artisanal food production. A reassertion of theatricality in performance studies reveals the importance of critically engaging with the term within food studies. The microscopic connections link a relatively small-scale installation and food performance to widely circulated food writing and television. Fermentation, as this paper will argue, works both theoretically and materially to construct interventions across fields. Microbial theatricality, a frame that can shift understandings of the role of theatricality in food and performance, extends into a broader study of food.
Selfmade was first presented at Trinity College Dublin in an exhibit titled “Grow Your Own.” Four cheeses, enclosed in clear containers, sat on view for spectators. Occasionally, the audience held the cheese for olfactory engagement (“SELFMADE”). The cheese was not immediately consumable by human spectators. However, as media coverage of the installation continually narrated, Agapakis ate the cheese she produced in collaboration with human bacteria.[3] Reviews and articles covering the installation often opened with a proposition of eating “human cheese,” such as the 2013 Wired article titled “Hungry? Try Some Cheese Made of Michael Pollan’s Belly-Button Germs,” suggesting at the liveliness that the cheese invited for humans even without consumption (Stinson).
At one scale, the cheese in Selfmade is static. On another, the microbes perform otherwise: the rind of the cheese is alive with consumption as the microbes digest the proteins in the milk. The multiple scales of performance result in a doubling of performance, both human and nonhuman, that occurs simultaneously. The microperformance of the liveliness of cheese occurs alongside, albeit at a much different scale, the dramatic claim of eating human cheese. These opposing scales invite contradictions. The installation and performance present contradicting goals regarding nonhuman ethics emerging from human-bacteria relations. In an interview regarding the installation, Agapakis asks, “We want people to be more accepting of bacteria in our bodies, have a better relationship with our bodies and the environment” (Lin). On one scale, this ‘better’ relationship seems clear: an invitation to sense those messy, uneasy feelings that our food is alive with things we cannot see. Human spectators are tasked to reflect on the “real” yet often hidden interconnections between human bodies and microbial life. To conclude at this scale would be an elision, however. A deeper, gustatorial interrogation positions theatricality as centrally figured into the food performance.[4]
Selfmade joins contemporary ecological performance artists, scientists, and cultural critics who write, rehearse, and advocate for new relationships with a wide range of nonhuman participants. Often, their work grapples with questions of scale: both actors and impact shift when addressing more-than-human ecologies. Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism proposes a theory of scale, especially to understand the “scalar mismatches” of Western colonialist environmental activisms and policies. Expanding on the ethical projects of indigenous and feminist science and technology scholars, Liboiron argues that “scale is not about relative size. Scale is about what relationships matter within a particular context” (Liboiron 84). An examination of scale in performance, particularly with nonhuman actors, affirms the risks of constricting the analysis of nonhuman performance. Working at the microbial scale cannot, and perhaps should not, scale to the planetary–at least not easily. For example, envisioning human-cheese at a global scale of production is not a useful solution to our probiotic problems. An application of Liboiron’s theory of scale to performance studies must be carefully considered. The transformative potential of a more responsive relationship with microbes (and perhaps multispecies broadly) in Selfmade risks a scalar mismatch. Without the incorporation of the dramatic scale of the human bodies that negotiate microbial life, including the body of Michael Pollan, an influential public figure in food, an environmental intervention would reproduce the very issues that Liboiron identifies in environmental discourse.
There is no human body present in Selfmade. The human figure is still sensible, however. Video documentation narrates Agapakis’ cheese-making process, where the spectator can watch her cook. But perhaps more relevant is the human’s trace presence within the cheese. Agapakis added the bacteria cultivated from humans to cow’s milk, with rennet to coagulate the liquid, forming curds. The cheese was then aged and put on display. The display of food exemplifies Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s third point in her foundational work “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium,” where food and performance have three key connection points: “to-do,” “to-behave,” and “to-show ”. Each of these points emphasizes how food itself invites audiences in through its edibility, where the cheese on display acts as a medium for performance: “to-do” encompasses the procedures and actions leading to cheese, the installation challenges how audiences “behave” with microbes, and the staging of the cheese, presented somewhere between an art gallery and a scientific laboratory, “shows” cheese as an artwork itself. But perhaps more importantly, each of these connection points centers on human participation in food performance.
