Why fermentation?

Culture your Food

I started fermenting after reading Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, full of good recipes and tips and stories. He makes fermentation sound like fun, easy, delicious, and political—all of which it is.

Political: Because our food system is premised on mass production, which favors industrialization, sterility, uniformity, usually at the expense of nutrition and flavor, reclaiming food autonomy by making food ourselves is a political act.

Easy: And fermentation is easy! Mostly, what you need are ingredients + container + culture (what we call the mold or bacteria—I like to call them my beasties!) + time! Sandor says that fermenting vegetables is even easier than making yogurt, which is already pretty simple. I just need to find a large ceramic or glass jar. And patience to wait anywhere between 3 days and 3 years!!!!

Delicious: Plus, my kombucha, soy yogurt, tempeh, nut cheeses, strawberry honey wine/mead, preserved lemons are delicious! They are my babies! Actually, I take that back. I didn’t like the preserved lemons so much, but I may not have had the right recipes to help them shine.

Fun: I like having a more intimate relationship with what I eat. By making it, I can tweak it to my taste. But more than that, I like the rhythm it confers on my life. Making yogurt and kombucha every week gives my kitchen life a cycle. As spring wakes after winter’s hibernation, so relive kombucha and yogurt creation weekly or biweekly in my kitchen. I find certain comfort in making patterns in my life.

One of the most personally important reason is that, through fermentation, I participate in fertility—in the most extravagant understanding of the term. Other people may have plants and pets. I generate more life by feeding my beasties at the right temperature. Cultivating life in the right environment is easy. My beasties are resilient. In fact, they kill the germs that would make me sick. After I eat them in yogurt, they become a part of my internal microfloral landscape and keep me healthy and safe. I give to my bacteria communities and receive from them. Is it too much to claim that we are accountable to each other?

You can hear Sandor Katz speak on Awesome Pickle.

Nutritional tidbit of the day: I knew that table salt was bad for me. In the talk, Sandor tells me why: table salt is so cheap because they who make it don’t make money from selling it. How do the salt sellers make money then? They strip natural minerals from the sodium chloride and sell the minerals to vitamin producers! That explains why unrefined salt, though less processed, is more expensive than table salt. But it is better to get your minerals with your salt rather than in pill form. It is always better to eat whole foods rather than processed foods—and vitamins are processed!

Image from howsyrface (totally crazy image, no?)