For people living in affluent parts of the world in the 21st century, we are used to preserving food by way of refrigeration.
But this technique is quite new when you consider that people have been preserving food through fermentation for at least 10,000 years.
Our ancestors experimented with fermenting to make food more delicious, more easily digestible, and more stable for storage. And there are many reasons why you might want to learn the process yourself.
Sandor Ellix Katz is a well-known food writer and self-taught fermentation experimentalist. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Fermentation, Wild Fermentation, and The Revolution will Not Be Microwaved.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Sandor joins Ross to explore the practical benefits of fermentation and explain how our disconnection from food systems contributes to our destruction of the environment.
Sandor explains why it’s valuable to maintain the cultural wisdom around preserving food through fermentation and how our health might improve if we relied less on refrigeration and more on fermenting.
Listen in for Sandor’s insight on the tradeoffs between pure culture starters versus wild fermentation and learn how to take the first steps in learning fermentation—and why it’s easier than you think!
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Resources
The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World by Sandor Ellix Katz
Fermentation As Metaphor by Sandor Ellix Katz
Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition and Craft of Live-Culture Foods by Sandor Ellix Katz
Fermentation Journeys: Recipes, Techniques and Traditions from Around the World by Sandor Ellix Katz
The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements by Sandor Ellix Katz
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m the creative editor at Nori, one of the co-founders there. Nori is a carbon removal marketplace based in Seattle. And today I have the pleasure of having Sandor Alex Katz with me, author of many books such as The Art of Fermentation and as Michael Pollan has referred to you, The Johnny Appleseed of Fermentation. Welcome to the show, Sandor.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Thanks so much for having me on.
Ross Kenyon: Pleasure to be with you. It’s a pleasure to be with you too. I have spent so much time in your brain through your books. I’ve learned a lot. You’ve inspired me to ferment quite a lot of things. Sometimes it’s taken over my life. I actually like that you have quite a lot of anecdotes about how sometimes you’ve overdone it and then your kitchen, your life has been ruled by microorganisms. Have you reigned that in at this point or have you just given into it?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, you know, at this point, you know, fermentation has been such a constant for half of my life now that, you know, I mean, it’s very unusual that I feel overwhelmed by it. You know, I just, it’s a constant and there’s certain... You know, sort of periods when I’ve been spending more time at home, when I sort of start more projects or do more experimentation. There’s other times when I’m really busy and I’m like in and out and traveling a lot where, you know, just by necessity, it’s pared down. But, you know, I wouldn’t say that I’ve like had any times in, you know, recent times where I’ve felt, you know, overwhelmed by my ferments.
You know, I found like a very, you know, sort of happy balance of ferments. Of having them, maintaining them in my life. Actually, my computer that I’m talking to you through is sitting on top of a crock of soy sauce that’s been fermenting for a year. And I keep it right on my kitchen counter because I try to stir it every day. And, you know, when I’m out of town, I have a little sign that I put up next to it to remind the people I live with or the people house sitting for us to stir it every day.
So certain of the things require really kind of ongoing interaction, but most of them I can forget about for long periods of time, really.
Ross Kenyon: Nice to hear that you have that, because for me, I used to do kombucha primarily, and I felt I would produce so much of it. And it wasn’t good enough that I would want to drink all of it, but I felt pressure not to waste it. And then as soon as one batch was done, I wanted to get the scoby going in another one. And at some point I was producing way more than I could even give away.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, you know, vinegar is a great solution for too much. What do I do with all the vinegar? Well, everybody needs vinegar. You know, you could clean your windows with vinegar. You know, you can like make salad dressing with vinegar. You can marinate things in vinegar. Nobody has too much vinegar.
Ross Kenyon: I think releasing myself from the expectation of getting to 100% efficiency where there is always something fermenting because much of it takes a while. So there’s always a pressure. The sooner you get it in, the faster it starts working. I’m sure you feel that in your soul driving you a little bit too. I really gave up on that. I’ve been doing more pickles and sauerkrauts, which I feel in smaller batches are much easier to consume pretty quickly in our family favorite, especially pickles. Pickles I find to be, there’s pressure to eat them, but it’s a much easier ask than drinking a gallon of kombucha.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah, no, I’m with you. I mean, I, you know, I mean, I love kombucha. I enjoy kombucha once in a while. Kombucha is no longer in my like regular repertoire, you know, of things that I mean, you know, I’m just trying to stay away from sugary drinks and, you know, for all the other things that kombucha is, kombucha is still a sugary drink. And, you know, there’s just so many ferments. And, you know, I mean, my gateway into fermentation. My most sort of constant fermented companion has definitely been fermenting vegetables.