The trace of humanness within the cheese is paired with the microbial presence. Cheese is nearly always a human-bacteria collaboration. Alimentary transformations have many overlaps with the transformations that performance can initiate. Fermented foodstuffs challenge anthropocentrism in performance, as they are also indicative of nonhuman participation. While much scholarship on food and performance takes eating, hunger, or digestion into consideration, Selfmade, by using bacteria, invites nonhuman actors to perform through eating. Microbes, searching for food on the rind of the cheese, eat and transform proteins. These transformations, often invisible, are otherwise sensed.
As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett reminds us, “food, like performance, is alive, fugitive and sensory” (1). Liveliness in food becomes particularly potent in cheese performance. Active bacteria cultures transform the milk, and the aging process transforms the cheese to produce a kind of fermented “photocopy” of the human bacteria samples used in the art piece (Selfmade). The iterative behavior of fermentation works as a representation, albeit through edible matter. In some versions of Selfmade the cheese is labeled a ‘portrait,’ referencing the representation of the human and the bacteria present, as transformed into the cheese. However, as the film playing above installation illuminates, staging fermentation as a performance demands more explanation.
Above the four cheeses on display sits a small screen playing a companion short film to the installation. The narration educates viewers on the production process and displays the ‘liveliness’ of bacterial activity (see fig. 1). The camera shows the hand of Agapakis pouring a stream of milk into a large pot. One minute in, she pulls a petri dish, mixes the cultured bacteria into a small bowl, and adds it to the milk. Fermentation acts as microbial representation, a theatricalization of the original milk, bacteria, and time that produces a transformed food substance. The fermented quality of Selfmade is echoed again with the repetitions in the staging: the cheese performs within the clear boxes and on the screen. Science and technology studies scholars such as Maya Hey have considered fermented food’s performativity (Hey). While the cheese itself may contain iterative qualities, the installation hosts many fermentations, expressing a type of theatricality. The exaggeration of microbial life through fermentation occurs through microbes digesting the proteins present in pressed coagulated milk (soft cheese) simultaneously on the screen and the display box.
The examination of the embodied intimacies of food and eating is emerging in broader food studies discourses. “Critical Eating Studies,” a term coined by literary and performance scholar Kyla Wazana Tompkins in Racial Indigestion, articulates an approach to food where consumption and eating trace how bodies have been rendered edible. This rendering is beyond, but linked to, objectification (Tompkins; hooks; Anlin Cheng). What critical eating studies additionally asserts is the entangled literal and metaphoric capacities of studying food and eating. Representation, when looking at food that is cooked, smelled, eaten, touched, becomes messier. Tompkins's new approach to food studies shifts away from visuality and instead towards the mouth, digestion, and conceptions of the body in cultural material. Critically examining fermented food has a fermented effect on the theoretical lenses required for analysis: microbes consuming proteins and humans consuming cheese bridge together critical eating studies, multispecies theory, and performance studies. While sensing the microbes might present a sort of utopian multispecies harmony emerging from the Selfmade, theatricality and exaggeration within the installation, between the cheese and the film, reveals a less straightforward ethics for the implications of microbes in performance.
Selfmade produces a kind of theatricality, one that materializes the human at microbial scales. Spectators and performers participate through non-ocular sensory modes. To better chew on microbial theatricality, Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait’s edited volume Theatricality, from 2003, articulates the materiality inherent to this keyword in performance studies. They identify theatricality as an aesthetic and an idea pertaining to theater or a quality of exaggeration. Theatricality, often a pejorative, is pinned against an imagined morally superior “real” or “authentic” (Davis and Postlewait 17). Revisiting the dichotomy of theatricality versus the real is particularly useful in understanding the overlaps between performance and food studies.[5] Theatricality becomes a potent keyword not only within performance studies but also as a term applicable to food studies’ debates of authenticity, biomimetic foods, and the aestheticization of local foods as the “real” solution to contemporary food system crises. This scalar approach to theatricality is resonant with Kristin Hunt’s concept of “culinary mimeticism,” where multi-sensory experiences demand a theatricality of “examination at close range and in detail rather than willing suspension of disbelief at a distance,” shifting the scale of representation to shrink in distance (10). Selfmade scales down representation further, where transformation becomes a microbiological act. Theatricality becomes a means of exaggeration across micro and macro scales rather than a means of artifice or representation (as separate from matter). These changes in scales of performance additionally invite new players into culinary performance, where microbes encounter body, tongue, and gut. In crafting artisan-style cheese but staging it as a performance and art installation, Agapakis shifts fermentation away from a “natural” or pastoral food practice and instead proposes human-bacteria relationships as theatrical, exaggerated, and imaginative.
