Making bread the old-fashioned way. Recombinant typicalities and the absence of bakers

Abstract

"Typical" bread is made up of different ingredients, as any other product circulating in different social contexts. Among these ingredients, the present paper focuses on reconfigured "natural" yeast. The study examines the development of a project aimed at standardising and using reconfigured "natural" yeast in the production of "typical" Sardinian bread, and precisely the convergence between the microbiologists responsible for the project and the technologists working on the implementation of a device for maintaining "natural" yeast. The paper also analyses the difficulties in the implementation of this project among bakers. In particular, it highlights issues related to an authoritarian mode of implementation, conflicts depending on status relations and untitled expertise, and problems concerning the transformation of a socio-technical convergence into a proper alignment. Finally, the paper examines the hybrid and recombinant nature of "typical" food, when embedded into dense technoscientific processes.