“Inconfidência queijeira”: evoluções institucionais e práticas multiespécie na construção de um mercado de excelência para os queijos artesanais de Minas Gerais

Abstract

This article analyzes the construction of a market of excellence for artisanal cheeses made in Minas Gerais. I try to demonstrate how this construction, called “Franco-brazilian Revolution” or “Cheese Inconfidence”, is not only the effect of individual initiatives and inventive discourses about the image of food but primarily a consequence of structural and institutional evolutions. These evolutions include a series of actors from different socio-technical worlds (sanitary, gastronomic, commercial, etc.), but also non-human actors (bacteria, fungi, mites, among others). As an essential element in the institutionalization of this market, cheese maturation emerges a multi-species practice that has produced effective political power by transforming a popular food, shrouded in health controversies, into a moral object consumed by elites. It is a way of building distinctions that have been redesigning the cartography of production, commercialization, and consumption of the food manufactured in the state.