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- [00:01]
Katie Overstreet
Don't chew on that, Max. Cooper loves that chew too.
- [00:04]
Unidentified Speaker 1
Oh, now he's into Cooper's food.
- [00:06]
Katie Overstreet
Wow, he is loving it.
- [00:08]
Unidentified Speaker 1
What do you feed Cooper?
- [00:10]
Katie Overstreet
Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula. He never leaves a crumb. I love it because it's made with high quality protein, nutrient rich fruits and veggies and wholesome whole grains. Looks like we're switching to blue. Blue Buffalo foods are made with the superior ingredients your dog needs to thrive. Can your dog food say that? Visit feedbluefood.com to learn more.
- [00:31]
Unidentified Speaker 1
Dripping in gold, that's cool. Dripping in Velveeta's supremely creamy golden cheesiness. That's respect. Elevate your drip with Velveeta's range of outrageously delicious dips and dishes, shells, cheese, melty blocks and heat and eat queso that go all in on indulgence. Flex on your fam with a creamy cheesy masterpiece and go all in on what you love with Velveeta. Respect the drip and satisfy your cravings. Bring home the drip with Velveeta.
- [01:01]
Katie Overstreet
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:15]
Sadie Hale
Hello, and welcome to Anthropology on Air, a podcast brought to you by the Social Anthropology Department at the University of Bergen in Norway. Each season we bring new conversations with inspiring thinkers who are either based at our department or who have come to share their research with us. Hello listeners, it's Sadie here. Just jumping in because Cecil and I have some news to share about the future of Anthropology on Air. From the next episode onwards, we're excited to be partnering with the New Books Network to help us reach a wider audience. Regular listeners don't need to do anything. New episodes will come into your feed as usual. But because New Books Network offers this service to creators free of charge, some podcasts are supported by advertising. So depending on where in the world you live, you might notice some ads here and there. Other than that, your listening experience won't change at all. Thank you so much for supporting us for the past two and a half years. And now let's get on with today's show.
- [02:31]
Unidentified Speaker 2
In this episode, we speak with Assistant professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Katie Overstreet. Katie is coordinator for the Landscapes, Census and Ecological Research Cluster, as well as a core member of the center for Sustainable Futures, both located at the University of Copenhagen. Katie's core fields of research include multispecies ethnography, Environmental anthropology, feminist STs, and agrarian political economy, and she has written on themes such as farm animal welfare, food waste, bioindustrialization, technoscience, trans species, sensory worlds and care. Her main ethnographic field sites include the midwestern dairy worlds of the United States and various sites in Denmark, including pig farms, an insect farm and a former brown coal mine. Across these sites, Katie has worked with a lot of different co species, social formations and techno scientifically modulated ways of living and dining agriculture. And in today's episode she will speak to some of these, focusing on the relations between microbes, cows and humans in raw milk production, consumption and politics. The basis for our conversation is a talk that Katie gave on the day before we recorded the podcast as part of the BSAS seminar series. Her talk was titled Digestive A Microbial Ethnography of Raw Milk in America's Dairyland. In the podcast, Katie unravels the notion of digestive belonging in this ethnographic context, connecting it to farm life, microbes, social landscapes, pasteurization, politics and rural nostalgia, among other things. We further discussed different modes of care in animal farming practices, the cultivation of trans species sensing and the idea of positive animal welfare. We hope you enjoy the episode.
- [04:27]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
So today we have the pleasure of welcoming Katie Overstreet, an anthropologianaire. Welcome Katie. We're going to talk a bit about your work. As mentioned in the introduction, you have worked with many forms of cospecies social formations. You've worked with those between humans and bred and wild insects. I'm not sure if that's a way to phrase it. Between cows, gut microbes and technoscientific experts, between people and beings who disturb and repopulate anthropocentric landscapes such as former mining sites. And in yesterday's seminar that you gave here in Bergen, you presented what you call the Microbial Ethnography of Raw Milk in America's Dairyland, focusing on the relationships between microbes, cows and humans. What made you interested in raw milk and these multi species relationships of labor and care in this American dairy production?
