“You are what you eat,” the nutritionist’s bromide assures us.1 As good food studies research should, the essays in this special issue disrupt such cozy equations of food with self, along with any assumptions about clear boundaries between the devouring self and edible others. In these articles, both subjects and objects, the “you” and “what” of eating, are revealed to be fraught with ambiguity across vast spatial and temporal scales, from global food systems to microbial processes, and from partially recalled family food histories to centuries-old culinary encounters. The essays question the boundaries between the myriad things and stories that constitute “you” and the vaster category of “what”: the stew of organic matter and cultural history from which we assemble our bodies and selves (and into which we eventually dissolve). This issue comprises two parts—a special section on microbes, and a section of scholarly articles and essays loosely united by themes of language and memory, from “alien” microbes to the sixteenth-century Catholic Saint Francis Xavier. Juxtaposed in a single issue, they show that just as our bodies are part of a global food cycle, our words and thoughts form part of the metabolism of culinary memory, of thoughts lost, scattered, then recycled, adapted, and reshared across history, as recipes refiled and reused in cycles of reproduction, care, and forgetting.Let’s start with microbes, because everything starts—and almost certainly ends—with the microbes. The first four articles in this issue are the second installment of the microbes special section that ran in the previous 26.1 (Spring 2026) issue of Gastronomica. They elaborate a narrative of a post-Pasteurian “microbial turn” in food studies, one that, to borrow the jargon of digital technology, shows that microbes are not “bugs” but “features” in our food supply. But they also show that we still are far from fully comprehending the convolutions of this “microbial turn,” including the fact that microbes also can be technology and hence as much artifice as nature.Syama Wynn confronts these contradictions in “post-Pasteurian” food production. As her two case studies show, fermentation has emerged as a transformative practice within industrial food systems once dominated by antibiotic logics—the systematic elimination of microbial life through pasteurization, pesticides, and other antimicrobial technologies. Wynn’s comparative ethnography of a UK fermentary and a regenerative farm documents practices of inoculating with “wild” microbes, monitoring ferments through sensory attunement, nourishing microbial communities, and sharing fermentation knowledge. These practices, she argues, enact post-Pasteurian microbiopolitics that welcome rather than eliminate microbial others. Yet Wynn alerts us to the tensions. Fermenters who value microbial abundance must still navigate food safety regulations designed around microbial control. Practitioners who celebrate spontaneous fermentation must still earn livelihoods within capitalist markets. The boundaries here are temporal as well as conceptual. Fermenters attuned to “microbial time” are embedded in economic structures that demand efficiency and standardization. What Wynn reveals is that alternative food practices exist in an uncomfortable middle space, enacting one paradigm while constrained by another.Microbial tales span our planetary spatial and temporal scales and even beyond. Elisabeth Abergel and Daphne Esquivel-Sada take us to the most extreme edges of life itself in their exploration of extremophile microorganisms—those “alien biologies” that thrive in conditions lethal to most life forms. Their article traces how these microbes are being extracted from volcanic springs, deep-sea vents, and other harsh environments to be deployed across food systems, from agricultural soil treatments to food processing innovations and interventions in the human gut microbiome. The extremophiles, the authors point out, present a peculiar temporal irony. Ancient organisms that predate human planetary impact are simultaneously positioned as blueprints for our Anthropocene future.Microbial technologies also offer uncomfortable insights into the boundaries between food and effluvia and between culinary and industrial infrastructures. Mariachiara Ficarelli follows the flows of animal waste through biomethane production facilities in rural Italy, asking us to consider what happens when the messy materialities of farmed animal bodies—feces, urine, blood, paunch, feathers, grease—are rendered into “clean” renewable energy. The biomethane industry, she shows, depends on making categorical distinctions between different kinds of matter: waste versus resource, dangerous versus safe, contaminated versus purified. Yet the smells that permeate rural communities, the flies that multiply around facilities, the uncertain chemical compositions of digestate fertilizer—all of these visceral intrusions trouble the industry’s tidy narratives. Residents whom Ficarelli interviews articulate what the industry tries to obscure, that the boundaries between animal bodies, agricultural systems, energy infrastructure, and human health are far more porous than regulatory frameworks acknowledge.Finally, in Molly McConnell’s personal explorations of domestic fermentation, failure becomes a productive site for considering microbial otherness. Working through her own frustrated attempts at fermenting sauerkraut and miso, McConnell asks us to attend to what happens when the human fermenter loses control—when mold appears, when the kombucha goes wrong, when the brine turns foul. These failures, she argues, are moments when the illusion of human mastery dissolves, and we must confront the microbes as active participants with their own agencies and trajectories. The chlorinated water that prevented her sourdough starter from rising and the mysterious variables that caused her summer ferments to mold are reminders that fermentation is always a collaboration with beings whose goals may not align with ours.Together, whether through extremophiles moving between ecosystems and bodies or animal waste revealing porous boundaries, these four articles challenge our assumptions about discrete, bounded entities in food systems, revealing forms of life beyond our comfortable frameworks of “food” and “non-food,” “eater” and “eaten.” The self that eats is revealed to be a permeable ecology, a holobiont, an assemblage of human and microbial communities whose boundaries are never as clear as we would like to believe.If a focus on microbial life exposes what we might call the uncanniness of bodily permeability, what happens when we expand our view to the porous cultural membranes across which we incorporate the food into ourselves as symbolic action? A trio of independently submitted articles and essays focuses on food encounters at the cultural level. Though topically distinct, they all reveal the profound ambiguities of boundaries between self and other, especially