The cheese performs as itself. The piece dramatizes an aliveness in the food through the use of bacteria cultivated from humans, adding humanness to cheese.[6] Literal human cheese. The human is decentered and then recentered in microbial performance. The blurry lines between human, food, and bacteria in this performance do not result in a violent or dramatic narrative, such as those that Pasteur and his followers (including the US Food and Drug Administration) might have told, but rather something much more banal and messy.[7] Selfmade is not fighting bacteria, but collaborating with them.[8] The spectator confronts a seemingly edible, everyday object that comes alive through its staging and aging, resulting in a theatrical production of food.
What are the risks of inserting theatricality as an approach to nonhuman life in both performance and theory? Narrating the performance of nonhumans risks anthropomorphization, thus affirming the importance of incorporating the theoretical and practical failures of human-nonhuman performance. However, cheese complicates conceptions of representation. The microbes anthropomorphize the cheese via fermentation. Enzo Cozzi’s 1999 argument in “Hunger and the Future of Performance” is another instance of critically considering the failures, specifically representation of hunger, which Cozzi defines as “the pressing presence to an organism of the absence of sustenance (of whatever kind)” (121). Cozzi suggests, by emphasizing an organism, the application of hunger to nonhuman organisms. Pressing, however, becomes a particularly sticky adjective to identify in nonhuman performance. While the time between cotton swab and coagulation could be articulated as an absence of sustenance for the bacteria in Selfmade, at what temporal scale is a pressing presence felt by the bacteria? Is proof of microbial hunger only found in microbial consumption of lactose? In Cozzi’s argument, hunger additionally resists representation by its presentation, or failed attempt at representation, of absence. Fermentation, however, muddles this representational failure, where fermented foodstuffs are perhaps always indexical of nonhuman labor, nearly always a version of hunger.
How cheese fails at representing hunger is a material limitation rather than a representational one. Acting of its own accord, this transformation process only somewhat involves the human. The hunger of microbes results in the materially actual fermentation of other matter: milk, cabbage, cacao, grapes, and myriad other foods are transformed, made edible, and visible. This representational possibility, as microbial theatricality stresses, is only viable at microscopic scales. To ‘scale up’ these assertions around hunger risks Liboiron’s “scalar mismatches.” However, scaling to the micro- in performance opens new considerations for sensing, if not representing, nonhuman matter.
The microscopic activity taking place in cheese overwhelms the analysis thus far. Yet Selfmade is not only a product of microbial life. To remain in the nonhuman potential of fermentation may have great appeal, but the theatrical force of the humans in this performance should not be glanced over.
The use of theatricality is not to imply artifice in staging cheese. Instead, theatricality notes the exaggeration and representational strategy employed to materialize human-bacteria relations as vital, entangled, and scalable. In each iteration of the installation, the cheese presented was not made from the bacteria of just any humans but from celebrities in the popular world of microbial studies. Admittedly, the celebrity utilized is rather niche: food writers, bakers, artists, and even scientists who regularly appear in documentaries telling the story of microbes. Nevertheless, to ignore the entanglement with celebrity in Selfmade would be an elision. Celebrity appears in Selfmade through the swabbed bacteria of significant humans, the appearance of food professionals in the short film as part of the installation, and finally, through the celebrity status that is being granted microbes in ‘The Probiotic Turn.’ Microbial theatricality inserts human drama into the mess of multispecies performance, an appropriate reflection on the weight of human impact on multispecies worlds.