And I grew out of my gardening practice and as a practical way to preserve abundance from certain moments in the garden. But I think it’s It’s, you know, it’s a really it’s a great thing that people in a small household can do on a very small scale. Like you don’t need to make your sauerkraut in a 55 gallon barrel. You know, you don’t need to preserve a year’s worth at a time. Even if this is the way your great-great-grandparents were doing it, just because our context at the moment is different.
And I think that it’s a real skill, really with anything in the kitchen, but particularly with fermentation, just to scale it appropriately for your household.
Ross Kenyon: Are there reasons that you consider important to ferment for beyond just... I don’t know why should someone even bother with this because it seems stinky. There’s a lot of food prep. There’s stuff that’s being stored places that takes up space. Why not just buy everything? I mean, lots of people are making artisanal fermented products. Is it not better just to buy those?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, I mean, I don’t think it’s I don’t think it’s better. And really, I don’t think it’s worse. I mean, you know, I’m really not on a mission to convince everybody that like they have to get interested in fermentation and start fermenting. You know, really what I would say is a And I think there’s a little bit of an inverse to that. Like if anyone has, you know, the slightest interest or inkling to ferment, there’s no reason for them to be afraid. There’s no reason for them to be intimidated. The rest of my work is trying to demystify fermentation to empower people who are interested in doing it to do it.
I’m not out to convince everybody that they have to start fermenting in their own kitchen, but I do think that there are a lot of great advantages. If we think about fermentation broadly, there are always practical benefits to fermentation. Your food is not decomposing into a disgusting, ugly mess that nobody would ever put into their mouths. And instead... Either you are preserving abundance from one moment of the year to enjoy through other times. You might be making food more digestible. You might simply be making food more delicious. You might be producing eggs.
We’ll see you next time. It’s super fun and satisfying. And for another thing, if we want to think about it in terms of microbial terroir, and at this point, we understand that every healthy human being is host to trillions of bacteria. And those bacteria play a huge role in our physiological functioning. And they enable us to effectively digest food. They synthesize essential nutrients inside of our bodies. They constitute much of what we describe as our immune system. They play a role in all kinds of biochemical regulation, including serotonin and other compounds that determine how we feel and how we think.
I guess I would encapsulate the relationship of fermentation to them. It has the potential to restore and improve biodiversity in the gut, which can potentially improve any of those things. I think anyone can potentially benefit from incorporating information. But what’s particular about fermenting foods in your kitchen, fermenting the foods that you grew in your yard, fermenting foods that farmers in your area have grown, is that the microbial communities on the locally grown foods are They are your environment. And when you ferment at home with foods that come from nearby and then you eat those foods, you are quite literally becoming your environment.
And I think it’s an expectation. Excellent strategy for not buying some generic probiotic bacteria at the nutritional supplement shop, but rather incorporating what’s right around. I have friends, Six Mile. You know, I’m constantly hearing people complaining about how much that costs. And so, you know, they’re outraged that like, you know, a pint sized jar of fermented vegetables is going to cost them. And, you know, it’s really like it’s very easy. You can do it yourself. You could go buy, you know, a pint sized jar will take about a pound of vegetables.
You can buy a pound of vegetables for, you know, depending on what the vegetable in the season is, you know. Anywhere from, you know, maybe 50 cents to a couple of dollars. You can shred those vegetables. You can put a couple of cents worth of salt on them. You can pound them and squeeze them a little bit to get them juicy. You can pack them into a jar that you have already in your kitchen. So, you know, like many things you could do yourself, it preserves resources and saves you money.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s quite empowering too, to not merely be a consumer, but be involved in food production, especially as our civilization has become much more urbanized, much less connected to the land and making things and many people work from computers and are not actually making anything tangible. Yeah.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I am so with you on that. And I think that a significant piece of the environmental destructiveness of our society has to do with how... You know, little most of us have to do with, you know, in terms of direct interaction with our environment. And, you know, all food production is about interacting with plants and with animals and with microorganisms. And I think that the value... The vast majority of us have supposedly been liberated from that toil, but at the same time, it’s created this profound sense of disconnection and alienation.
And I agree wholeheartedly that any kind of getting involved Whether it’s growing some herbs in your windows, whether it’s having a small garden, whether it’s getting involved in a community garden, whether it’s supporting local farmers by buying food at a farmer’s market, whether it’s fermenting vegetables or other things in your home, can really be profound in terms of helping to make us more connected to food. Our environment. And then in terms of the safety, I mean, I just want to say like food does not get safer than fermented vegetables. And statistically speaking, fermented vegetables are much, much, much safer than raw vegetables.
