Fervor for Fermentation

Lea Burkenroad

ILS 252

12/14/11

Fervor For Fermentation

            I have never considered myself to be good at science.  I never took a liking to memorization and had trouble understanding mitosis and meiosis in middle school.  My twin brother was always the one who easily excelled in science and had a real passion for it.  The first time I encountered the art and science of fermentation was through a friend.  She told me about kombucha and raved about its digestive health benefits and how easy it is to make.  “The process of fermentation makes food more digestible and nutritious.  Live, unpasteurized, fermented foods also carry beneficial bacteria directly to our digestive systems, where they exist symbiotically, breaking down food and aiding digestion” (Katz 2).  I recall telling my mom about it and unsurprisingly, she was worried about the danger of the risks of contamination and urged me to make sure everything was really clean during the process.  I was just getting involved with Slow Food UW at the time and found out from the co-leader that she could give me a SCOBY.  I remember waiting and waiting for it, not really knowing what I was waiting for.  When it was finally ready, she asked me to bring a jar and we did the transfer after a Slow Food family dinner night.  My friend that had previous experience brewing kombucha in the past showed me the steps to the process and after the first time around I felt confident brewing a batch independently.  Although kombucha did not prove to be a “gateway” to fermented foods, thinking back to this experience reminds me of the social and cultural values that undoubtedly surround fermentation.  I believe that the art, science and culture of fermentation are nothing without storytelling and the exchange of knowledge, food, and live cultures.  Yet, life is nothing without these microbial cultures.  “Not only are we dependent upon microorganisms, we are their descendants: According to the fossil record, all forms of life on Earth spring from bacterial origins” (Katz).

My interest in fermentation was inspired once again when I lived at a housing cooperative.  I would watch people experiment in the kitchen with various fermented foods from kimchee to kefir to sauerkraut and they would often make vast quantities and share their experiments with the house.  Although people would often be doing their experiments individually, it was always an activity that was open for others to take part in and ask questions about.  I was also inspired to partake more in fermentation through FH King Students For Sustainable Agriculture.  The former program director is another fermentation mentor who inspired me to experiment with fermentation.  He lives in one of the most cramped spaces I’ve seen in Madison, yet he uses every inch of his home for something productive.  He has a “fermentation station” filled with things such as kombucha with SCOBYs’ larger than any I’ve seen, banana vinegar, yarrow beer, mead and sauerkraut.  He is always offering tastes of his experiments and for my honest opinion.  He also feels strongly that by eating fermented foods, his health is improved.  “Fermented foods are a powerful aid to digestion and a protection against disease.  And because fermentation is, by nature, an artisanal process, the disappearance of fermented foods has hastened the centralization and industrialization of our food supply, to the detriment of small farms and local economies” (Fallon xi).  He led a workshop for FH King this past summer that left me with the idea that I could go home and ferment vegetables simply with salt and water.  I love the sour taste of things like pickles and felt that there were certain vegetables that I would prefer the taste of if they were fermented rather than cooked in some fashion or eaten raw.

I acquired “Wild Fermentation”, by Sandor Katz and decided that I could use this project as a reason and motivation for experimenting with fermentation using various recipes.  I began with a rye sourdough starter because I liked the idea of baking my own bread using yeast from my own environment; yeast that can be resilient and sustained.  It begins simply with flour, water, and in my case with some plums because Katz suggested that unwashed, organic fruit has some yeast on it that is drawn to the fruit’s sweetness.  I stirred the mixture vigorously and covered it and let it sit in a warm place.  I attended to it at least once daily for multiple days and started to notice bubbles.  This is a sign that the yeast is active.  It felt like magic.  I could smell sourdough bread when I put my nose even remotely close to the bowl and was ecstatic that wild yeast had made its way into my batter from the air in my house.  I continued to add flour to the mixture for a few more days to “feed” my starter.  When it was ready to use, I saved some of it for future use and used the rest to make onion-caraway rye bread.  This bread took two days to make and ended up extremely sour and dense.  Although I liked the taste of it, I wanted it to be less moist and a bit less sour.  I spoke to some folks and came to the conclusion that I should alter the recipe by adding more than exclusively rye flour to get less dense bread.  The beauty of this experiment is that my starter was still alive, so I could use it again and again indefinitely unless I stopped caring for it.  From there I went on to experiment with kombucha using different kinds of teas and varying ratios of sugar, kimchee, coconut, dairy and water kefir, sauerkraut and various mixtures of vegetables and herbs.