Popular food and science writer Michael Pollan’s belly button bacteria feast in one cheese, and the tears of environmental artist Olafur Eliasson cultivate another. Samples from Heather Paxson and Ben Wolfe, scholars who work both publicly and in scholarly fields on the ‘culture of cultures,’ also fuel the lively activity in cheese production. (Stinson; Fisher; Selfmade). There is a fermented effect of celebrity: it emerges in the performance through repeated, multiple, layered sensory modes.
Selfmade is not “not real” because of its theatricality, but rather imagines, materially, new relations between humans and bacteria. Hey’s chapter “On Performative Food Acts and the Human-Microbe Relationship” articulates the performative instantiation where “fermentation as a performative food act can help unpack the ethical and political relations of living with (and eating) other species,” while also addressing the real concern that “recent interventions seem to point to the invisible labor of microbial life as the answer to contemporary problems” (170). Hey’s analysis addresses localized and intimate relations with microbes, resulting in new hierarchized relationships with microbes. Celebrity is key in conceptualizing how those hierarchies play out in contemporary food performances.
The short film that sits atop the cheese installation reinforces the role of celebrity in microbial performance. Created by Agapakis, the film features interviews with Heather Paxson, Michael Pollan, and a raw-milk cheesemaker. Each human brings a layer of authority, perhaps a type of food safety, in narrating human curiosity and disgust with bacteria. Looming over the small cheese boxes, Michael Pollan sits casually on a sofa and suggests that within the cheese “there are reminders of the body, obviously, of body odor, and various parts of the body, and I think that we are both attracted and repulsed at the same time” (Selfmade). Pollan’s presence validates the experimental art piece, providing authentication through celebrity status. Our hunger for microbes teeters on the line of desire and disgust, not unlike our appetite for celebrity.
The small screen above the cheeses keeps the celebrity figures askew, not quite at eye level (fig. 1). These humans, many of whom appear in Netflix documentaries with glossy, seamless production techniques, take on new, strange roles in this nearly home-movie-style film, with crunchy audio and uneven lighting (fig. 2 and fig. 3). The prominent role of the cheese and the amateur camera work skews the smoothness and grandness of celebrity.
Acknowledging celebrity in microbial performance reinforces the tension between zooming in and exaggerating out. Celebrity cheese broadens and narrows the scope of analysis, bounded by the cheese matter. Yet, to examine microbes in performance, and the performance of microbes, requires less metaphoric or representational analysis, but a meta-analysis of the performances. Consider instead how the actors, mediums, and matter have doubled up, or fermented, over time.[9] Lectures transformed to books transformed to documentaries transformed to installation transformed to celebrity transformed to film transformed to cheese. Fermentation, adaptation, and transformation are all resonant processes that emerge in the study of microbial theatricality.
And the microbes, grandly performing in the installation, are they too now celebrities? While microbial theatricality can perform multiscalar and multispecies assemblages, the relationship between humans and bacteria is not a symmetrical one. Microbial performance should not imply a predetermined utopia, where human performance with microbes assumes an ethically good relationship. Rather, the consideration of celebrity as a quality that emerges in both humans and nonhumans critically recenters the role of the human in understanding the dramatic effects that humans have on planetary health. To consider and sense theatricality in alimentary performance is to reject the clear, teleological purity of “authentic” or “real” food production. In the introduction to “Celebrity Ecologies,” a special issue in the journal Celebrity Studies, editors Michael K. Goodman and Jo Littler poignantly remind us that “just as non-humans have agency, so too can they sometimes have a kind of celebrity that elevates some ‘things,’ places or entities above others in environmental and ecological politics” (272). What are the stakes of theatricalizing microbes, and how is celebrity lingering at the edges of alimentary performance?
The microbiological art experiment does not produce a clear morality to artisanal cheese production. The video above the cheeses narrates, “Microbes do not come attached with the labels good and bad” (Selfmade). Rather than reinforce a nature/culture moral equivalency, the performance invites spectators to consider the contradictory ethics of consumption in our current food system. Under the looming eye of Pollan, next to the fermented tears of Eliasson, the moral pressure does not appear visually spectacular but microbially presses throughout the installation.
