Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (43 page)

Plants stave off decomposition with sturdy
cell walls constructed of cellulose or lignin, carbohydrates too complex for most
microbes to penetrate. We humans rely on our various membranes: our skin, of course, and
then an even larger interior membrane made up of
epithelial cells
that, at least when we are well, can hold most of the bugs at bay. This second,
gastrointestinal skin lines our digestive tract and is painted with a protective layer
of mucus made from carbohydrate-rich glycoproteins that the microbial mob cannot easily
breach. If you could spread out the lining of just the small intestine, it would
completely cover a tennis court. These thin, tenuous membranes are all that stand
between us and the microbes’ ultimate objective: to ferment us.

Not terribly appetizing, I know, especially
in a book about food. You probably don’t want to identify too closely with the
cabbage when making sauerkraut, but sometimes you can’t help it. Here,
deliciousness is the by-product of decay, as the funky scent will occasionally remind
us. As one of the primary processes by which nature breaks down living things so that
their energies and atoms might be reused by other living things, fermentation puts us in
touch with the ever-present tug, in life, of death.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm
and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such
corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with
such endless successions of diseas’d corpses …

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts
such leavings from them at last.

It is the earth—the earth as understood here
by Walt Whitman in “This Compost”—that breeds and shadows every
fermentation. Earth into grapevines into wine, barley seeds into beer, cabbage into
kraut or kimchi, milk into cheese (or yogurt or kefir), soybeans into miso (or soy sauce
or natto or tempeh), rice into sake, pig into prosciutto,
vegetable
into pickle: All these transformations depend on the fermenter’s careful
management of rot, on taking the decomposition of those seeds and fruits and fleshes
just so far and no further. For, left to its own devices, the stain of corruption would
continue and dilate and deepen until the life form in question—the “fermentation
substrate”—had been broken down completely and returned to earth, an increment of
humus. Most of our fermentations are instances of rot interrupted, dust-to-dust delayed.
And in fact some of the microbes that do this work for us, the bacilli and fungi, are
denizens of the soil, on temporary loan to the aboveground world. They splash onto
leaves, find their way into milk, drift onto seeds and flesh, but ultimately they are on
a mission from the soil, venturing out into the macrocosm—the visible world of plants
and animals we inhabit—to scavenge food for the microbial wilderness beneath our
feet.

All cooking is transformation and, rightly
viewed, miraculous, but fermentation has always struck people as particularly
mysterious. For one thing, the transformations are so dramatic: fruit juice into
wine?!—a liquid with the power to change minds? For another, it has only been 155 years
since Louis Pasteur figured out what was actually going on in a barrel of crushed grapes
when it starts to seethe. To ferment is to “boil,” people would say
confidently (“to boil” is what the word “ferment” means), but
they could not begin to say how the process started or why this particular boil
wasn’t hot to the touch. Most other kinds of cooking rely on outside energy—the
application of heat, mainly—to transform foodstuffs; the laws of physics and chemistry
rule the process, which operates on the only formerly alive.

Fermentation is different. In fermentation
the laws of biology have primary jurisdiction and are required to explain how a ferment
generates its own energy from within. It not only seems alive, it
is
alive. And
most of this living takes place at a scale inaccessible to us without a microscope. No
wonder so many cultures have had their
fermentation gods—how else to
explain this cold fire that can cook so many marvelous things?

Now, any true fermento would say that, by
dwelling on the links between fermentation and death, I’m being way too hard on
these microbes, most of which they count as benign friends and partners. I’m
trapped in a hygienic, Pasteurian perspective, they would say, in which the microbial
world is regarded foremost as a mortal threat. Actually, Louis Pasteur himself held a
more nuanced view of the microbes he discovered, but his legacy is a century-long war on
bacteria, a war in which most of us have volunteered or been enlisted. We deploy our
antibiotics and hand sanitizers and deodorants and boiling water and
“pasteurization” and federal regulations to hold off the molds and bacteria
and so, we hope, hold off disease and death.

I grew up on that field of battle. My mother
instilled a deep fear of molds, trichinosis, botulism, and countless other unnamed germs
possibly lurking in our food. She maintained an under-the-sink and
in-the-medicine-cabinet antimicrobial arsenal stocked with Lysol, Clorox, Listerine, and
Bactine. A touch of white on a wedge of cheese was enough to condemn it. The slightest
dent in a can of food consigned it to the trash, no matter that the dent came from being
dropped on the floor. You never know; could be botulism; better safe than sorry.

The molds and bacteria now have a small but
growing tribe of human defenders. These post-Pasteurians,
^*
as they
sometimes call themselves, form one of the more curious subcultures in America. It
is sometimes called the fermentation underground, a word that seems
fitting, given the fierceness of their devotion to microbes and their willingness to
break the law to consume them. These are people who will fight for the right to drink
unpasteurized milk and eat unpasteurized cheeses, who ferment all manner of foods and
beverages using “wild cultures” exclusively, and who generally believe the
time has come for humanity to renegotiate the terms of its relationship with “the
microcosmos”—the biologist Lynn Margulis’s term for the unseen universe of
microbes all around and within us. Much more than a way to prepare and preserve food,
fermentation for these people becomes a political and ecological act, a way to engage
with the bacteria and fungi, honor our coevolutionary interdependence, and get over our
self-destructive germophobia. It seems there’s a lot more going on in a crock of
homemade sauerkraut than a handful of lactobacilli species diligently fermenting the
sugars in a cabbage; at stake in that crock is our whole relationship to nature.

