the greatest promise of metaphorical fermentation is that it generates new forms, which seems very relevant right now in the midst of everything that’s happening during the pandemic when so much has been broken open to reveal the chasms in our society.

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 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.

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

So in the cultivation of microorganisms on our food—which is what we’re doing in fermentation—we use the same word, “culture,” to describe the community of bacteria that turn milk into yogurt that we use to describe language, belief systems and the totality of what we’re trying to pass down generation to generation.

reclaim a relationship, not only with food production, but with traditions and communities and ultimately with the living world through the simple act of fermentation.

In the microbial world, there is no purity. That’s totally a human construct. In a lot of commercial winemaking, you might use little chemicals to sterilize the grape juice and then you can introduce the single strain of yeast that’s been propagated into that. But that’s a real departure from the long history of winemaking that just works with the ... See more

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

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