Because, you know, we read every year about outbreaks of food poisoning stemming from raw vegetables. You know, last year was red onions.
Ross Kenyon: My uncle got sick from blueberries one year. Yeah.
Sandor Ellix Katz: But, you know, clearly there’s the possibility of incidental contamination of raw produce. But if you ferment it, well, you know, the lactic acid bacteria that are present on all plants growing out of soil on planet Earth, you know, once you get the vegetables submerged in the way that you do it, the lactic acid bacteria will dominate every time. And if there happen to be some cells of E. coli, salmonella, other organisms that have the potential to make us sick, the very convenient fact for us is that the pathogens cannot survive in an acidic environment.
And so acidifying vegetables just is about as safe as food gets.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a nice PSA for the listeners. One thing I catch both in the way that you speak, but also you’re a little bit more explicit about it in fermentation as metaphor, something I associate with Ed Young and Lynn Margulis that we sort of are largely... The anthropology that we’ve assumed to be the case, that we are individual, that we are a coherent being, has been challenged by the fact that there are trillions of microorganisms that complete metabolic processes for us, including ones that are cognitive in origin too, and that we’re actually bigger than just this individual species.
And within fermentation as metaphor, you have a sort of queer politics operating that’s about fermentation as a way of understanding the dissolution of boundaries in some important way. Help fill in the gaps here. Am I onto something?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, I think that this is, you know, a profound shift that is taking place in how we view ourselves. And, you know, I think that there is this sort of long tradition of things. I’m thinking of the individual human being as this sort of singular unit. And I think that sort of science is showing us more and more the degree to which we are really These composite beings and that, you know, we have these trillions of microorganisms that we are host to, but they’re not random and they’re not parasitic and they’re not freely.
They exist in a symbiotic relationship with us and, you know, we could not possibly live without them. And I think that we’re also learning that, you know, sort of many of the, you know, sort of emergent, you know, sort of And so, you know, each human being is not a singular entity, but we are these sort of, you know, massive entities. I don’t want to take away anybody’s agency or anybody’s individual identity. What we can do and who we are is actually extremely complex and involves the collaboration of all these different kinds of organisms.
Ross Kenyon: What would really change if you saw yourself more as a shepherd of the microbiome rather than an independent brain that operates unilaterally? Does that much really change spiritually, practically? Does anything really change?
Sandor Ellix Katz: I mean, sure. sure. I mean, just in terms of our outlook and how we think about things and, you know, how we perceive ourselves and how we perceive our relationship to what is beyond us. So, I mean... And sure, I mean, I imagine that there are people who, you know, in their conception could sort of minimize the importance of that. You know, I think that the growing recognition of that is really is shifting a lot. Like, you know, I learned this new word recently, which Which is lichenization. And, you know, sort of science has long recognized that lichens are, you know, not a singular life form, but that every lichen is a symbiosis.
But we’re realizing that’s true of pretty much every life form, that no life form is singular. And I think that, you know, really, I don’t know, Calls into question a lot of, you know, our thinking and our ideas. And I think it really sort of strengthens the importance of, you know, interdependence.
Ross Kenyon: Has your learning about fermentation, in addition to your life story is quite fascinating as well. Has that influenced the spiritual dimensions of how you approach your work? Is that even a thing for you? Do you have any sort of divine interest or is that extraneous? Yeah.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, I mean, I have been accused of being a spiritual couch potato. Who called you that? That seems like a rude thing to call you. A friend of mine, long ago. But yeah, sure. I mean, I think that for me, my practice of fermentation has really... Help me to tune into unseen forces in our lives. And I think, you know, fermentation has always been regarded as, you know, a mystical phenomenon. And, you know, I mean, fermentation... Fermentation is really very ancient. The way biologists talk about fermentation as anaerobic metabolism, the production of energy without oxygen, cells of our bodies are capable of fermentation.
The earliest forms of life on Earth were fermenting organisms. And as the symbiosis between different early organisms resulted in more complex cell structures, what are called eukaryotic cells, which is what all of the multicellular life forms are composed of, the multicellular life forms that they spawned have all had bacteria and other single cell organisms as part of them.