- [05:22]
Katie Overstreet
Thank you very much for the invitation to be here. This is a great pleasure and I really appreciate the generous introduction and question. So I actually didn't set out to study raw milk and raw milk microbes when I started my fieldwork in Wisconsin. I was originally interested in genetically modified crops, but my dairy farmer interlocutors were more interested in both what was going on with animal rights activism and the way that they thought about caring for their cows and at the same time wrapped up in that. There was a debate going on about rbst, the growth hormone that was being used widely to promote production. There was a consumer oriented controversy about that showing up in milk and the potential effects on children drinking milk. But part of that controversy also raised questions about what else was in milk. And so a lot of people that I was talking with at the time wanted to discuss whether hormones in milk or microbes in milk, what were the effects on consumers? That's how I got started in this. I really tried to do a responsive ethnography where I work with the people that I'm interviewing and pay attention to what they're interested in.
- [06:54]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
In your presentation, you offered the notion of digestive belonging to make sense of how these microbes contain in the raw mic, how they can afford the creation of new relationships and connections. Could you elaborate a bit on this idea and perhaps give us an ethnographic example, maybe a timing during your research, an aha moment where you got to see how these microbes are kind of participating in shaping social life?
- [07:21]
Katie Overstreet
Yes, it's a great question. When I started my fieldwork in Wisconsin, I was interviewing an extension agent at University of Wisconsin Extension. We were talking about cow care at the time. But he brought up this example that he would much rather his grandchildren drink milk that contained rbst, this growth hormone that was controversial at the time, than raw milk, because he saw raw milk as such a dangerous and risky food. Now, this is a position that I've seen reiterated among experts that are charged with preventing foodborne illness in a very kind of explicit way. So they put out websites about it. I mean, it's basically a kind of pro pasteurization position across the board. Raw milk is considered risky food. Nobody should drink it. It causes disease. So that's that kind of level of position. In 2024, my family and I stayed on a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin. And one day we were out petting calves and helping with chores like feeding the calves from the morning milking. And there was another family on the farm at the same time doing a similar thing. They lived nearby, and they would bring their children by to pet calves and feed chickens and that sort of thing. The farmer host, she looked at my family and she said, you know, you should probably have your children wash their hands after petting calves because of zoonoses. And my partner, who was there at the time, he looked at me with just, like, fear in his eyes. His eyes were as big as dinner plates. And as this kind of idea of zoonoses hung in the air. But then she turned to the other family, and she said, I'm not worried about you, because you drink our milk, meaning raw milk, and you eat our eggs, which they collected from the chickens. Now, we were welcome to gather those eggs, but we were not offered raw milk products on the farm. And so I became very curious. This moment, this very clear kind of small moment actually really stuck with me, even as it was just a kind of very minor thing in the midst of a larger fieldwork project where I was more looking at the kind of co work of cows and farmers and employees and the ways that kind of landscape is remade on the dairy farm. So I wasn't actually setting out to study raw milk, but it sort of grabbed me. Like, what was this moment actually where interacting with calves and drinking raw milk were kind of paired as activities that separated people in a very kind of bodily sense as being from the farm or of the farm and people who were kind of foreign to that environment. So I started talking about it in the course of doing other interviews. And we were spending a lot of time with these farmers who were hosting us. I kept prodding at it and I got very interested in what did it mean actually to think differently about these microbes. At the same time, I started a collaboration with a group in Helsinki at the center for the Social Study of Microbes. So I was really starting to think about what does it mean actually to live with microbes a bit differently? Because we're in this really interesting moment right now where as Heather Paxton has pointed to, there's this kind of post pasturianism that's showing up in a lot of different realms. And of course, Jamie Lorimer's work about rewilding the gut and rewilding landscapes, it's really clever connection. Right. So I was kind of already attending to what is the role of microbes here. Raw milk in particular is interesting because it takes up a lot of space in US debates and controversies about milk. But it's actually one very small process, pasteurization in a long line of other processes for milk. Right. So the products, as I mentioned yesterday, the products that we were offered by these farmers that went through the National Dairy Co Op that purchases their milk, you know, it was homogenized. The fat percentage was reduced. It was processed into well, milk, but also cheese, butter, packaged in, in hermetic packaging, refrigerated, you know, all kinds of things go on to kind of change the product from when it leaves the cow to when a consumer meets it. And pasteurization is a really quite minor process, but it takes up almost all the space in discourse about. About milk. So I was quite interested in why that process took up so much space. What I found as I've looked more into it is it's really come to represent industrial food writ large. Dairy scientists who do public outreach, they often emphasize this is a very gentle treatment. They often call it because it's a short term heating of the milk that's really targeted at specific pathogens. They claim it doesn't change the flavor of the milk. But flavor and taste actually often becomes the reason that people claim raw milk is better than store bought milk.
