Alessandro Guglielmo - Cheese, maggots, and multi-species bodies. The decay of more-than-human health in rural Sardinia

Food is a relational entity: far from being an object with fixed boundaries, it is a porous body expressing and constituted by nested political, sociocultural, and environmental trajectories. This comprehension is at the heart of shepherds in rural Sardinia, Italy, where I am undertaking ethnographic fieldwork: instead of considering “milk”, “meat”, and “cheese” as simple objects, they differentiate between “original” and “coloured” ones. But then, what is that makes foodstuff “original”? That’s a complex question, one in which more-than-human freedom, killability, industrialization, and health practices find themselves deeply intertwined. Original foods are understood to be as healthy as the nonhumans from which they are extracted – and what counts as “non-human health”, in rural Sardinia, is often connected with freedom. On the contrary, coloured foods do not satiate you, embody neoliberal modes for food consumption, and do not build your body as original ones.

In this seminar, I will address the withering practices of crafting and eating Sardinian traditional cheeses, such as sa Casada, su Casaxedu (“the acidic cheese”) or su Casu Marzu (“the rotten cheese”), connecting them firstly with land use, and later with local notions of more-than-human health. Starting from the privatization of the commons in Sardinia during the first half of 1800, I will show how industrialization is today bringing ties of multispecies relations and embodiment to the brink of extinction, and how these ties are expressed both in the materiality and symbolism of these cheeses and in the more-than-human bodies gravitating around them. I will show how sa Casada is a nexus of creation of multispecies bodies, and how su Casu Marzu resists neoliberal modes for food production and (macro)microbiopolitics. Later, I will delve into the local understanding of what counts as nonhuman health and welfare, and how these understandings clash or synergize with biomedical ones. Lastly, I will connect the use of these cheeses with the notion of “local biologies”, showing how their crafting and eating express microbial alliances linking more-than-human health with food and environments.