Formulating citizenship: The microbiopolitics of the malfunctioning functional beverage

Citizenship in times of crisis: biosocial state-citizen relations during COVID-19 in Austria

Drawing upon 152 in-depth qualitative interviews with residents in Austria carried out in the first year of the pandemic, this article discusses how people's experiences with COVID-19 policies reflect and reshape state-citizen relations. Coinciding with a significant government crisis, the first year of COVID-19 in Austria saw pandemic measures justified with reference to a biological, often medical understanding of health that framed disease prevention in terms of transmission reduction, often with reference to metrics such as hospitalisation rates, etc. Instead of using this biomedical frame, our interviewees, however, drew attention to biopsychosocial dimensions of the crisis and problematised the entanglements between economy and health. We call this the emergence of a biosocial notion of citizenship that is attentive to psychological, social and economic dimensions of health. Insights into the biosocial nature of pandemic citizenship open a window of opportunity for addressing long-standing social injustices.

On pickles: biological and sociocultural links between fermented foods and the human gut microbiome

BACKGROUND

The composition of the human microbiome varies considerably in diversity and density across communities as a function of the foods we eat and the places we live. While all foods contain microbes, humans directly shape this microbial ecology through fermentation. Fermented foods are produced from microbial reactions that depend on local environmental conditions, fermentation practices, and the manner in which foods are prepared and consumed. These interactions are of special interest to ethnobiologists because they link investigations of how people shape and know the world around them to local knowledge, food traditions, local flora, and microbial taxa.

METHODS

In this manuscript, we report on data collected at a fermentation revivalist workshop in Tennessee. To ask how fermentation traditions are learned and influence macro and micro ecologies, we conducted interviews with eleven people and participated in a four-day craft fermentation workshop. We also collected 46 fermented food products and 46 stool samples from workshop participants eating those fermented foods.

RESULTS

We identified ten major themes comprised of 29 sub-themes drawn from 326 marked codes in the transcripts. In combination, this analysis allowed us to summarize key experiences with fermentation, particularly those related to a sense of authenticity, place, health, and the discovery of tactile work. From the 605 amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) shared between food and fecal samples, we identified 25 candidate ASVs that are suspected to have been transmitted from fermented food samples to the gut microbiomes of the workshop participants. Our results indicate that many of the foods prepared and consumed during the workshop were rich sources of probiotic microbes.

CONCLUSIONS

By combining these qualitative social and quantitative microbiological data, we suggest that variation in culturally informed fermentation practices introduces variation in bacterial flora even among very similar foods, and that these food products can influence gut microbial ecology.

Empire and indigestion: Materializing tannins in the Indian tea industry

In the mid-1800s, plantation-produced tea from India came onto the British market. Tea retailers blended this more malty and black tea with the lighter Chinese-grown tea to which consumers had become accustomed. By the turn of the 20th century, blending helped Empire-grown tea supplant Chinese-grown tea on the market. Scholars of tea have shown how British tea companies working in South Asia stoked racialized fears that Chinese tea arrived in Britain in an adulterated state, laden with impurities that included dyes, perfumes and even human sweat. This article describes how concerns about protecting tea leaves from outside adulteration gave way to concerns about the potential digestive threat that lay inside tea leaves themselves. Medical journals linked the increased consumption of Indian teas to a population-wide 'epidemic' of indigestion. The most cited culprits in this epidemic were tannins, chemical compounds that were also thought to give black tea its characteristic bitterness and color. The normalization of black tea consumption among the British public was not just a work of marketing or branding but a work of resolving uncertainty about what tannins were at a material, biophysical level. As this uncertainty was resolved scientifically, tea was materialized not as a singular, unified product but as an active chemical assemblage.