- [13:37]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
You could say so with these. It's really fascinating to think about with these anti pasteurization activists, if you can call them that, are proponents. Would they then say that by pasteurizing the milk you kind of inhibit digestive belonging? I know it's digestive belonging, usual term, but is it kind of in that sense that you are kind of being inhibited from belonging to the landscape through this pasteurization? You're becoming domesticated as a consumer?
- [14:08]
Katie Overstreet
I think that's a really beautiful way to put it, and I think so. I mean, because this technology seems to stand in like this differentiation between industrial and a kind of natural food that's placed so directly on pasteurization itself. Well, you have other processes, you could talk about homogenization, right? All these other kinds of things, but pasteurization becomes instantiated as like the kind of break between the natural and the cooked in a very Levi Strozian way, in a sense. Right. And I think what your question really nicely points to is also this way in which raw milk drinking is partly wrapped up in this rural nostalgia, this kind of imagined rural past where people are more connected to the land and their food. And it's very much, you can see, it's a kind of response to the idea, the kind of critiques of industrial food as separating people from the processes and the materials of food production and processing. So I think you're exactly right to say that it is a break with digestive belonging. What you probably picked up in my talk yesterday was that I do tend to see it as a kind of fetishization of raw milk that places all of that kind of sense of belonging and that sense of rural connectedness on a product that then becomes risky because it isn't embedded in the landscape. Right. So as I argued yesterday in my talk, digestive belonging is about how pathogens that are present in milk are embedded in a set of processes on the farm and a set of encounters that take place through the work of dairying, of producing dairy, where farmers, family members of farmers, employees on farms, and sometimes visitors to farms can become involved in this kind of microbially enriched environment through ongoing exposures, right? So that they become, I think I use the word digested in a sense, right? So that digestion is going both ways. It's not only the humans who are digesting the milk, but it's also the microbes in the raw milk that are digesting the humans in the sense of changing our biologies.
- [17:26]
Unidentified Speaker 2
Right.
- [17:27]
Katie Overstreet
I mean, it's a Donna Harawayan point, right? I mean, you can look on the first page of When Species Meat, and she's talking about how cayenne pepper's tongue leaves these kinds of viral and bacterial imprints that travel in the body. And I have to say, even even though I knew this passage quite well a long time, I was quite shocked in the course of doing this research about raw milk and the kind of effects on the body that when you drink something like raw milk or fermented beverages and foods, these critters, I guess you could say, don't stay in the gut. They actually move quite easily out. They're not sort of rendered inactive by our quite powerful digestive juices. Actually, they have all kinds of effects that we don't fully understand. And so that's what I mean also by being co digested. But as you rightly point to also in your question, it also points to a kind of agency, right, that bodies are kind of remaking bodies. And it's not just the human who's in charge of that in a sense, but there are quite subtle, and we could say feral activities on the part of microbes all the time.
- [18:58]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
From what you're saying now, I'm getting really curious about methodology also, because you gave us this great example of you starting to kind of notice that there is something about cultivating and belonging to the landscape through the microbes as well, with your family on the farm. So I was thinking about, like, if you gradually came to kind of belong in that landscape differently in that field work.