The perplexing and pervasive fascination with and fantasy of celebrity is not left behind in Selfmade, but instead lingers on the edges of the smelly cheese. Rather than being visually clear to locate, celebrity takes a new corporeal position from that of Joseph Roach’s It. Not only found in the “accessories, clothes, hair, skin, and flesh,” the “it” factor of microbes materializes in the nonvisual: in taste, food, and guts (Roach 44). The celebrity is not only the human body nor the microbes swabbed from it but also the new celebrity status of microbes. These microbes, alive in fermented foodstuffs and probiotic supplements, are suggested by food and health writers such as Sandor Katz as holding the potential for significant health and planetary interventions, where food habits, behaviors, and productions take a greater account for the life of microbes. As Ann Folino White addresses in “Tasting Celebrity,” through the analysis of an early 20th-century celebrity cookbook, “taste’s claim to authentic knowledge may risk celebrity as much as celebrity is dependent upon letting the public taste the ‘favorite foods of famous players’” (69). As alimentary performance scales the distance between performer and spectator to microscopic distinctions, the nature of theatricality also scales. Working from the edible fermented matter itself, rather than its iterations, alimentary performance has the potential to shrink the distance between everyday person and celebrity through human-microbe relationships.
As the article opened, media coverage of the 2013 installation revealed much about the visceral and gustatory impact of the cheese. For example, this event appeared in many popular news sources, with catchy titles inciting a visceral response, such as: “Cheese Made From Celebrity Belly Button and Armpit Bacteria Goes on Display” or “Ruby Tandoh: how I was turned into a human cheese” (Daley; Tandoh). These headlines reveal the messy and transformative role of both humans and microbes. Tandoh, a British baker, writer, and The Great British Bake Off contestant becomes cheese, while simultaneously cheese is made from celebrity. Celebrity and theatricality are not unilateral exaggerations. Neither concept is conditional on “scaling up,” but instead work as tools for relation. Rather than position theatricality as a negative or in opposition to the natural world in need of saving, theatricality is a device. Exaggeration is a means to examine how the scales of performance emerge from the many iterations of the human: as celebrity, as microbe, as eater and edible in our contemporary crisis.[10]
While celebrity and figuring might be unavoidable in the probiotic turn, they are essential in understanding contemporary food issues. Rather than take the contradictions of contemporary consumption as an end, Davis and Postlewait offer a gentle observation: “perhaps failure, like theatricality, is inescapable” (11). To consider theatricality is to embrace contradiction. Perhaps more importantly, a material approach to theatricality resists a single narrative for ecological futurity. In the case of Selfmade, the spectator is not literally eating Michael Pollan, but rather sensing the bacteria growth from Pollan’s belly button through cheese (which to say is not entirely metaphoric consumption, but something else).[11] The utility of this endless conceptual and material flipping from celebrity to real to theatrical to daily to human to microbial is not to get somewhere but to sense something else about foodways and alimentary performance. Microbial theatricality resists a clear, “one true meaning” and instead poses the need to consider simultaneity, celebrity, scale, and species. Ultimately, braiding theatricality with microbes, but also failure, is crucial in avoiding the trap that a singular food aesthetic (like the farmer’s market utopia) will emerge as the solution to our failing global food system.
Selfmade has complicated the utility of theatricalizing the human, particularly in regards to both scale and celebrity. Performance studies has long grappled with representations of humans, and has much to offer both multispecies and food studies. This refiguring offers a new approach to engaging with the complex impact of Michael Pollan, a food and environment writer who rose to popularity through works such as The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006). Pollan’s own voice is a personal, journalistic, yet scientifically informed speaker, reinforcing the individualism that dominates many food and nutrition discourses. Still, Pollan’s work continues to appear on university syllabi as a foundational work in food studies. His ability to shape narratives surrounding popular understandings of diet and agricultural interventions in food systems affirms a need to critically engage with his impact as a celebrity and author.[12]
In his 2013 book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan tells the story of Sister Noella Marcellino, a nun and microbiologist who studies the bacteria cultures on the rinds of the cheeses she makes.[13] Popularly called the “Cheese Nun,” Sister Noella Marcellino also regularly performs her work, from public lectures to documentaries.[14] Her scholarship relies on the theatricality of cheese and microbes to propose microbes as critical participants in human life. Emphasizing the role of the milk, cows, and bacteria living in the walls of the wooden barrel and paddle that Sister Noela Marcellino used in production all echo the food performance that Agapakis stages in Selfmade. Additionally, Agapakis and Sister Noella Marcellino are both microbiologists who practice human-microbial relationships mediated through cheese. Agapakis, Marcellino, and Pollan all figure the microbe as a character with theatrical potential and use celebrity as a mediator in their performances.
