Passive Complicity has an unashamed interest in food. Good food, and lots of it. We enjoy beer, cider, wine and spirits. We like pickles of all descriptions. We get excited whenever ferment is mentioned. Thus it is with pleasure that over the next two days we bring you the foreword to a fascinating book “The Art of Fermentation”. The foreward is written by the author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma”, Michael Pollan.
The Art of Fermentation is an inspiring book, and I mean that literally. The book has inspired me to do things I’ve never done before, and probably never would have done if I hadn’t read it. In fact, Katz’s book is the main reason that my kitchen counters and basement floors have lately sprouted an assortment of mason jars, ceramic crocks, jelly jars, bottles, and carboys, the clear ones glowing with unearthly colours. since falling under the spell of Katz’s fermentation evangelism, I have launched ig crocks of sauerkraut and kimchi, mason jars of pickled cucumbers, carrots, beets, cauliflower, onions, peppers, and ramps; jelly jars of yogurt and kefir; and five-gallon carboys of beer and mead. All of them, I am regularly reminded, are alive. When it’s late at night and quiet in the house, I can hear my ferments gurgling contentedly. It’s become a deeply pleasing sound, because it means my microbes are happy.
I read cookbooks all the time and never make a thing from them, so why was The Art of Fermentation different? For one thing Sandor Katz writes about the transformative power of fermentation with such infectious enthusiasm that he makes you want to try things just to see what happens. It’s the same way I felt the day my elementary school teacher told us something miraculous would happen if we mixed up some vinegar with baking soda. These microbial transformations are miraculous and so, very often, are the results: striking new flavours and interesting new textures, wrought from the most ordinary ingredients, and not by us but by bacteria and fungi.
Another reason Katz inspires us to try recipes to make things you never even knew existed (kvass? shrub?!) is that he never intimidates. To the contrary. As a cookbook – and, as I will get to, it is so much more than a cookbook – The Art of Fermentation is empowering. Though the book traffics in many kinds of microbial mystery, Katz is by temperament a demystifier: it’s not that complicated, he assures us, anyone can make sauerkraut; here’s all you need to do. And if something goes wrong? If your sauerkraut grows an alarming-looking beard of mold? No need to panic; just shave off the mold and enjoy the kraut beneath it.
But this attitude has something more behind it than Sandor Katz’s easy-going temperament in the kitchen; there is a politics at work here as well. The Art of Fermentation is much more than a cookbook. Or rather, it is a cookbook is the same way that Zen and the Art of Archery is a how-to about bows and arrows. Sure, it tells you how to do it, but much more important, it tells you what it means, and why an act as quotidian and practical as making you own sauerkraut represents nothing less than a way of engaging with the world. Or rather, with several different worlds, each nested inside the other: the invisible world of fungi and bacteria; the community in which you live; and the industrial food system that is undermining the health of our bodies and the land.
This might seem like a large claim for a crock of sauerkraut, but Sandor Katz’s signal achievement in this book is to convince you of its truth. To ferment your own food is to lodge an eloquent protest – of the senses – against the homogenisation of flavours and food experiences now rolling like a great undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would much prefer we were all passive consumers of its commodities, rather than creators of unique products expressive of ourselves and the places where we live. Because your sauerkraut or homebrew will be nothing like mine or anyone else’s.
Michael Pollan December 2011
(To be concluded tomorrow)