Ross Kenyon: So, you know, mitochondria, right? That’s where that comes from.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Mitochondria, cell nuclei. But yeah, I mean, sort of one of the things that distinguishes the earliest cells, the prokaryotic cells from the eukaryotic cells is that in the early cells, the genetic material is not And actually that gives them this incredible genetic flexibility, which multicellular organisms do not possess because the cell, the genetic materials in a nucleus and pretty much fixed for the life of the organism.
Ross Kenyon: Species are also, I mean, it’s maybe the incorrect paradigm for understanding much of the microbiota at this point too, right? Like that is also becoming, the boundaries are much fuzzier than we once thought.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Sure, sure, sure. No, I mean, especially for, you know, for bacteria, which have this incredible shape shifting ability, this genetic flexibility, this ability to, you know, take in and release and exchange genetic material. I mean, many, Many microbiologists really are coming to the conclusion that, you know, our concept of species, which we developed to describe animals and plants, you know, really is an inappropriate way to describe bacteria because there’s so much genetic flexibility and shape shifting among them. Now, you know, I’m certainly not trained as a microbiologist. I am not in a position to sort of have a, you know, a nuanced view of this debate.
But, you know, I am well aware that, you know, this is a debate in the field of microbiology is, you know, just how appropriate is this conception that we have of species to bacterium?
Ross Kenyon: So much of human knowledge is based around having stable categories. And I wonder what happens when we lose the ability to speciate in a meaningful way. Does one even practice science with so many confounding interacting variables where you don’t have stable categories? It kind of hurts my brain to think about what might emerge next. How does one even do that?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Science is never fixed. We’re always learning more that’s changing our conception of things. I think we have no choice but to be open to the new information. And, you know, consider that our, you know, earlier conceptions of, you know, how things are organized were imperfect. And, you know, we need to, you know, use our observational skills. I remember where I was going earlier. You know, because, you know, really, I got into how I was talking about how ancient fermentation is.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s right.
Sandor Ellix Katz: And that in a certain sense, it goes back to the earliest life on Earth in terms of a human cultural practice of fermentation. There’s an archaeological record. That demonstrates that the practice of fermentation is at least 10,000 years old from pottery shards in China. But really, I mean, I would say that only tells us about the history of pottery, not about the history of fermentation, because presumably there The earliest vessels that people used for fermentation were all things that are totally biodegradable from various animal membranes to wood, hollowed out wooden structures, gourds, but any of the...
The earliest kinds of vessels would biodegrade, but we do have pottery showing us that there’s a intentional human practice of fermentation going back at least 10,000 years and fermentation is practiced everywhere. And, you know, my... My general idea about why is fermentation practiced everywhere is the simple fact that microbiology has illuminated for us that all of the plants and all of the animals and all of the animal products that we have, So there’s a certain inevitability to microbial transformation. And, you know, without specifically knowing about bacteria, because, you know, science really only began to have a foundation.
I had a firm idea about bacteria about 150 years ago. Without even knowing about bacteria, people developed an incredibly elaborate range of techniques for working with them. And the way that I envision it is that just as a practical matter, people observed under what conditions does food decompose into a disgusting, ugly mess that nobody would ever put into their mouths and under what contrasting conditions... Does the food improve in some kind of a tangible way? And whether it’s, you know, becoming more delicious, becoming more easily digestible, becoming more stable for storage.
And, you know, in this question of storage, I think it’s relevant and not unrelated to the topic of your podcast. And that is for people living in the 21st century, particularly in the more affluent parts of the world, we have We have a refrigerator. And so people are used to preserving food in the refrigerator or in the freezer. Or we have these techniques which are really relatively recent in the scheme of things like using heat and pressure to preserve food. Preserve things in a sterile way in a jar that, you know, with what we call canning.
In English and French, they call it apertization because they remember the name of Nicolas Apert, the clever Frenchman who early in the 19th century discovered this process. But our refrigerators, I mean, you know, I keep a lot of things in the refrigerator. I mean, I keep the yogurt that I make in the refrigerator because I have the refrigerator. But, you know, I mean, the fresh milk that we grew up with, like it was something that only people living on dairy farms had. But, you know, in all of the parts of the world where there’s a tradition of people raising animals You know, there are fermented forms of milk and whether that’s yogurt or kefir or cheese, you know, these all are practical strategies for preserving milk.
And now, like, you know, a hard cheese, like a Parmesan cheese or a cheddar cheese. I mean, really a big block of that is stable for years, you know, outside of refrigeration. I mean, with yogurt, it might not be years, it might be weeks. If you don’t keep it in the refrigerator, the bacteria will continue to make it more satisfying. So the flavor will become more intensely sour as the days and weeks go on. But that sourness only makes it safer because the pathogens can’t survive in an acidic environment. So I think it’s really...
