Mapping Roquefort – Diffracting a popular cheese

This paper maps the trajectory of the French cheese Roquefort – diffracted through the lens of its continuous success and propagation. It investigates how demarcations, delimitations, classifications and bordering schemes within the food industry create particularities, but also how multi-species (human maps, specific topographies and microbia) are invested in developing foodscapes. Defining territories and delineating foodspaces in order to make ‘geographical claims’ is an active procedure of ‘terroirizing’ (Ostrowski, 2023) which can entail not only stringent geographical, productive, facilitative, temporal and skilled constraints, but also hormone development, sheep breeding schemes and domestication of fungi.