Only when I thought about it did I realize how the process of fermentation could be a model and metaphor for my definition of sustainability and a tool for making the world a better place.  It is about preserving life by caring for it, carefully watching it grow, experimenting with it, experiencing it firsthand and as a result caring for it even more.  It is also about reproducing life and passing life on to others along with the experiences and knowledge surrounding it.  Fermentation gives people the opportunity to connect with science via the process of life itself (for example to make kombucha you’re watching it work its magic as days go by but also participating in the process by interacting with it through your senses). “In 1857, Pasteur published the results of his studies and concluded that fermentation is associated with the life and structural integrity of the yeast cells rather than with their death and decay” (El Mansi et al 3).  By connecting more with live processes such as these, we can become more appreciative of life, more connected to our environment (noticing your sauerkraut tastes different when you make it in different locations) more connected to the food that we are fermenting and less wasteful (for example of food we might otherwise throw away).

Fermentation is an ancient tradition.  “Fermentation has been known and practiced by mankind since prehistoric times, long before the underlying scientific principles were understood”  (El Mansi et al. 1).  That such a useful technology should arise by accident will come as no surprise to those people who live in tropical and subtropical regions, where as Marjory Stephenson put it, “every sandstorm is followed by a spate of fermentation in the cooking pot” (Bryce et al 1).  Sometimes, we can’t figure out exactly how things work, why they happen when they do, or where their roots lie.  In the case of fermentation, we know that it is an ancient practice and one that I strongly believe should be revived to strengthen or health as well as our culture, community and passion for life.

 

 

WORKS CITED

El-Mansi, E.M.T., C.F.A. Bryce, A.L. Demain, and A.R. Alman. Fermentation Microbiology and Biotechnology . 2. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2007. 1-4. Web. <http://books.google.com/books?id=8gG1NaLmPkoC&printsec=frontcover

Katz, Sandor Ellix. Wild Fermentation, The Flavor, Nutrition, And Craft Of Live-culture Foods. Chelsea Green Pub Co, 2003.

 

Introduction

Introduction

         The motivation for my project is one that is the result of a broad problem we face in today’s world with a complex set of factors causing this problem. The problem I aim to remedy via fermentation is the disconnectedness we, as consumers and members of our particular communities face when it comes to the food that we consume.  We are living in a disconnected, globalized world that lacks the value of community, the exchange of ideas, a food culture and a reverence for traditions surrounding food.

In recent years, people from diverse academic backgrounds have begun to question the development of our food system and recognized the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the fact that it might take, for example a journalist like Michael Pollan to ask the question, “where does our food come from?”  “When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain- the one that now feeds most of us most of the time and typically culminates either in a supermarket or fast-food meal-I expected that my investigations would lead me to a wide variety of places.  And though my journeys did take me to a great many states, and covered a great many miles, at the very end of these food chains (which is to say, at the very beginning), I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt” (Pollan 2008).  Pollan identifies how concentrated our agricultural system is.  There are now more farms raising single crops conventionally, like corn or soy and in a manner that does not care for the land, is not diversified and does not feed people in the area surrounding the land.  Instead, these single crop farms fuel an agro-food system dominated by processed food.  Nowadays it is probably more likely that a child has no idea what a vegetable looks like in an unprocessed state than a child that does.  Even if children run around supermarkets with their parents and see the mountains of apples or oranges or tomatoes, how can they get to the conclusion that these fruits and vegetables come from the ground and come from a complex system of farmers, land, laborers and power?  Many aspects of the industrial food chain are hidden from the average American consumer.

The idea of a globalized world is framed in both positive and negative ways.  In some ways, technology is portrayed as bringing us all closer together.  It could also be argued that we are the least connected as human beings as we have ever been.  Hendrickson and Heffernan write about how “society has undergone a new time-space compression where “the horizons of both private and public decision-making have shrunk” (Hendrickson and Heffernan 2002).  Although the scale of decision- making has increased over space, fewer and fewer people have ownership over these decisions.  These scholars argue that this is a regime of capitalism that requires production to speed up as well as consumption. “In our view, spatial decentralization can actually mask the tendencies to centralization of control that we are seeing in the agro-food system” (348).  This restructuring of space and time allows for more wiggle room and less regulation for the few, powerful hands that guide the industrial food system.  Without the preservation of locally produced and consumed food and a space for multi-logical dialogue between producers and consumers, the power of a few decision makers is sustained through its removal from local spaces.