Take, for instance, a bacteria-laden wooden barrel. In the chapter and episode Earth from his book Cooked, Pollan narrates his visit to Sister Noella Marcellino at the Abbey Regina Laudis and explores her microbial research. The chapter extols the wooden barrel she uses for coagulating milk for cheese. Pollan livens up the already lively vessel, where the “cheese-making barrel wears a permanent cloak of white,” rendering the microbiological activity an adornment as well as a critical participant in cheese production (342). However, this barrel also serves as a case study for Sister Noella Marcellino’s published research to prove that the wood barrel used to coagulate milk would result in less risk for food-borne illness than a stainless steel receptacle, changing FDA regulation for artisanal cheese production (O.S.B. et al.). The policy shift that Sister Noella Marcellino was able to incite through an intimate, theatrical, microscopic relationship with microbial life served as a justification for Pollan in imagining a future of food where eating considers the hunger of nonhumans alongside the health concerns of industrialized food production. Fermentation and theatricality act across scholarly and artistic disciplines.
Pollan is rightly critiqued for presenting impossible and unscalable interventions to the food system. As Julie Guthman aptly points out in response to his earlier work, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “In describing his ability to overcome King Corn, to conceive, procure, prepare, and (perhaps) serve his version of the perfect meal, Pollan affirms himself as a super-subject while relegating others to objects of education, intervention, or just plain scorn” (78). This ‘super-subject’ mirrors the exceptionalism of celebrity. But Pollan does not only dramatize his own subjecthood but that of microbes. What Pollan’s perhaps accidental doubling of celebrity reveals is that farmer’s market aesthetics are not the antithesis of theatrical, celebrity, or the fake, but rather constantly tangled up in scales. Instead, microbial theatricality takes seriously the cheese made from the bacteria in Michael Pollan’s belly button more than his human celebrity.
The contradictory nature of microbes takes shape in intimate human-nonhuman interactions, large-scale food interventions, and riddled through performance, installation, and documentary. As Maya Hey aptly articulates, scholars should be wary: instrumentalizing microbial life to enact utopian food futures is as prevalent as their transformative potential. This article has braided food, performance, and film to consider how microbes act across scales. From shifting our understanding of performance as entirely human or microbes as entirely ‘natural,’ cheese has presented myriad transformations. Fermentation is a particularly salient cooking act for consideration because of its iterative qualities and material implications.
Fermentation and theatricality are companion concepts. Exercising the conceptual and material overlaps in food and performance studies opens new avenues for interdisciplinary scholarship. This article explores theatricality as a key term in alimentary performance in attempts to think beyond the artisanal (often conflated with the real) in foodways, emphasizing scale itself as theatrical and relational. Alimentary multispecies performance disputes the assumption that theatricality is inherently excessive. Theatricality in alimentary performance is emitted in microbial life, made sensible by Selfmade using bacterial and celebrity participants.
Our global food system requires many interventions to address the urgencies identified by food justice activists, scholars, artists, and communities. Microbial theatricality is a key quality when analyzing the aesthetic components of food interventions, particularly when imagining or performing new relationships between humans and nonhumans as a method for change. Can scale, in the theatrical sense, be a critical tool to understand not only efficacy in performance, but also relations? Which nonhuman matter gains celebrity status, and how? Can the role of the celebrity and the quality of theatricality have real material impact but also grapple carefully with scale? Microbes as celebrities may appear contradictory: something so small and nonhuman figured into the exaggerated human-made star. However, this scalar tension in matter and representation is precisely the careful analysis that performance studies can offer food studies.