- [19:26]
Katie Overstreet
It's a very good question. I think it points to one of the aspects of ethnography that I think is really special, which is that as anthropologists, we spend a lot of time in our field work. Many of us spend a lifetime or at least years visiting the same place, talking to the same people, becoming involved with people in really deep and ongoing ways. And that's certainly been the case for me. I am from the US but I'm not from Wisconsin. But over the course of fieldwork, I've very much been adopted into a family there. And. And I keep going back And. And following people's lives and being in Christmas letters and those sorts of things. So I think belonging is a really important part of ethnographic fieldwork. Not everyone does ethnography that way, but I think you can learn things from partial belonging. Right? It's not complete. It's certainly not complete. I mean, no one in Wisconsin would say that I am a local. I'm more a kind of. Yeah, it's a very. That's a very partial belonging. And it's not an aspect that I've talked about so much in this paper. But I'll say this. When I was originally thinking about this paper, I was thinking about this aspect of fieldwork that I've never quite figured out what to. What to do with it yet, which is that when. Whenever I travel around in Wisconsin with my host mother and she encounters someone new, she does this really interesting work of trying to place that person in her kind of known social network. So if she meets somebody with the last name Zimmerman, for example, she'll say, well, are you related to the Zimmermans that live over by Monroe? Or, oh, I went to school with somebody with that last name. Are you related to them? And, I mean, it generally works out in this quite impressive way. Like, she. She's lived there her entire life, and her family has lived there for multiple generations. And so she can kind of place people in this landscape of where they live and who they know and familial relations. And it can. It's quite a kind of deep sense of who lives where and ways of connecting people. And she's not the only one who does this. Right. Most people have a good sense of who lives around them and who's related to who. And not only that, but roads are really interesting technology for keeping track of relatedness in the landscape. There I had this really strange moment where I stopped at a farm one time around 20 minutes from where I was living on small rural highways. And they said, oh, we've seen your car going by. So we were wondering whose car that was. And I was completely shocked that people had been paying attention to a car that they didn't know in the area going by every so often. But people really are very aware, actually, of cars going by, trucks going by. They use it as a kind of. I mean, there's a gossip element to it, but there's also a kind of news element to it that is quite important. So they'll say, oh, it looks like so and so is laying cement at their farm down the road, because a cement truck goes By Right. So there's this way they're really paying attention to the kind of movements of each other around the neighborhood, around, around the region. And so people who move into this area and people who've lived there for 15, 20 years, they have trouble actually integrating sometimes into these networks because they don't have that deep knowledge of who's connected to who and how are they related to so and so and so it actually takes quite a long time in Wisconsin to be considered of this particular area in southern Wisconsin.
- [24:15]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
So belonging is not only structured through the microbes, but really also.
- [24:19]
Katie Overstreet
Absolutely.
- [24:19]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
No, I should say.
- [24:21]
Katie Overstreet
Yes, yes, yes. So it's made me really curious about like what it takes to belong in, in this area in a social sense and who can be considered belonging. I mean, it also, it's even more intense when you come to dairy farming. Right. So there are dairy farmers who are celebrated all the time for having a dairy farm that's continually operated for more than 100 years. They're called Centennial Dairy Farms and who have fourth generation dairy farms. Right. So there's this way that it's a kind of constructed past that's very present in the sense of contemporary belonging. So it's made me very curious about what that means in terms of young farmers coming in and intergenerational transfer, because it's not discussed that much actually. But there is a bit of a crisis going on in terms of intergenerational transfer of dairy farming. It's very precarious work, it's very hard labor. And a lot of people don't want to go into dairy farming. And a lot of parents don't encourage their children to go into dairy farming because it's such a difficult way to make a living. And this challenge of being considered part of this social network is potentially also preventing people from coming to the area and joining the work of agricultural labor. And from my perspective, that contributes to an ongoing movement towards consolidation of dairy farming. Because as smaller farms go out of business, then larger farms in the area will buy those farms or start cropping their land. And so then, I mean, when you look at the, they're called plat maps, property maps over time, then you can really see particular farms growing in many farms going out of business. And I'm not saying that all farming should be done in this small scale method, but I think it's important to know the drivers of demographic change going on in this agricultural region.
- [26:58]
Unidentified Speaker 3
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- [27:22]
Unidentified Speaker 4
This message may be shocking to many millennials. If you are one, you might want to sit down Right now. Loads of people are searching the following on Depop. Low rise jeans, halter top, velour tracksuit, puka shell necklace, disc belt. You likely place these in the dark of your closet in 2004, never to be seen again. But if you can find it in yourself to dust them off, there are a lot of people who will give you money for them. Sell on Depop where taste recognizes taste.