It’s really hard for people in our time to even conceptualize how they would feed themselves without this sort of energy guzzling machine. But obviously people do and people did. And most people on planet Earth do not have a refrigerator in 2023. You know, and we still have an incredible amount of wisdom, you know, you know, cultural legacies from every part of the world and how to feed ourselves, how to preserve food, you know, without the benefit of this machine. And I’m not. I’m not encouraging people to throw away their refrigerators, but it’s certainly conceivable that there will be a moment when energy will not be as widely available, will not be as cheap as it is now, and that refrigerators will not be so widespread.
And it really behooves us to hold on to this cultural wisdom. I wonder how our health would change as a species if we were less reliant upon refrigeration and other preservation techniques and were more reliant upon fermentation.
Surely, surely it’d be a healthier human community. Yeah, there’s so many potential health benefits to fermented foods. And I don’t want to say that fermented foods are superior to fresh foods. I do not espouse that belief at all. Really, I think that there’s nothing better and more luscious and more satisfying than really fresh food. Yeah. The reality is, in most places, we just cannot feed ourselves through the year, day in, day out, with fresh food. To some degree, we have to be reliant on different preservation methods. Fermentation is not the only ancient preservation method.
Drying food, certain kinds of foods, in their mature state, they’re dried. You know, any kind of grain, any kind of bean, any kind of nut. And so, you know, to preserve these foods, we don’t need a refrigerator and we don’t necessarily need to ferment them. And when people ferment them, like nobody ever ferments a bean or a grain in order to preserve it. People ferment beans and grains in order to unlock their nutritive potential. They ferment them in order to make them more delicious. They ferment them in order to make them lighter.
I mean, think about bread. If bread wasn’t fermented, it would be dense like a brick. And what gives bread its lightness and its pleasant texture is the lifting. It’s the bubbles of carbon dioxide that form inside the loaf and lift it up. Also, a lot of these sort of dense foods like a soybean or a grain of wheat, they can preserve for very long periods of time as long as you keep them dry, but their density and some of the protective, what I would call anti-nutrient Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, the fermentation breaks down a lot of these anti-nutrient compounds.
And, you know, in the case of soybeans, which are the plant source food with the most protein, our human bodies can’t break it down to absorb themselves. So the Asian cultures that developed soy agriculture thousands of years ago recognized the indigestibility of the soybeans. If you try to eat just a bowl of cooked soybeans for dinner, you’re going to have terrible indigestion and gas, and you’re not going to get very much protein out of them. And so all of these different traditions emerged of fermenting the soybeans in different ways, and the fermentation doesn’t preserve them, but it We digest them.
It breaks down the proteins into amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. And this, you know, not only makes the nutrients more accessible, but it makes them flavorful. And it takes an otherwise, you know, very mild, somewhat insipid food and gives it like, you know, all of this incredible character and flavor.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve also danced a little bit around this and you haven’t addressed it directly, but I’ve also seen the beer first theory of civilization that actually settlement in a permanent capacity. I think in Egypt is where this is supposed to have happened. People settled in order to produce beer, like regular supplies of beer. So there’s also that side of fermentation too. Is that responsible for us having permanent settled civilizations?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, I mean, I think that, yeah, I mean, this is certainly a debate, you know, within the field of archaeology. But I mean, I think it’s pretty clear that like sort of, you know, civilizations emerged out of grain agriculture and Chinese civilization. So civilization emerged around rice agriculture and in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, it was around wheat agriculture. And in the Americas, it was around corn agriculture and in Africa. It was it was around millet agriculture. So, you know, different grains in different places. But, you know, the significance of grains is the thing that I mentioned, that they are so stable and storable and so, you know, sort of.
This gave rise to the idea of like growing lots and storing it. And it also, you know, gave rise to, you know, the idea of accumulations of wealth and, you know, sort of rulers being able to rule large numbers of people. But then there’s a question of, well, what did people do with these grains? And, you know, bread, which is... You know, almost synonymous with sustenance in a Western context, you know, is one explanation. But then, you know, beer is another thing you can do with it. But, you know, what I would say is that, you know, in all of the parts of the world where civilizations grew out of grain agriculture, the grains were used both for alcoholic beverages and for food.
