Out of concern for public health, the U.S. government bans the sale of cheese made from unpasteurized milk if it is aged fewer than 60 days. But while the FDA views raw‐milk cheese as a potential biohazard, riddled with pathogenic microbes, aficionados see it as the reverse: as a traditional food processed for safety by the action of good microbes. This article offers a theoretical frame for understanding the recent rise in American artisan raw‐milk cheese production, as well as wider debates over food localism, nutrition, and safety. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with cheese makers and purveyors and on participant‐labor conducted on a Vermont sheep dairy farm, I develop the concept of microbiopolitics to analyze how farmer–cheese makers, industry consultants, retailers, and consumers negotiate Pasteurian (hygienic) and post‐Pasteurian (probiotic) attitudes about the microbial agents at the heart of raw‐milk cheese and controversies about this nature–culture hybrid.

Terroir, the taste of place, is being adapted by artisan cheesemakers in the United States to reveal the range of values-agrarian, environmental, social, and gastronomic-that they believe constitute their cheese and distinguish artisan from commodity production. Some see themselves as reverse engineering terroir cheeses to create place though environmental stewardship and rural economic revitalization. But a tension is produced: while warranting projects of reterritorialization through defetishized food production, terroir marketing may risk turning the concept of "terroir" into a commodity fetish. U.S. terroir talk reveals attempts to reconcile the economic and sociomoral values that producers invest in artisan cheese.

Microbial life has been much in the news. From outbreaks of Escherichia coli to discussions of the benefits of raw and fermented foods to recent reports of life forms capable of living in extreme environments, the modest microbe has become a figure for thinking through the presents and possible futures of nature, writ large as well as small. Noting that dominant representations of microbial life have shifted from an idiom of peril to one of promise, we argue that microbes -especially when thriving as microbial communities -are being upheld as model ecosystems in a prescriptive sense, as tokens of how organisms and human ecological relations with them could, should, or might be. We do so in reference to two case studies: the regulatory politics of artisanal cheese and the speculative research of astrobiology. To think of and with microbial communities as model ecosystems offers a corrective to the scientific determinisms we detect in some recent calls to attend to the materiality of scientific objects.

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Family planning has been imported to Greece as a means of encouraging individuals to become modern adults by rationalizing their sexual relations and fertility-control efforts. But family-planning discourse neglects how such factors as emotion and so-called traditional belief-including gender normsguide people's reasonable actions. In this article, I examine how the purported gender neutrality of family-planning advocacy and its reliance on riskmanagement models fails to speak to women's experiences and undermines family planners' goals for women's autonomy, [family planning, abortion, gender, sexuality, modernity, risk, Greece]