- [27:53]
Katie Overstreet
We heard you. Nine years of bring back the snack wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the hot honey snack WR. Now you've really wanted. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can. Sam.
- [29:00]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
I. I read another piece of yours where you are talking a bit about also the skills needed to to care for cows and to perform this, this labor on the dairy farms and how that's also a skill that takes time to develop.
- [29:15]
Katie Overstreet
Yeah.
- [29:15]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
You have a chapter in the collected volume titled Making taste public from 2018. And your chapter is titled how to Taste like a Cow Cultivating Shared Scents in Wisconsin Dairy Worlds. And in this chapter you describe how the dairy farmers try to cultivate a shared sense with their cows when they are out buying hay feed for the cows. One of the interlocutors even encouraged you as an ethnographer, to think like a cow, or more precisely, to taste like a cow. And I was curious, what does that, what does this mean to taste like a cow? And how did your interlocutors, and perhaps also yourself come to develop this form of tasting?
- [29:58]
Katie Overstreet
So in this piece about tasting like a cow, what I was really interested in is the mutuality of the work on dairy farms between cows and humans. As I mentioned yesterday, a lot of my work has been kind of circular, circling around these questions of human animal boundaries, especially in the context of work and production. And taste is really interesting. I mean, much like the microbes, it's a way that you can kind of see how bodies are shaped in these productive modes in the sense of sensory attunements. Here I'm really inspired by Christina Grasseni's work, who's also worked on cattle farming in the Italian Alps, and she's looked a lot at the kind of skilled sensors, as she calls it, especially with visual skill. So I was interested in taking this in a little bit of a different direction to think about taste. As I said, taste is something that sort of exceeds capitalist production. It's this sensory mode that comes into being through a lifetime of interacting with cow. So even as children working with observing cows. But what I wanted to really explore was to push this, this aspect of multi species ethnography, right, where we're taking other than humans seriously as social actors. So if human tastes are social and skilled, what about cow tastes? How could we think about cows as cultural eaters? I'm working in a tricky mode here because I'm trying to use social theory about nutrition and the senses to think with cows and cow bodies and to really take them seriously as social, cultural actors. In that piece, what I'm really trying to do is kind of do this back and forth where I'm disrupting the boundary of the human body as a tasting body and the cow body as a tasting body to find how they reach towards each other, a kind of anticipation of taste on behalf of another. It's a difficult thing to describe, but using that approach was really eye opening because in my conversations with farmers and dairy nutritionists, they often discussed tasting the feed that they would produce for cows, that they would mix for cows, observing, like I said, in pastures, but also learning to kind of taste industrial feed or these pellets that are produced for robots, that are supposed to be a treat for cows. That's a lure. It really has to be something that cows might want to eat. But also watching in pastures is quite interesting. I didn't put this in that piece, but I also visited some agricultural research stations in Wisconsin where they were trying out different pasture grasses from different parts of the world. Teff was one, for example, that I saw on a plot. They were trying to figure out what cows would want to eat in a pasture or in different kinds of hay mixes. It's really interesting actually, because the cow becomes the consumer in this kind of research. All of these experiments and experiences on the part of the human interlocutors, shapes how they produce the feed, anticipate the taste of the cows. The cows, on the other hand, they also have to learn to eat. It isn't a kind of naturalized eating because many of these cows, especially in conventional systems, they're not necessarily eating pasture plants, they're given feed mixes. So calf starter, for example, which often contains antimicrobials, greens, also some things for palatability and basically from the time they're weaned off milk, they're just given this kind of mix. Then they'll move into what's called a total mixed ration, which is a sort of smoothie in a sense. It's not very wet, but it's a kind of like moist mixture of concentrates, which are basically kind of meeting nutritional needs of lactating or non lactating cows, depending on the group. Hay forages produced on farm potentially, but also bought feeds through feed mills and that sort of thing. The cows have to learn how to eat these mixes. They also disrupt that kind of intentional mix of feeds. They're actually surprisingly good at sorting the feed with their tongues, even though farmers mix it in this way where they're trying to keep cows from sorting. Because a little bit like the way that nutritional guidelines are given to humans in the United States through these USDA food triangles about the food groups you're supposed to eat. And the way they think about