at moments when we attempt to use food to project a coherent narrative of ourselves to others who are bound to reinterpret it and digest it in their own ways.Zhongyuan Hu’s meticulous study of Jesuit language learning materials reveals how food and language profoundly intertwine in processes of cultural encounter and incorporation. Examining Portuguese-Chinese dictionaries, grammar books, and conversation manuals from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Hu shows how missionaries learned Chinese culture through its culinary vocabulary, including seasonal fruits, regional specialties, drinking customs, and festival foods. But this was never merely instrumental learning. European Jesuits literally sought to use ritual, language, and food—the host—to incorporate their Chinese interlocutors into the body of Christ. At the same time, to acquire the language of Chinese foodways was to inhabit, however imperfectly and marginally, a foreign social body: to understand hierarchies encoded in what different classes drank or to navigate gift-giving through wine presentations to the emperor. On the surface, the Jesuit dictionary is thus a fragmentary collection of lost recipes for bidirectional cultural transubstantiation. Though perhaps less ambitious than the Jesuits, a desire to understand language through food and food through language remains a project for many of us engaged in cross-cultural food studies today.If Jesuit translations of Chinese foodways represent an archive of civilizational culinary exchange, Adrian Bresler’s memoir explores how recipe collections serve as partial archives of familial and cultural memory. Opening her late mother’s tin recipe box, Bresler discovers not just culinary instructions but temporal strata of a life lived: index cards from the 1960s when she cooked for a family of six, later additions reflecting solitary vegetarian meals, shifts in dietary guidance following her husband’s heart attack, the gradual displacement of butter by margarine then back to butter as scientific consensus evolved. Her mother, who claimed to dislike cooking, prepared meals daily for decades. Bresler’s attempts to recreate her mother’s dishes—the lemon meringue pie now lost, the chicken fricassee whose spices remain mysterious—are acts of memory work that can never fully succeed. Her turkey meatloaf replaces her mother’s veal, her cranberry chutney substitutes for her Ocean Spray cranberry sauce, yet something essential remains inaccessible. The boundaries between past and present, between her mother’s embodied knowledge and her written recipes, between memory and reconstruction, prove impossible to fully traverse.Finally, Anna Isabella Schnee’s meditation on the Argentine pionono cake her mother makes annually for her father traces familial histories of incorporation and exile. The mother who fled Argentina’s Dirty War finds stability and selfhood in ritual cake-making. The pionono, with its spiral of sponge, cream, and fruit, becomes a recipe for navigating displacement. Schnee gives us two mothers: the reserved, protective immigrant navigating unwelcoming American spaces, and the mother in the kitchen who “returns to herself,” dancing and humming, channeling her semi-literate father’s embodied culinary knowledge. The boundaries here multiply: between Argentina and Atlanta, between Spanish and English, between the mother’s public and private selves. Like the pionono’s spiral that reveals itself only when sliced, her mother’s life shows “its colors” through this annual ritual that simultaneously celebrates the life built in exile and reveals what was left behind.Though we may read them separately, the juxtapositions of articles in a single issue are an open invitation for creative musing across the boundaries of seemingly unrelated disciplines and contexts, in this case, from microbes to Jesuit fathers in Asia. After reading the articles in this two-part special section, I begin to wonder whom I am actually addressing when I say “itadakemasu” (literally, “I partake”) over my daily meal. Microbes are recognized peripherally in Japanese Buddhism. Perhaps, I muse, the bakers and vintners should install a memorial for the souls of all the yeast microbes that die daily to make my bread and wine, like the monument to termites established by pest control companies in the vast ancient cemetery of the Buddhist sanctuary of Mount Koya in Wakayama Prefecture. I learn there already is a monument dedicated to germs at Manshuin temple in Kyoto, established in 1981 by an industrial producer of enzymes to memorialize the sacrifices of industrial microorganisms to human well-being (Nakata 2022). But what of all the five nonillion (5×1030) other microbes estimated to be seething through our biosphere? My head spins at the weight of all these microbial souls.I wonder what Francis Xavier would say. I see Xavier nearly every day. As I enter my office building at my Jesuit University in Tokyo, I am greeted by a prominent statue of the saint holding up a crucifix angled up towards the opposing edifice of our university library. As an early missionary to Japan, he is regarded as the spiritual founder of Sophia University. I don’t usually pay much attention, but today, after encountering Xavier in the unfamiliar context of Zhongyuan Hu’s article on Jesuit dictionaries, I pause at the statue. His raised cross seems to be blessing the library stacks, but it equally could be seen as protecting the tiny vegetable garden to his rear, fed microbe-rich compost by the Sophia student group KASA Sustainability (https://www.kasasustainability.org/). The Jesuits didn’t know about microbes, though their sacrament—the wine—depends on them. On the other hand, upon his death on a Chinese island, Xavier’s body was said to resist decay for decades, evincing an adversarial relationship to the microbes that otherwise would be doing their work.My Japanese students, who are not always familiar with Catholicism, joke that Xavier’s crucifix resembles a selfie stick. I think it does as well, but I wonder what self is being reflected back to a sixteenth-century saint in a twenty-first-century campus in central Tokyo? He wouldn’t recognize much, not in the buildings, nor the dress of the students, nor, I dare say, much of what now passes for Catholic Jesuit education in Japan. But he might still recognize many of the ideographic food words he likely struggled with in those early texts five centuries ago. Though their referents shift, food ideograms from ancient China survive the myriad displacements of modernity and technology in East Asia. As porous and fragile as our embodied identities are, such reassembled fragments of culture remind us that from saints to microbes, we all are part of something larger, permeable, churning, smelly, and alive. I suppose if I am to greet Xavier, it could be in our shared Chinese, “Chi fan le ma?” (Have you eaten yet?). Then I might ask him about the souls of microbes.
James C. Farrer (Thu,) studied this question.