The man who first taught me how to make
sauerkraut is a leader of this underground and possibly the most famous fermento in
America. Sandor Katz is the Johnny Appleseed of fermentation, a fiftyish writer,
advocate, and itinerant teacher with a suitably retro appearance. Six feet tall and
loose limbed, he has electrified muttonchops that drift together and link chops above
his lips to form a bushy mustache that would not have been out of place in
nineteenth-century America; Katz could easily pass for a Civil War veteran. Yet Katz
grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, eating sour dills from Zabar’s,
studied history at Brown, and learned the arts of fermentation while living on “a
fairy commune” in rural Tennessee; he had to figure out
some
thing to do
with all the surplus produce from the garden. Katz has been HIV-positive since 1991, and
partly credits a diet rich in “live culture” foods—i.e., ones teeming with
living bacteria—for his continued vigor and good health.

Since his first book,
Wild
Fermentation
, was published in 2003, Katz has traveled the country teaching
people how to make kraut and kimchi, pickled vegetables of every kind, mead and beer and
wine, miso, natto, tempeh, kvass, smreka, sourdough bread, ogi, kefir, cheese, yogurt,
labneh, tej, shrub, kishk, and dozens of other obscure fermentations I had never heard
of. But, like John Chapman, whose offer of apple trees was really just a way to get his
foot in the door so that he might expound his Swedenborgian gospel, Sandor Katz’s
sauerkraut teachings open onto an evangelism, too—a microbial gospel. Both characters
would have us turn our attention to an invisible realm, both plied their message along a
frontier, and both bid us to see the natural world around us in a striking new
light.

But first the kraut. I caught up with Sandor
at a health-food store in Alameda, California, where he was conducting a workshop. He
was in town on a two-week tour of the Bay Area, offering classes, visiting pickle
makers, participating in panels and “culture swaps” and “skill
shares,” leading a bicycle tour–cum–tasting of home brews in the East Bay (only a
few minor accidents were reported), and giving the keynote address at the third annual
Fermentation Festival up in Freestone. (About which more later.) Here in Alameda, on a
weekday afternoon, twenty aspiring fermenters had gathered with their notebooks around
the café tables in the store’s sunny window to watch Sandor make sauerkraut and
expound on “cultural revival.”

“So really there’s not much to
it. Chop or grate the cabbage, fine or rough, however you like it. Chopper’s
choice, I always say.” I was immediately struck by Sandor’s anticharismatic
mode of address. He is utterly unpretentious, refusing to mystify his expertise in any
way. If anything, he makes what he does sound rather ho-hum. Sandor also refuses to be
categorical about
any
thing. His answer to every other question is “Well,
it is and it isn’t,” or “Yes and no,” or “It really
depends,” or “Every fermentation is different.” His
shrug gets a good workout, too.

I came to see that his diffidence reflects
both a practical and a philosophical stance. There is no “right” way to
ferment anything, no hard and fast rules. And, given how little we understand about the
microbial world, one where bacteria can trade genes and their exact identities are often
up for grabs, it would be hubris to pretend to certainty. As I realized when I was
learning to bake bread, for a human to have a good working relationship with bacteria
and fungi, it helps to possess a healthy degree of negative capability. These are
cultures you can nudge, perhaps even manage, but never entirely control, or even
comprehend. “Nature imperfectly mastered,” a phrase I heard from a cheese
maker, stands as a pretty good definition of this work, which has much in common with
gardening. Every ferment retains a certain element of unknowable wildness.

While Sandor walked us through the nuts and
bolts of pickling—a term serious fermenters apply to all vegetable ferments, not just
cucumbers—he occasionally wandered off the how-to trail, sauntering into the political,
ecological, and philosophical implications of fermentation. He regards his work as a
form of “cultural revival”—by which he has in mind both meanings of the word
“culture,” the microbial and the human. The revival of these food cultures
depends on reviving the microbial cultures that create them, and the reverse is true as
well. The word “ferment,” too, had a double meaning: “When people get
excited about ideas, they get bubbly. I want to leave you with thoughts of social and
political ferment, too.” The DIY skills he was imparting held within them an
implicit politics. They would help people take back control of their diet from the
corporations, whose “dead food” was damaging our health and
“homogenizing” our experience. Mastery of the fermentation arts could also
help us
break the dependency of consumerism, rebuild local food
systems (since fermented foods allow us to eat locally all year long), and rediscover
the “pleasures and wonders of transformation.”

“As a culture we need to rehabilitate
the image of bacteria. They are our ancestors and our allies. Did you know you have more
bacterial cells in your body than human cells? By a factor of ten! Most of the DNA
we’re carrying around is microbial DNA, not human. Which raises an interesting
question: Who exactly are we?” Katz suggested that a visitor from another planet
would be forced to conclude who we are is a superorganism, a symbiotic community of
several hundred species, with
Homo sapiens
serving as unwitting front man and
ambulatory device. “We need them and they need us.”