food in terms of every meal should meet this kind of nutritional requirement, or every day should meet this kind of nutritional requirement. With cattle feed, they often say it should be uniform in every bite, but cows are always disrupting, and it can be kind of problematic. It becomes this back and forth between cows and the farmers or nutritionists or feed mills mixing their feeds. Partly because of the specificities of cow digestion. They have to keep larger particles in the feed for microbes to cling onto in the cow gut. If it's too fine, then their digestion in this fermentation vat that we call the rumen can become too fast or too hot, they call it. And that can make cows sick. So on the one hand, they can't make it too fine, or cows can get sick, they can't make it too coarse, or cows can more easily sort it. And then they can also get sick actually, if they don't get the kind of scope of nutrition that they need. So they're quite choosy eaters. And so nutritionists and farmers and feed mills, they're always kind of trying to make these additives that make things more palatable. And in my piece, I mentioned some flavorings that they add, like Berry Delight and caramel and butterscotch, which sounds like you're at an ice cream shop or something like that, right? So there's this way in which the kind of cultural preferences of flavors in Wisconsin, especially around sweetness. Sidney Mintz has written this nice book too, about, well, besides sweetness and power, but also later work on sweetness like it's Very much seen as this kind of core preference in food, but also disposition. And you know, it has a lot of cultural salience as a, as a flavor and more so in that sense, I'm trying to understand how these preferences and kind of negotiations and permeabilities and boundaries happen through cattle feed. Also, because cattle eat all kinds of things that are quite surprising actually, like that only can become cattle feed through modes of translation, as Michelle Kellogg has called it, where nutritional categories make it possible to feed cows things like candy leftovers from candy factories or fish meal, not something you would traditionally find in a pasture. But it becomes possible to feed these things because they can meet nutritional criteria.
- [39:03]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
I think this is a great example of how species interact and create their preferences through the negotiations with one another. And you've been speaking a bit throughout our conversation to these two practices of care with farm animals. And before we end, I want to address that a bit more because apart from doing research with farm animals and their caretakers, you have also participated in the EU funded cost action project lift, aimed at, and I quote, lifting farm animal lives through formulating the foundations for positive animal welfare. And on the, on the webpage they define positive animal welfare as focusing on providing animals with experiences that elicit positive emotions, like giving them opportunities for play, positive social interactions, agency, maybe for preference in terms of finding the clover to eat, because they like the that that part of the pasture instead of just minimizing negative experiences, as is often what we understand by animal welfare. Farm animal welfare. Can you maybe say a bit about how your academic work has supported such efforts of positive animal welfare or how you understand it?
- [40:19]
Katie Overstreet
Thank you for the question. Yes, it's true that I'm involved in the LIFT project, which is a really interesting and also very big project there at this moment, more than three hundred and fifty people involved from many countries on that project, a lot of whom work specifically in animal welfare. And this is part of coming out of long. I'll say that I've been involved in a lot of interdisciplinary projects with veterinarians, animal welfare scientists, animal scientists and others who are interested in to some extent improving farm to animal life on farms. It's difficult work. A lot of animal welfare work has focused on these very sort of relative improvements, right? Like what is a pig's life if you give them half a meter more of space in their pens and these sorts of things. I would say that animal welfare as a field has had a difficult relationship with industry. Many animal welfare scientists have been accused of contributing, in fact to the unlivability of farms through these kinds of approaches that qualify very small scale improvements. But what you also find in animal welfare, what I have found through my collaborations, is there are many people who are trying to think beyond what the field has allowed so far. As you said, much of animal welfare has been shaped in relation to the Five Freedoms, which came out of the 1965 Bramble Report, which was about sort of more. More focused on freedom from suffering. So this project, which is. Which is really about kind of flipping that discourse and then trying to kind of develop concepts of positive animal welfare and as well as methods for studying animal welfare and actually doing also a lot of outreach, a big project like this has a lot of possibility in that realm.
- [42:45]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
Have you encountered any tensions around your engagement with animal welfare activism when your research might be interpreted as evaluative or even moralizing towards your interlocutor's farming practices?
