Killing in More-than-human Spaces: Pasteurisation, Fungi, and the Metabolic Lives of Wine

Abstract

What place might killing occupy in a more-than-human world, where human life is alwaysalready entangled among nonhumans? In this article I attempt to unsettle the assumption that only individual organisms can be killed, and to render other sites and spaces of killing visible. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among winemakers in South Australia I examine pasteurisation, a killing practice that acts not on organisms but on the fluids within which they live. Examining the pasteurisation of wine damaged by the fungus Botrytis cinerea, I argue that this practice shifts the locus of killing from botrytis' body to metabolic life processes which embrace extracellular enzymes diffused throughout the wine. I suggest that pasteurisation thus displaces killing into spaces, such as wine-in-the-making, within which many metabolic lives coexist and interpenetrate. Pasteurisation therefore renders killing an intervention into the metabolic relationships that tie together numerous species of microbes living within wine. In acting on wine as a whole it kills rather indiscriminately, simultaneously terminating multiple lives that relate to humans in different ways. Pasteurisation therefore both protects and spoils wine, reconfiguring multiple human-nonhuman relationships in conflicting and sometimes economically costly ways. In so doing, it illustrates that in a morethan-human world killing becomes difficult to confine to a single unwanted organism or species. Killing instead becomes disturbingly mobile and communicable, prone to rebound upon the valued human lives of those who kill in unsettling and potentially harmful ways.

Ball jars, bacteria, and labor: CO-producing nature through cooperative enterprise

“…Agri-food scholars have explored how encounters and intimacies with non-humans can lead to new sensitivities, attachments, and relationships of regard and care for the morethan-human world. However not all non-human encounters are positive, and tending to and caring for some non-humans may necessitate the exclusion or killing of others (Pitt 2018, Brice 2014. The darker side of non-human encounters has been observed in gardening activities, where the killing of slugs (Ginn 2014) and weeds (Doody et al 2014) often accompanies the tending of more desirable non-humans, and feelings of moral ambivalence.…”

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“…Ladybirds are encouraged because they control aphids; bees and hoverflies are encouraged because they support pollination. The design artefacts including seed library and website acknowledge and narrate this complex negotiation which includes killing [7]: "The biggest thing that's going to impact on the slugs and snails is things like the blackbirds and the thrushes, so make sure you've got lots of shrubbery, and keep a pond for frogs. It's not like an immediate cure, but it's a sustainable long-term cure, and it makes life a lot easier to correct that imbalance in the biodiversity, rather than intervening too much" (Richard, seed guardian).…”

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“…Lay microbiologies, we might say, are replete with such methods. As lay microbiologists we smell and taste when wine goes bad (or at least when Botrytis cinerea makes it unpalatable, Brice, 2014) and the gastronomic transformations wrought by bacteria on artisan cheese (Paxson, 2008). We observe the biofilms stretching over jams and marvel at the bubbles and smells emanating from a sourdough starter or 'that thing in a jar' (Jasarevic, 2015).…”

“…Probiotic cultures (in the sense of particular humannonhuman collectives) can be enduring, reflecting long histories of human-microbe collaboration. Such collaborations include the tea-based mushrooms fermenting in jars on the shelves of Bosnian kitchens (Jasaveric, 2015), the Botrytis cinerea in winemaking tanks in South Australia's Barossa Valley (Brice, 2014), or the Geotrichum candidum moldering on the rinds of North American artisanal cheeses (Paxson, 2008). There are also new probiotic cultures emerging in the form of the experimental fermented pork product butabushi found in test kitchen of celebrity chef David Chang (Paxson and Helmreich, 2014), kombucha, a fermented, fizzy tea-based drink with purported health benefits (Spackman, 2018), the use of Fecal Microbial Transplants to address chronic health problems (Wolf-Meyer, 2017), or the helminths (or hookworms) reintroduced into affluent Western human bodies 'to tackle allergies and inflammatory and autoimmune conditions' (Lorimer, 2016, p. 59).…”