When I picture food culture, I automatically lean towards the French.  They are famous for their relationship with food.  This relationship is not devoid of their relationship with each other; rather is embedded within their relationship with food.  American food culture, on the other hand has become more individualized and more associated with anxiety and nutritional debate than pleasure and community.  “As a culture we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we once possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety” (Pollan 2008).  As psychology professor Paul Rozin says, “Americans worry about food and associate it with nutrition.  There is a sense among many Americans that food is as much a poison as it is a nutrient and that eating is almost as dangerous as not eating.  They try to categorize food as good or bad, healthy or unhealthy” (Shaw 2005).  Our tendency to think in binaries has led us astray when it comes to food.  It takes the focus off of food’s roots and onto how one reacts to food individually, in a negative, self-conscious light.  Instead of focusing on the ethical production of food we focus our personal consumption of food with regard to our “health”.  We ignore the health of the community and the land that produces the food that we “feel guilty” eating.  This manifestation of personal control over food via nutrition and dietary rules lacks control over the means in which the food gets to one’s table, or couch, or cubicle or car.  As a result, we in turn have very little control over the social and ecological side of the production of the food we consume as well as little motivation to seek this information out.

Our connections to each other, to the land, to the places we live and to the food that we eat have been convoluted and disconnected in detrimental ways.  There are ways to reinforce these connections and recreate the values that surround them.  “Transformative learning is a process that represents a change of consciousness in that it changes how the learner perceives and makes sense of the world.  Participating in food production oneself is both a desirable step in reaching a more sustainable lifestyle and a powerful learning tool in linking the consumer to a host of other environmental and social issues” (Merriam and Caffarella 1999).  I chose a project based off of experimenting with fermentation because fermentation is an activity that embodies transformative learning. It is empowering and allows one to be connected to food, to take risks, to see something grow and live as you nurture it and brings back traditions from the past.  As Sandor Katz says, “This partnership leads to a reverence for all the processes that contribute to the wellbeing of the human race, from the production of enzymes by invisible bacteria, to the gift of milk and meat from the sacred cow” (Katz 2003).

 

 

Works Cited

Heffernan, William and Mary K. Hendrickson. “Opening Spaces through relocalization: Locating Potential resistence in the weaknesses of the global food system.” Sociologia Ruralis. 42.4 (2002): 348-67. Web. 23 Nov. 2011.
Katz, Sandor Ellix. Wild Fermentation, The Flavor, Nutrition, And Craft Of Live-culture Foods. Chelsea Green Pub Co, 2003.

Kerton, Sarah, and A. Sinclair. “Buying local organic food: a pathway to transformative learning.” Agriculture and Human Values . 27.4 (2010): 401-13. Web. 23 Nov. 2011.

 

Pollan,Michael The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin, 2006), 99–100

Shaw, Steven A. Turning The Tables, Restaurants From The Inside Out. William Morrow Cookbooks, 2005.

 

 

Fermentation Fever

I’ve been working for the student organization -FH King Students For Sustainable Agriculture for a year and a half and lived at a large cooperative house last year and as a result of both experiences have gotten interested in fermentation.  FH King has gotten me excited about growing food and preserving it in creative ways.  I see the way FH King works as a model of sustainability in that it creates a cycles that starts with growing food which leads to preserving food which leads to sharing food which leads to composting food.  Along the way I think one can cultivates community, revives traditions, exchanging ideas and following your food’s roots.

I have been experimenting with Sandor Katz’s “Wild Fermentation” with sourdough starters for yeast breads, kimchi, kombucha, kefir and more.  I have also been fermenting various vegetables with various herbs and spices and garlic that may be going bad as a way to use them quickly and transform their flavors into something new and exciting.  I have learned a lot about fermentation through dialogue with others and through workshops with FH King.  The former program director led a workshop on fermentation and kombucha making.  From there, some of us left with scobys and those who didn’t left with new knowledge and connections with people who could eventually share their new scoby with for brewing kombucha.  This is representative of the s