- [42:57]
Katie Overstreet
One of the things that I've worked very hard at in my current book project, which is called A well Cared For Cow Produces More Milk. In that work, which is really based on research in Wisconsin for more than a decade, I actually do not talk about animal welfare that much, in part because my ethnographic proclivities mean that I'm really interested in what's the local ethos of care, but also taking that as a kind of jumping off point for doing critical ethnography that's also really respectful of the people that I work with and who generously dedicate time to talking with me and showing me around their farms. That's why I talk about care, because care has a really different valence than animal welfare. I would say that animal welfare is a field of academic study, but it's also a form of governance. You have animal welfare inspection, which Inga Annabear has worked on a lot in Denmark, for example. She's looked at the specifics of animal welfare inspection on pig farms in particular in Denmark. There you have a lot of tension between these mostly veterinarians who do inspection and farmers, because they can potentially lose subsidies or have legal repercussions based on that kind of inspection. There you see animal welfare becoming a kind of governance regime. Care, on the other hand, is not formalized in that way. It's a really different situation in Wisconsin and the wider us where you don't have this animal welfare oversight to the extent that you have in Denmark. But care is something that farmers talk about, and it's something they wanted to talk about a lot with me while I was in the field. And this Was partly actually because animal rights activists had. Right. When I started my fieldwork, there were some videos that came out from dairy farms in the American Midwest that showed really problematic treatment of cows on dairy farms. This had spurred a lot of conversations among dairy farmers about how the industry is represented, on the one hand, and care is very much wielded in that sense. As a kind of marketing term. We care well for our cows. Of course we care about them. They're the kind of basis of our industry. Right. So we provide these brushes and we design their diets. Right. Very carefully. Right. So there are all these ways that care is kind of projected outwards in a different way than animal welfare, which is sort of projected from a different position onto farming. But. And so, I mean, as an anthropologist, we have to take seriously what people mean by care, but also be critical about it. We've talked a lot about diets, so I'll use that as the example. On the one hand, it is a mode of caring for cows. It's food provisioning, much like in a home. That's a form of care. And so that's another place where you see the sweetness. It's kind of providing this love in a material form. But it's also towards efforts of industrial capitalist production, more or less depending on the farm, where there are different parameters of thinking about what's an industrial farm.
- [47:09]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
But.
- [47:11]
Katie Overstreet
It'S also a mode of pushing productivity. So when you have a herd of dairy, how you can actually use diet to make them produce more. That hot diet, as we mentioned, about what's going on in the rumen. Right. So there you start to see the tensions of care in terms of production and technology. What I called the care production. Nodding. Right. That it's. That it's not clear from the start what care means. So my. The reason that I've actually called this project a well cared for cow produces more milk. This is something people say all the time to kind of emphasize that they use cows for production. It's an instrumental relationship, but that care is integral to that production. But I really wanted to take that apart because it's not always clear what care means or how it's mobilized, especially in relation to new technologies that deeply intervene in and shift cow bodies. For example, hormone shots that push cows, or we could say force cows into specific cycles of fertility that become more efficient on a farm, for example. But I don't want to villainize farmers. I mean, a lot of times in these conversations around animal welfare, but also, of course, animal rights, the farmers are vilified. The way that I see it, farmers are certainly responsible in a sense. Many of us share responsibility for the current situation for farmed animals on many farms. So it's not about not placing responsibility. But what I think is really important in ethnographic research is we also pay attention to the structures, the forms of power that shape the situations of individual actors and interlocutors. Right. And farmers of course, are no exception. They are caught in systems, quite top down systems in, in many cases that produce research, educate vets towards specific industrial modes of doing agriculture. They're squeezed both by the companies that buy their or co ops, as we often see in agriculture that buy their products, but also the ones that sell them the inputs. Right. So in agrarian political economy it's called the cost price squeeze, right. That farmers end up in the middle and squeezed on both sides and it's very hard to make a living producing food. So this is also the source of farmers wanting to talk about this. When I come to their farms, they want to talk about what care means when they're pushed on many sides sometimes to do farming in a way that they wouldn't choose. I've certainly been to farms where they've told me that they needed a loan and the only way they could get a loan was by increasing the size of herd and therefore putting in barns that keep cows inside, for example, reducing pasture. There are all sorts of ways that farmers are caught in structures that shift farming into particular modes, whether they choose it or not. To me it's important to be critical of what care means in this situation and also not to vilify farmers for all aspects of what's really a kind of set of issues.
