Failing

Using Allison Hayes-Conroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy’s political ecology of the body, this interdisciplinary paper explores what failure means in the context of microbial engagement via fermentation. In the domestic kitchen space, fermentation is what David Pye might call a workmanship of risk, and failure in this context affords new possibilities for engagement with the microbial more-than-human. This understanding is juxtaposed against understandings of failure at larger scales. Ultimately, this paper exposes the difficulty of reconciling these understandings and posits that failure in fermentation at the domestic scale might serve as a model for how to move into new possibilities and realities for our larger food system.