[1] Others have situated the politics of microbial life with US Food production. Heather Paxson, anthropologist and ethnographer, narrates an era of Post-Pasteurianism and the emergence of and reaction to a “microbiopolitics” to describe modes of resistance to the governing of human-bacteria relationships, especially in United States food production in “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States.”
[2] One of these food debates is initiated by Claude Levi-Strauss in his culinary triangle, which asserts a distinction between raw, cooked, and rotten to theorize nature-culture binaries. However, as cheese and other fermented foods materialize, that binary is less clear when microbial actors produce cultural products in collaboration with humans. This discussion continues into contemporary food studies debates, as illustrated by a 2020 Food, Culture, and Society special issue addressing the continued effect of Levi-Strauss’ concepts (Graf and Mescoli).
[3] As noted in a news article on the 2013 installation, “Agapakis, however, admits to tasting some herself, among them, Christina, a cheese that she cultured with bacteria from her own mouth and which is included in the exhibit. ‘It had just been strained and pressed and was very fresh. It didn’t have a very strong flavor, but it was fine. It just tasted like cheese’” (Lin).
[4] The claim of theatricality as central to food performance is well illustrated by scholars who have addressed the emergence of spectacular foodstuffs, from medieval feasts to modernist cuisine to contemporary social media food displays. What the incorporation of the microbial shifts in these claims of theatricality is the material, nonhuman, and microscopic components that produce theatricality as well.
[5] Richard Schechner who wrote the foundational performance studies text, Performance Theory, uses concepts of “raw” and “cooked” in describing distinctions between ritual and theater. These distinctions are theorized as well in Claude Levi-Strauss’ ‘culinary triangle’ which defines cooking practices and cultural development through techniques. While both performance and food studies theorize processes of transformation, Levi-Strauss and Schechner are both interested in defining “the real” in complex and contradictory ways.
[6] Alimentary performance is a funny conundrum through which to tackle the liveness vs. remains debate in performance studies. Food, especially when not shelf-stable, but even if pasteurized to inertness, becomes ephemeral when eaten. The body transforms food into fuel and waste and no longer functions as edible, engageable performance. However, through microscopic analysis, food material, the stuff itself, remains in odd, decaying, transformed ways.
[7] For an explicit look at the regulation of milk in the United States and its relation to microbes and purity see Melanie E. DuPuis’ Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink (DuPuis).
[8] This result of microbial play resembles Donna Haraway’s “chthonic being” in Staying with the Trouble, where multispecies collaborations are conditional on imaginative, yet material, connections between humans and nonhumans.
[9] Emphasis on the literal over the metaphoric is a central claim in Una Chaudhuri’s “There Must be a Lot of Fish in That Lake” as a method towards a new theater ecology.
[10] Haraway uses the word urgencies to address the many impending shifts needed for better planetary, human, and nonhuman survival. Indigenous scholars such as Kyle Powys White address the ways in which, for many Indigenous communities, the apocalypse and climate crisis has already happened. Microbial life is both companion to, and distinct from, humans which perhaps calls for reconsidering microscopic crisis broadly.
[11] Smelling is not a passive sense. The spectator and Pollan (or any of the cheese-figures), do become microbially entangled during the performance.
[12] Michael Pollan was my pathway into the field of food studies as well.
[13] It may be an odd act of curation to make a case study of someone else’s case study. This article’s investment in the Sister Marcellino, the Cheese Nun, is not quite a meta-analysis, but perhaps falls in line with fermentation as a rhetorical and theoretical strategy that pairs with microbial performances.
[14] Blanketing thousands of years of cooking techniques, Pollan's Cooked is organized through fire, water, air, and earth, connecting both general understandings of the development of cooking in human history to contemporary case studies that reinforce the chemical and historical transformations he writes about (Carruth).
Agapakis, Christina. “Selfmade.” Christina Agapakis, https://www.agapakis.com/work/selfmade.
