Cultura material e agência do queijo: uma sociologia da ação e reputação da comida

Abstract

A constant presence in the daily urges and pleasures, food acts discreetly in the everchanging framework of human existence. It is exactly its recurrence which blurs this kind of power: repetition fosters that which is unnoticed, establishing that which is familiar or common. I do not quite refer to the organic-nutritional process of absorption, whereby food becomes the body of those who eat it, biologically weaving the outlines and substance of their physical form. The discussion which inspires this thesis shifts in direction of another type of food power, somewhat controversial, expressed in a particular socially-shaped expertise, and definer of esteem, logic and habits – even though such shift concerns only a resource for conscious comprehension of the bordering area which constitutes the nutritional field. Understanding that food has certain agency in social interaction contexts, I intend to analyze how the Coalho cheese from Jaguaribe, made from raw milk, acts between those who manufacture it. Such food has become a paradoxical figure of a changing and productive symbolic scenario. If, on the one hand, legislation and health inspection bodies announce its demise, claiming it to be a “risk to health”, on the other, it survives with relative strength in the informal trade, supported by a network of advocates who celebrate it as a product protected by tradition and as a means for more sustainable consumption. In this field of contradictions, quality emerges as a food value and a problem; a field of struggle or a place of opposition where the cheese, as traditional food, causes (re)definitions, being affected in its signified materiality. The immersion in this unstable panorama of actions and conceptions has taken place since 2015, through documentary and field research. Based on the methodology of comprehensive interview, as defended by Jean-Claude Kaufmann, I have approached, from a privileged position, narratives from producers and traders of this cheese. Intending to monitor its mode of action in the lives of these specific individuals, a concept has gained shape and strength: the notion of food reputation, thought in conjunction with dietary modernity and material culture theories. Such an idea sustains itself on the premise of food as a culinary artifact which has its own social life and inspires the consideration not only in the context of commercial, legal and cultural implications, but also on how such food causes interactions, mobilizing engagement, disputes and identification with dietary moralities. Therefore, the analysis has been conducted in the investigation of four interchangeable dimensions of the “social experience” of the cheese, emphasized on the field: aesthetics, hygiene, health, and taste. Moreover, understanding that the reputation of the cheese does not exist unless it is connected to a series of relationships between itself and (the reputation of) other artifacts which make up its chain of production, the study has been developed focusing on three conjunctions which are showing themselves to be strategic: I refer to the relationship between this food and milk, curd, and wood. These courses of approach of the studied object have raised reflections about the treatment of food as something concrete in social sciences, opening paths to consider that which is edible amidst a socio-historical plot of sanitary-nutritional knowledge which affects and is affected by moral and emotional matters. These are activated inside cultures whose agents take heterogeneous and, sometimes, literally invisible forms, such as the microorganisms which uphold the innate definition raw milk cheese as “alive food” and work on the composition of its organoleptic characteristics, also summoning the sociological perspective for the coexistence with the microcosm – which seems to mobilize, moreover, a new manner of body control: microbiopolitics, according to Heather Paxson.