Fermentation as Metaphor

It seems like there’s a reclaiming of ancestral roots that is also part of this fervor in fermentation. But it also seems like those ancestral roots that they’re trying to reconnect to are not going to take shape in the same way. They’re not going to appear like they did for their grandparents or their great-grandparents or back in the old country ... See more

For me one of the most exciting things that’s happening right now is a real cross-pollination of these traditions. And so you might have people in one part of the world learning about traditions from another part of the world and then applying it to a completely different set of ingredients.

I think that many of our biggest problems relate to the ways in which we have become so distanced from our environment.

Producing food forces us to become more connected to the weather, the insects that are around us, just so many aspects of the world that are right there but it’s so easy for us to ignore them because they don’t seem like they’re directly relevant to our life and to our experience even though they are.

The more you get out of an air-conditioned car and into an air-conditioned house, the less relevant the environment is to your direct experience. So reclaiming our food is reclaiming much more than our food. It’s reclaiming this huge set of relationships that ultimately connect us to the land and to the biological web that we are part of.

For us right now, in this period science has some understanding of what’s going on, but historically fermentation has been such a mystery that it’s been really seen in many contexts as something quite literally divine. And there’s a huge amount of ceremony and ritual organized around fermentation. We can even look at some of the major world religio... See more

Fermentation is ultimately a very hopeful practice because it does not yield immediate gratification. There’s always delayed gratification in fermentation, and so in a quite literal way it’s an investment in the future. If you are despondent and despairing and don’t know if there’s a future, why would you invest your energy into fermenting? It is q... See more

in those rural and village settings, the pace of life was slower, and you come to urban settings and the pace of life increases and obviously our modern life is an extreme example of that run rampant, but it seems like one of the things that makes fermentation so attractive to folks, and you kind of intimated this earlier, is that it’s so much slow... See more

I think that in the fermentation revival right now, there’s just an incredible amount of innovation and creativity being applied so it’s not just reviving traditions; it’s also applying them in creative and novel ways to create some new things.