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.
Here is the second part of this piece.

The Koreans, who know a thing or two about fermentation, distinguish between the ‘tongue taste’ of various foods and the ‘hand taste’.  Tongue taste is a simple matter of molecules making contact with taste buds – the kind of cheap and easy flavours any food scientist or food corporation can produce.  ‘Hand taste’ is the far more complex experience of a food that bears the indelible mark – the care and sometimes even the love – of the person who made it.  The sauerkraut you make yourself will have hand taste.

And you will have plenty of it to give away, trust me.  One of the best things about making your own ferments is sharing them with others, off the grid of the cash economy.  I now swap bottles of beer and mead with other homebrewers and take part in a steady trade in mason jars, which leave my house brimming with sauerkraut only to return brimming with other peoples kimchi or pickles.  To delve into the world of fermented foods is to enter the community of fermentos, who happen to be a most interesting, eccentric and generous bunch.

But of course there is another community to which The Art of Fermentation serves as a kind of passport or visa: the unseen community of fungi and bacteria all around us and within us.  If this book has an underlying agenda (and it assuredly does) it is to help us reconceive our relationship with what biologist Lynn Margulis calls the ‘microcosomos’.  Since Louis Pasteur discovered the role of microbes in disease more than a century ago, most of us have found ourselves on a war footing with respect to bacteria.  We dose our children with antibiotics, keep them as far away from microbes as possible, and generally strive to sanitize their world.  We are living in the age of Purell.  And yet biologists have come to appreciate that the war on bacteria is not only futile – the bacteria, which can out-evolve us, will always win – but counterproductive.

The profligate use of antibiotics has produced resistant bacteria as lethal as any we managed to kill.  Those drugs, along with a processed food diet lacking in both bacteria and food for bacteria (aka fibre), have disordered the microbial ecology in our gut in profound ways that we are just beginning to understand, and which may well explain many of our health problems.  Children protected from bacteria turn out to have higher rates of allergy and asthma.  We are discovering that one of the keys to our well-being is the well-being of the microflora with whom we share our bodies, and with whom we co-evolved.  And it looks like they really, really like sauerkraut.

In the war on bacteria, Sandor Katz is a confirmed pacifist.  But he isn’t just sitting out the war, or speechifying about it.  He’s doing something to end it.   A Post-Pasteurian, Katz would have us renegotiate the terms of our relationship with the microcosomos, and The Art of Fermentation is an eloquent and practical manifesto showing us exactly how to do that, one crock of sauerkraut at a time.  I fully expect that, like a particularly vibrant microbial culture, this book will spawn thousands of new fermentos, and not a moment to soon.  Welcome to the party.

Michael Pollan, December 2011.