Anlin Cheng, Anne. “Sushi, Otters, Mermaids: Race at the Intersection of Food and Animal; or, David Wong Louie’s Sushi Principle.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 2, no. 1, 2015. https://doi.org/10.5250/resilience.2.1.006.
Carruth, Allison. “Michael Pollan’s Dilemma.” Public Books, 1 Nov. 2013, https://www.publicbooks.org/michael-pollans-dilemma/.
Chaudhuri, Una. “‘There Must Be a Lot of Fish in That Lake’: Toward an Ecological Theater.” Theater, vol. 25, no. 1, 1994, pp. 23–31. https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-25-1-23.
Cozzi, Enzo. “Hunger and the Future of Performance.” Performance Research, vol. 4, no. 1, 1999, pp. 121–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1999.10871652.
Daley, Jason. “Cheese Made From Celebrity Belly Button and Armpit Bacteria Goes on Display.” Smithsonian Magazine, 17 May 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cheese-made-celebrity-belly-buttons-and-armpit-bacteria-goes-display-180972189/.
Davis, Tracy C., and Thomas Postlewait, editors. Theatricality. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
DuPuis, E. Melanie. Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink. New York University Press, 2002.
Goodman, Michael K., and Jo Littler. “Celebrity Ecologies: Introduction.” Celebrity Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, 2013, pp. 269–75, https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2013.831623.
Graf, Katharina, and Elsa Mescoli. “Special Issue Introduction: From Nature to Culture? Lévi-Strauss’ Legacy and the Study of Contemporary Foodways.” Food, Culture & Society, vol. 23, no. 4, 2020, pp. 465–71, https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2020.1773692.
Guthman, Julie. “Can’t Stomach It: How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos.” Gastronomica, vol. 7, no. 3, 2007, pp. 75–79. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2007.7.3.75.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw25q.
Hauser, Jens, and Lucie Strecker. “On Microperformativity.” Performance Research, vol. 25, no. 3, 2020, pp. 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1807739.
Hey, Maya. “On Performative Food Acts and the Human-Microbe Relationship.” Conversations with Food, edited by Dorothy Chansky and Sarah W. Tracy, Vernon Press, 2021, pp. 163–78.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Routledge, 1992.
Hunt, Kristin. Alimentary Performances: Mimesis, Theatricality, and Cuisine. Routledge, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203704158.
Katz, Sandor Ellix. Fermentation as Metaphor. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium.” Performance Research, vol. 4, no. 1, 1999, pp. 1-30, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.1999.10871639.
Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478021445.
Lin, Judy. “Stinky Cheese Offers Us a Whiff of Knowledge about Our Body’s Bacteria.” UCLA Newsroom, 8 Jan 2014, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/christina-agapakis-bacteria-cheese-249812.
Lorimer, Jamie. The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctv19cw9vg.
O.S.B., Marcellino, et al. “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Tales of Mold-Ripened Cheese.” Microbiology Spectrum, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1128/microbiolspec.CM-0005-12.
Paxson, Heather. “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2008, pp. 15-47. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00002.x
Pollan, Michael. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Penguin Books, 2014.
Roach, Joseph R. It. University of Michigan Press, 2007.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Rev. and expanded ed. Routledge, 2009.
“SELFMADE.” Science Gallery Dublin, https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/grow-your-own-exhibits/selfmade. Accessed 14 Mar 2021.
Selfmade. Directed by Christina Agapakis, 2013. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ej4BP64BsU.
Stinson, Liz. “Hungry? Try Some Cheese Made of Michael Pollan’s Belly-Button Germs.” Wired, 12 Dec 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/12/hungry-these-cheeses-are-made-from-human-skin-and-sweat/.
Tandoh, Ruby. “Ruby Tandoh: How I Was Turned into a Human Cheese.” The Guardian, 13 May 2019. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/may/13/ruby-tandoh-i-was-turned-into-human-cheese.
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century. New York University Press, 2012.
“What Are Microbes?” InformedHealth.Org, Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG), 2019. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279387/.
White, Ann Folino. “Tasting Celebrity.” Performance Research, vol. 22, no. 7, 2017, pp. 67–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1353195.