Dr. Maya Hey is a postdoctoral researcher with the Future Organisms project. At the 2021 Food Matters and Materialities Conference, she presented her doctoral research on the material practices of fermentation. ‘Material practices’ refer to specific actions repeated throughout a process like, in Hey’s case, fermentation in breweries and creameries in Japan. A central question she explored was, “how can the material practices of fermentation change the way we think of (continuing) life with microbes?”. During an interview with Dr. Hey, I had the opportunity to learn more about her research and experience.
Brewers at a natural sake brewery clean with boiling water and the proverbial elbow grease instead of chemical sanitizers because they rely on ambient microbes to ferment rice. Material practices like this matter because using chemicals would eradicate all ambient microbes and leave the brewery dependent on lab-optimized strains. Credits: Maya Hey.
JW: In your presentation, you gave some insight into how your background brought you to this research. Can you explain how you became interested in microbes and fermentation?
MH: I came to fermentation because when I was studying nutrition and dietetics from a health perspective, I had a really big issue with how prescriptive food knowledge was. These ideas of “eat this, not that” were something that really didn’t sit well with me. Who am I to tell you what to eat? I just knew what works in this sort of universalized abstraction that maybe can’t apply to an individual’s needs or individual contexts.
So, what I found interesting about fermentation is that it was the one food transformation that cuts across geographies and that spans all food cultures. Fermentation also traverses time; we’ve been doing this for millennia. Even if we look at the human evolutionary scale, our bodies are the result of different species coming together and merging. Our mitochondria were bacteria at one time, for example. We’ve co-evolved with microbes, and we also are co-constituted by them. If we think of microbiome studies right now, they’re really trying to flesh that out to understand who’s doing what, where, and why? How does that manifest into things like disease? So that’s how I came to fermentation and microbial relations.
JW: What led you to conduct your research in Japan and places like breweries and creameries?
MH: It was kind of an opportune time because Japan was preparing for the 2020 Olympics and was about to adopt and implement a national HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) guideline. This includes public safety and public health codes like hygiene standards. This was supposedly meant to be a way that food producers throughout Japan would all be at an internationally recognized level. I was doing fieldwork in Japan just before all the regulations were going to be implemented, so I wanted to ask questions. At the same time, people were really primed about how to work with invisible microbes that we can’t really see or sense. I was curious about how we work with them in a way that can ensure a larger scale of safety but also still maintain the practices that we have been doing for generations.
JW: In your presentation, you spoke about embodied practices. Can you explain what this means and how it relates to fermentation and microbes?
MH: For me, an embodied practice really refers to a way of knowing and a way of knowing with our bodies. So, for instance, in a fermentation setting specifically, I can’t see the microbes that are doing the work – I can see their effects – but I can’t see what they are doing. I can’t see their molecules, enzymes, or the substrates that they’re taking and spitting out into a different product. I can only detect their progress or even their presence by my embodied knowledge. This is done using smell, for example. There are some visual cues, but I can’t see the microbes – I need a microscope. I can detect them through scent, or touch through viscosity, or through memory if I know what has been done before. So, it’s a way of understanding knowledge through our bodies. I think it’s worth giving credence because it allows other forms of knowledge to surface.
It’s a human fault that we are so centered on the eyes and put a primacy of visual ways and visual confirmation of what’s happening in the world. We must see it to believe it. So, for me, one of the key challenges that I face is not to speak on behalf of the microbe. To not become the spokesperson for the microbe, I had to speak from what I know, which is my body. I know what I’m sensing in my body and what I am feeling and smelling. I can use this information to kind of conjecture what’s happening.
JW: You also explained the concept of ‘convivial ethics’ with a more familiar term, ‘symbiosis’. How does this relate to some of the terms you discussed in your presentation, like microbial sociality?
MH: I have defined convivial ethics as a way of understanding mutually enabling practices. What I’m trying to move away from is how we tend to speak of symbiotic relationships. It assumes a kind of mutual benefit that everything’s rosy or win-win. But, symbiosis doesn’t mean mutualism; mutualism is one of three outcomes. “Mutualism” is where both benefit, ‘commensalism’ is where one is benefiting at the other’s expense but the other just doesn’t care, and ‘parasitism’ is where one lives and benefits at the expense of the other. So, I think that there’s trouble in using ‘symbiotic’ as always being this sort of uncontested innocent thing to kind of strive for, so instead of using symbiosis, I wanted to use the term convivial. This is further supported by the fact that convivial is based on the philosophical idea of the ‘convive,’ which opposes autonomy and connects beings and entities. Also, in the context of food, the word convivial became imbued with festivity and merriment, again connecting entities on a social level.
We live with microbes, but there is a difference between us that cannot be easily erased or easily co-opted into mutually beneficial collaboration. So, it’s a way to kind of understand, at least in the instance for me, with humans and microbes, how to live with different scales of life. So, convivial ethics is a way of understanding how to live with differences.
In terms of microbial sociality, microbes have and always will be social and will continue to be unruly. If we understood them as being indifferent to whether we live or die, rather than approaching microbes as something that can be contained, I think it would be a better place to start with understanding them as hyper-social. They are literally threading through us, through our guts, on our skin at all times. They connect us. Perhaps the convive being connected to other beings might be a literal manifestation of that. We see microbiomes engaging with each other from two people. Spouses, for example, can begin to share microbiomes from coexisting together. So, as ‘convives’, we are connecting to other species.
JW: This has been so interesting. Thank you, Maya!
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.