"To only see microbes as tools misses the whole point of co-existence. Many of the verbs used in scientific inquiry around microbes like capture, harness, and exploit, cordons microbes off as just another resource to extract. My concern is that championing microbes as tool-first, organism-second means that the modern eater forever stays cradled in the bosom of product-oriented ways of life, instead of cultivating a robust sense of entangled lifeways. It ignores how our collective metabolisms are knotted together, our stakes, entwined."