So to me, it’s a little, you know, it’s a little bit of an academic debate. However, if people in their earlier, you know, migratory patterns were reasonably well fed, it does seem to me that a more compelling reason to change your way of life is, you know, because of this, you know, sort of, you know, mind altering alcoholic beverages that you could now produce more so than bread. But I think that there’s definitely room for debate about this question, and there has been plenty of it.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, certainly. It’s a fun one to think about. One thing I’ve noticed in your writing and speaking to you now is that you are quite passionate about fermentation and fermented foods, but you’re also a rather humble evangelist as well. I feel you often carve out space for saying like, Well, you can buy things store-bought, or you also tell stories in your books about how people will assume that you’re a raw vegan, or you have other sorts of very strong food preferences. There’s something about food that makes us focus on purity and exclusion in a really powerful way.
I don’t know what it is about food politics that are so intense, but I think you identified almost as fascistic in a way, a politics of purity around food. What happens with our brains and food? It really drives us nutty. Yeah, yeah, sure. I don’t know.
Sandor Ellix Katz: You know, I really just try not to be dogmatic about food. And, you know, I’m not dogmatic about diet. I mean, I definitely have ideas and preferences, but, you know, I also see that people are... I love vegetables. I love vegetables. I crave vegetables. It doesn’t mean that I don’t eat meat. Actually, I helped a friend of mine raise a couple of pigs and I ended up with all of this fat and I’ve been using lard, but like, oh my God, a spoonful of lard in sauteing vegetables just adds incredible flavor to it.
And I think sometimes, you know, we talk about we talk about diet isn’t like, you know, either every day you have to eat or every meal you have to eat a giant slab of meat or you’re vegan. And the thing is, in most cultural contexts, people have used meat in relatively small amounts to, you know, enhance their primarily plant based diets. But not everywhere. I mean, I’ve become friendly with this woman who is a microbiologist from Greenland. And, you know, the Greenland diet has, you know, virtually no or the traditional Greenland diet has virtually no plant food.
But eating the organs of animals, of fish and marine mammals and animals is considered essential, including the contents of the intestine, which is generally digested plants. You know, I mean, I think that, you know, it’s terrible for us to sort of like have these sort of abstracted ideas of how everybody needs to eat when clearly there are examples of populations where just based on You know, the foods that are abundant in their environment, they have sort of worked out strategies for survival in very different ways. And I think, you know, what’s clear for me as someone who’s, you know, just been interested in how people in different places eat is that human beings are extremely versatile and we can survive and we can thrive on very different kinds of diets.
And it always strikes me as absurd when people are promoting like a singular kind of a diet that’s like the only way to be healthy. And I think that there’s a lot of different ways we can be healthy and a lot of different examples of how people eat. And I think, you know, ultimately, a lot of it comes down to, you know, balance and how we sort of balance out the different foods that we eat. You know, and I think that, you know, people sometimes project also like magical powers on foods.
Like, actually, I just was talking to, I was just talking to a friend of mine, like what a triggering thing it is for me when people talk about super food. You know, they there’s a, you know, this berry from, you know, this faraway part of the world. And, you know, if we could just eat this berry every day, then, you know, it’ll solve all of our problems. And I just think that’s completely irrelevant. You know, unrealistic. And I think the whole idea of superfoods is just like a marketing ploy. You know, and that’s not to say that there aren’t like nutritionally powerful kinds of foods, but in every environment, there are Nutritionally powerful kinds of foods.
And of course, you know, a singular food, I mean, including sauerkraut, I mean, sauerkraut is an incredible food. Like I love to eat sauerkraut, but, you know, to say that like, oh, if you eat sauerkraut every day, all your problems are going to go away. You know, it’s like, okay, well, what else are you eating along with the sauerkraut? And nevermind what you’re eating, you know, what are you doing? How active are you being? How contented and happy are you? How good is the sleep that you’re getting? I mean, you know, our health is just an outcome of all of these different factors.
And to think that like one singular factor is going to happen. I mean, I think it’s very reductionistic. And I think that, you know, a lot of the dietary movements that we see are, you know, just imagining if only you could get the food right, you know, everything. I mean, diet is important. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not discounting the importance of what we eat, but I just don’t think there are singular reductionistic answers. And yeah, sure. I mean, a lot of dietary movements can be very, very puritanical. You know, for me personally, that just puts me off.
And, you know, I have these friends who, you know, follow this intense like raw food diet. And I mean, they really believe that like sort of human culture all around the world made a critical error. I have just huge respect for food. Human cultural traditions. That’s really, you know, my obsession with fermentation is really sort of ultimately an interest in, you know, in these human cultural traditions of how we use food and all those sort of diverse approaches to it. And, you know, if we’re going to say human cultural traditions are all like wrong, then, you know, we might as well say like language is all wrong.