- [51:10]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
I think it's extremely important to address these conditions of both care and of production. And I think it's applicable to many fields outside of farm animals. I think also in terms of conservation policies and other chains of production. So I'm looking very much forward to reading that book when it's finished and up.
- [51:32]
Katie Overstreet
Thank you.
- [51:33]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
My final question is really a question we ask everyone on the podcast. Do you have any recommendations for like a researcher, a book or an article, something that has inspired you or has been in any way influential for your work?
- [51:49]
Katie Overstreet
Thank you for this question. I mulled over or ruminated over it for some days now. And I mean, it's tricky because I'm inspired by so many. Of course you can hear Anna Singh's influence and Donna Haraway's influence and I think if you're in multi species studies or interested in it Then don't miss Vinciennes or Jocelyn Pourchet's work, who I am very inspired by as well. But I'm actually going to go in a slightly different direction. Partly influenced by my partner, Spencer Ory, who's a speculative fiction writer, but also during my time at UC Santa Cruz, Donna Haraway and Rustin Hodgeness, her partner. I was in the middle of studying anthropology and being undone, as you, I think you called it unlearning yesterday, a lot. And they would hand me speculative fiction books and give them to me on audiobooks as well. And it was a really important kind of way to experiment. I was really grateful, actually, that they helped to revive a kind of childhood love of fantasy and speculative fiction in me. And I haven't stopped since they started me on that path. And it's been really inspiring to keep reading in these modes, in part because they offer a kind of. They can offer. The authors working in speculative fiction can offer a kind of feminist. Otherwise, there's a possibility for experimentation in creative fiction that can push us in terms of what we're grappling with in our research. And one of the authors that I've recently come to, because I maybe unsurprisingly, have a preference actually, for these experiments in other than human perspectives that. That are given precedence in some of these pieces. Right. So there are speculative fiction authors who, like Leline Paul, who's written the Bees, where the entire book is written from the perspective of a bee, or Watership down, where you get this really interesting look into the social lives of rabbits, for example. But the book. I Know I'm Coming, I've taken a little while to get here. But the book that I'll mention is called the Mount by Carol M. Schwiller. It's quite difficult to find Carol E.M. schwiller's work because a lot of it's out of print. But what she does is kind of grapple with maybe we could say, care and dominance in these more than human relationships. So the Mount, the premise is that there are these extraterrestrials who've come to Earth. They have very large hands but very small bodies, which affords them the possibility of using humans as we use horses, so that humans become the horses. There's this kind of reversal there. And then she uses that, in fact, to dive into the politics of horsemanship. As a horse girl, former horse girl myself, it's been really interesting, actually, to kind of think through the. The lively possibilities of collaboration, but also the politics of. Of dominance and instrumentality. Through that kind of thought experiment mode. We've also I also mentioned Tender Is the Flesh, where there's a more kind of agricultural reversal going on in terms of humans and farmed animal species. I would encourage folks who are interested in this realm of research to also explore what's going on in speculative fiction, because there's really interesting offerings there in terms of what can be explored and how we think about some of these issues.
- [56:14]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
That's a great recommendation and a reminder that anthropology stretches out, connects to so many other fields and and that's all. That's what it's all about, really.
- [56:25]
Katie Overstreet
Yeah.
- [56:25]
Cecil Marie Henriksen
Thank you so much Katie, for being on the podcast. It was a pleasure talking with you.
- [56:29]
Katie Overstreet
Likewise. Thank you, Cecil.
- [56:41]
Sadie Hale
You've been listening to Anthropology on Air, a project of the Social Anthropology Department at the the University of Bergen. The music in the podcast was made by Victor Lange and the episode was produced by Sadie Hale and Cecil Marie Henriksen. If you like what you've heard, why not subscribe or leave us a review? We'd love to hear from you. You can follow us on Facebook and by visiting UIB no Antro where you will also find more information on the ongoing work and upcoming events at the department. Until next time from our city between the Fjell Take care and how de Bra.
- [57:32]
Unidentified Speaker 5
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