I am about to be made into a cheese. The designer and engineer Helene Steiner is serene in her lab coat, brandishing a cotton swab and sweetly asking if I would consider letting her probe between my toes for a bacterial culture that will turn fresh milk into a wheel of stilton. She has already shown me the centrifuge, the deep freezer, the little petri dish where she will deposit my bacterial sample and the incubator in which the microbes will grow overnight. It is an unlikely setting for a laboratory or a cheese dairy – a converted shipping container tucked away behind Shepherd’s Bush market in west London. But then there is nothing normal about spending a chilly spring day having your germs harvested for cheese. “I want to be a nice cheese. Please not my feet,” I plead with her. “How about my face instead?”
Selfmade started as a research project combining biotechnology, engineering and art. The brainchild of the synthetic biologist Christina Agapakis and the artist Sissel Tolaas, in conjunction with the University of Edinburgh and Stanford University, these cheeses aren’t beautiful, or even edible; they’re grown from the bits of us we would usually scrub away. While one of the cheesemakers working on the original Selfmade experiments said she would happily sample them, and they may well be safe to eat, they are not offered for consumption. And yet, as anyone who has ever walked past a supermarket cheese counter will have smelled, the bacteria present on human skin, from noses and ears to feet, have much in common with those in the cheese we eat. Microbacterium lactium from an armpit might smell yoghurty, sour and floral. Likewise, as Agapakis charmingly points out: “Limburger cheese offers a remarkably close substitute for the smell of human feet.”
This grotesquery is about to go on display at the V&A in London as part of its upcoming exhibition Food: Bigger Than the Plate. The show examines the future of food culture, science and technology with more than 70 contemporary art and design projects on display alongside items from the museum’s own collections. There is Alice V Robinson’s 11458, a range of accessories – from slippers to a leather bag with bone clasps – made with products from the slaughter of a single sheep. Jiwon Woo’s Mother’s Hand Taste subverts hackneyed tales about the inimitable taste of mum’s cooking by locating the origin of that taste not in love, or care, or some maternal magic, but in the unique microbial profile of a cook’s hands. Lubaina Himid’s 2007 work Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service consists of found tableware decorated with paintings of slaves, their owners and slave ships, and patterns from the west coast of Africa.
My stilton will sit alongside a cheddar made from Suggs’s bacteria, a Heston Blumenthal blue cheese, a mozzarella made from Professor Green’s germs and a Cheshire cheese courtesy of Alex James. This kind of stubbornly strange, silly, unsterile food antic is right on cue. Errington Cheese, a raw-milk cheesemaker in Scotland, was recently cleared of breaching food safety rules after many months of legal struggle, so acute is our fear of the unpasteurised and the “unclean”. While raw milk is legal in England, Wales and Northern Ireland as long as it is labelled as such and sold direct from producer to consumer, it is illegal in Scotland. Raw-milk cheese is permitted in Scotland but is under threat, and it is against this backdrop that our cheese selves roll in: stinking, fermenting rebuttals to a food culture that values control over spontaneity, consistency over organic growth.
Steiner, it turns out, is fine with my request to harvest cultures from my face instead of my feet. I hear they took a sample from James’s armpit, so they have sufficient gross-out credentials already. In fact, going for the face is of equal scientific and gastronomic interest because the site of the swab makes a big difference – the bacteria that thrive on a foot will vary from those that colonise armpits or faces. Will foot cheese will be more pungent than facial cheese? Or (my greatest fear) will the harmless face bacteria actually create the foulest cheese of all?
Art has long wrangled with the messy business of food. Seventeenth-century Dutch still lives are crowded, fertile visions of plenty. The American artist Wayne Thiebaud is best-known for his pastel-hued paintings of sickly sweet cakes, ice-cream and confectionery. Martha Rosler’s 1975 video Semiotics of the Kitchen deconstructed the apparatus of the domestic goddess through a feminist lens. But although food and art are dynamic collaborators, museums and galleries struggle to accommodate work involving real food.
The V&A housed the world’s first museum cafe and an early display called the Victorian Animal Product and Food Collection, which aimed to instruct the public on industrial and scientific progress in nutrition and food production, but these two departments were kept separate. That is set to change with this new exhibition. GroCycle’s urban mushroom farm installation, for example, will use spent coffee grounds to grow mushrooms that will, in turn, be served in the cafe. The cheese, however, will be displayed behind glass to keep it chilled, and to keep hungry fingers at bay should anyone be mad enough to try to nab a piece.
I haven’t seen my stilton yet. My cheese alter ego is, as I have been gleefully telling anyone who will listen, maturing in a dark, cool shipping container in west London, growing riper by the day. As is customary for stilton, a few weeks into its maturation my cheese was pierced all over with a steel needle. The holes poked through the rind allow air into the cheese, fuel for happy little pockets of microbial activity, giving it that trademark sumptuous marbling of mould. The hope is that the exhibit might illuminate the cheesemaking process in a reassuring way. But actually, I think it will appal more people than it entices. We like to live in comfortable ignorance of the fact that the cheddar in our sandwich is milk with a load of bacteria added to it. But it is important to confront the reality that the bacteria in cheese are not dissimilar to those on our skin and all around us. In fact, in spite of the potential cost to my pride, I can’t help feeling sad that exhibition-goers won’t be able to smell my Selfmade stilton.
Food: Bigger Than the Plate is at the V&A in London from 18 May to 20 October, vam.ac.uk
