As climate changes disrupt ecosystems and threaten food systems across the planet, extremophiles, organisms able to withstand unhabitable environmental conditions, stand out as resilient life forms that provide a framework for thinking about food futures and about nature and its boundaries. Given the absence of social studies literature on extremophiles uses in the food system, our paper sets out to map the role extremophile microbes play in the food system today, and how they reconfigure biotechnological frontiers. Combining a critical biocapital and biovalue approach and the concepts of sympoiesis and holobiont which highlight the interconnectedness and multispecies interdependence across biomes, we analyze the use of extremophile microbes in/through food systems across their journey between extreme environments, agricultural soil, food, and human guts. Building on an exploratory theoretical analysis and interdisciplinary literature survey on extremophiles, we show that their use is linked to the expansion of bioprospecting practices and the emergence of new domains for biocapital accumulation, where extreme ecosystems become sites for reimagining food, food production techniques, crop optimization, and manipulating gut metabolisms. We contend that the appropriation of extremophile biology overturns traditional biological categories of life, such as alien life, by altering our understanding of extreme environments as transcending ecological constraints in the context of the Anthropocene. After discussing how extremophiles expand biotechnological frontiers through global bioprospecting projects, our paper concludes that deteriorating climate conditions and ecosystems degradation have fundamentally linked the question of food and its metabolic status with biotechnological innovation and strategies for planetary survival.
Abergel et al. (Thu,) studied this question.