Ross Kenyon: But people do say that, like John Zerzan is like, we got to go back to primitivism, go back to pre-symbolic language. There are people out there saying that. Okay, well, I beg to disagree. Yeah, fair enough. Well, okay, we don’t want to be reductionistic here, but maybe one reduction you might permit is that When you do ferment something and it’s homemade, you have a polyculture of many, many different types of microorganisms where if you buy something commercially fermented, it might be a single strain of FDA approved probiotic added that is not indigenous to animals.
To the substrate that it’s going into necessarily. Like the diversity is the important thing that homemade fermenting might foster where commercial fermenting might neglect. So in some ways they might even be too different and we might be able to reduce to say homemade is often better than commercially bought. Would you allow that?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Sure. But I mean, I would say like, OK, like we are one of the things that I that I make regularly is yogurt. And the first years that I was making yogurt, you know, I would go to the store, I’d buy a little like, you know, the smallest container of, you know, plain whole. And I’d use that as a starter. And my first batch, as long as I got the temperature manipulation part right, my first batch would always be beautiful and thick and luscious. And then if I use that as a starter for a next batch, it was never quite as good And by the third generation, it always just was gone.
I mean, it was homemade, but I was starting from a commercial culture. And, you know, it turns out that, you know, the early microbiologists were terrified of biodiversity. And the biodiversity of a lot of traditional fermented foods and that, you know, your traditional yogurts had these sort of wide variety of bacteria in them. And the early microbiologists set out to identify which ones were absolutely functionally necessary. And they basically isolated out two organisms out of this big, massive unknown organisms. And, you know, all commercial yogurt is based on those two single strains of organisms.
And they make beautiful yogurt. But they’re not really able to sustain themselves generation after generation because they lack an evolved structure with essentially defense mechanisms. Whereas the traditional yogurts, which are these evolved communities, have structures to maintain themselves generation after generation. So, you know, eventually I got a hold of what I would describe as an heirloom yogurt culture. You know, this one’s originally from Romania via, you know, New York and the UK and then back to where I live in Tennessee. But, you know, a lot of people I mean, you know, you could make there’s people selling little white pallets.
You know, there’s people making homemade sauerkraut who like think that they need this little white powder. So, you know, for me, the defining characteristic isn’t necessarily simply is it homemade, but it’s like how how are you making it? You know, there’s people making cheeses at home that are adding pure culture starters. And by the way, I mean, I’m not against the use of pure culture starters. I mean, I think that, you know, in certain applications, they can be extremely practical. You know, they’re a phenomenon of the 20th century and, you know, all fermentation until the 20th century was, you know, relying either on wild fermentation or what I would describe as back slopping, which is when you take a batch of scoop of the previous yogurt.
It’s maintain your sourdough starter by taking a little scoop of the sourdough and adding it to fresh flour and water. And so that’s what we’re talking about. So, you know, to me, that was the more important distinction. And, you know, there are people producing various kinds of ferments on a commercial scale using wild fermentation. And then there’s some people making things at home using pure culture starters.
Ross Kenyon: And if you compare something like the Georgian winemaking traditions or natural winemaking generally, or wild fermentation of beer, the variability by vintage, I think is quite high relative to a commercial yeast, which sometimes there’s magic in a bottle. There’s nothing else like it when it’s good. And there’s also some where you’re Like this whole case is bad and needs to be thrown into garbage, essentially.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, I think that’s one of the reasons why people find why, you know, especially in the context of large scale production, people find pure culture starters to be so helpful because there definitely is more variability in wild fermentation. Right. I would say in every realm of fermentation, whether we’re going to talk about wines or cheeses or breads or salamis or sauerkrauts, in every realm of fermentation, the most delicious examples you can find in the world. The, you know, the greatest practitioners are always working with wild fermentation. But as you say, there’s greater variability and there’s more potential for problems.
And, you know, really, the reason why Louis Pasteur was highly... And if, you know, winemakers from, you know, the earliest practitioners thousands of years ago, you know, had this This incredible variability, well, you know, in the Industrial Revolution, as people were scaling up, that variability made the stakes higher. And so, you know, the pure culture starters made it all much more predictable and much more consistent. And, you know, and that has its benefit. But, you know, it’s still amazing to taste the, you know, the incredible complex flavors, you know, of a wonderful raw milk cheese or, you know, interesting.
Incredible flavor of a delicious sourdough loaf of bread or some of the styles of beer that are relying on wild fermentation. And I think that generally the most outstanding examples are made by wild fermentation.
Ross Kenyon: I respect that you acknowledge trade-offs so strongly. It’s sadly not as common as one might think. Why aren’t you more of a partisan or ideologue? I think someone might have expected that of you. Why do you shirk this duty?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, I mean, I use pure culture starters. You know, it’s like I make tempeh and I use starters for the tempeh. And I don’t know, you know, I mean, I think that, you know, fermentation like food grows out of particular places. And, you know, if you want to experiment widely and, you know, certain kinds of vegetables, I have to, you know, employ technology in order to grow them in my environment. I have to, you know, use row covers that extend the season or something like that. And certain kinds of ferments I just couldn’t possibly make in my environment, an environment where they’re not indigenous to, you know, without some kind of technological assist.
I guess I just can’t help myself. I see multiple sides of these things. I haven’t used a packet of yeast in more than 25 years. It’s not that I think the packet of yeast is expensive. And so I’m just more interested in the magic of sort of like... You know, bringing the yeast that’s already on these substrates to life. But, you know, I don’t want to pretend that it’s just, you know, some, you know, evil conspiracy that’s encouraging people to use them. It’s just like I can appreciate ease and quickness and why sort of, you know, somebody who’s working too hard but still likes to make their own bread would want to use yeast and just be able to have the process be done in two or three hours and live with bread that doesn’t have as much flavor complexity.
Ross Kenyon: If someone is listening and they haven’t done any fermentation before, or at least that they know about, where do you recommend people start?
Sandor Ellix Katz: Well, I mean, you know, I’ll suggest my books are a good place to start. Wild fermentation is probably the most accessible introduction. The art of fermentation is, you know, much more thorough and in-depth. My latest book is called Firmation. Fermentation Journeys, and that’s about fermented foods and beverages that I’ve learned about in my travels in recent years. I’m glad that you brought up fermentation as metaphor. That’s not going to really teach you much about the practical aspects of fermentation, but if you want to think about it, Think about some of the implications of fermentation and some of the ways that in the English language we use the word fermentation to describe any kind of bubbly, excited phenomenon.
Then check out that book. I have another book that I don’t know if you even know about called The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved Inside America’s Underground Food Movements. And this is about various grassroots movements to reclaim our food. So, you know, you can you can start with my books, but there’s a lot of resources out there. I mean, you know, you can just search on the Internet and find like lots of recipes. I have a website, wildfermentation. com with links to all kinds of fermentation related resources. Out there on the World Wide Web, you know, more and more you can find classes in different locales of, you know, people sharing their skills at fermentation.
You know, the Internet’s full of videos like YouTube videos, you know, how to how to make sauerkraut, how to make kimchi, how to make koji, how to make anything. So, you know, the resources are out there. And, you know, just just try to, you know, get over whatever kind of anxiety you might be projecting onto the process and give it a try.
Ross Kenyon: Honestly, it’s so much easier than you think. It’s the same with in cooking. You can often substitute time for skill. Like you can do a braise, which is mostly prep work. Or if you brine a chicken a couple of days ahead of time with salt and buttermilk, like you can look like a competent chef. I feel like fermenting is often like that too. A lot of it’s prep and waiting the correct amount of time. And it’s easier than you might think. I find your work to be very accessible and encouraging because it is trying to demystify it.
It is something that literally anyone could do.
Sandor Ellix Katz: Yeah. I mean, you know, the thing is, I just keep on reminding myself and reminding other people that like these processes were not worked out by microbiologists in laboratories. These were worked out thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago. In the kitchens of people who most likely have a much, much less technology than you have in your kitchen. And, you know, you don’t need a lot of special fancy equipment. If you really get into it, I mean, you know, ceramic crocs and other specialized materials. Substack, Substack, Restack, Restack, Restack, Restack, Restack, Restack, Restack, Restack, Restack.
But most ferments really happen in the course of a week or a couple of weeks or some of them like yogurt. I usually ferment my yogurt for about eight hours. Most commercial yogurt is only fermented for about two and a half hours. So the fermentation byproducts accumulate over time. And if you like things stronger, then you need to wait longer. But if you prefer things with milder flavors, then you can really generally enjoy them relatively quickly.
Ross Kenyon: Very encouraging. Well, Sandor, thanks so much for being here with me. It’s a true pleasure to have you on. I’ve learned so much from you and thanks for being here. It’s my pleasure. Happy to be with you. And thanks for listening. If you like what we do here, hey, please give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It really helps us a lot. It’s one thing you can do to help the show. Send this to a friend. And hey, thanks again so much for spending time with us.
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