Transcript: SANDOR ELLIX KATZ on Cultures of Fermentation /359
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today we're speaking with Sandor Katz.
Sandor Ellix Katz Every kind of organism is interacting intimately with its environment as it feeds itself, and we have tried to take ourselves out of this equation. And supposedly we have liberated ourselves by not having to spend each day procuring the food resources to get through that day, but you know, in fact, it has alienated us from our environments and careless about them.
Ayana Young Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. He is the author of five books: Wild Fermentation; The Art of Fermentation; The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved; Fermentation as Metaphor; and his latest, Fermentation Journeys. Sandor's books, along with the hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world, have helped to catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, the New York Times calls him “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.” Sandor is the recipient of a James Beard award and other honors. For more information, check out his website www.wildfermentation.com.
Well, Sandor, thank you so much for joining us today, myself, as well as all the For The Wildians are such fans of your work. And this has been definitely on my bucket list to talk to you for many, many years as I have your books on my shelf. So thank you for joining us and spending a bit of time with us today.
Sandor Ellix Katz Well, it is my pleasure and thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be talking with you today.
Ayana Young Me too. Well, as we settle into this conversation, I want to start off by paying homage to your long history of fermentation and the ways that it has totally transformed human culture and civilization across the world. So maybe we could start off with how is your study of fermentation also been a study of humanity?
Sandor Ellix Katz My interest in fermentation at one level has gone on for my entire life. Certainly, since long before I was thinking about fermentation and it's just embedded in some of the foods of my heritage. So my grandparents were all immigrants from Eastern Europe. They all ended up in the New York area, which is where I grew up, and I grew up loving pickles. And the pickles that my family was eating, I now understand we're not made by pouring vinegar over cucumbers, but rather were made by a fermentation process. In New York, we call them sour pickles. Outside of New York, in the US, they're often called kosher dill pickles. But without knowing anything about how these pickles were made or the distinction that they were fermented, you know, from the earliest age, I loved pickles, and I was drawn to this flavor that I could now recognize as the flavor of lactic acid.
And I would say more than anything that flavor led me into my interest in fermentation. Of course, there were other steps along the way. For a couple of years in my 20s, I was following a macrobiotic diet and macrobiotics places an emphasis on the digestive benefit of live pickles and other kinds of live fermented foods. And I started to observe that whenever I would eat these pickles that I've been eating my entire life that I could feel my salivary glands under my tongue squirting out saliva. So in a very concrete, tangible way, I began to associate this food that I had been enjoying my entire life with getting my digestive juices flowing and so I really sort of sought it out more regularly as a health practice.
But it really took moving away from New York City to rural Tennessee, which I did 30 years ago in 1993. And among the many changes in my life at that time, I took up gardening. And it was really from the experience of having a garden that I began to recognize the practical benefits of fermentation. So the first year that I was gardening, we had a really nice row of cabbages. And I was such a naive city kid, it had never occurred to me that in the garden, all of the cabbages would be ready at about the same time and all of the radishes would be ready at about the same time. So when I was faced for the first time with this rather obvious aspect of agricultural production, I realized that sauerkraut is a food that I've always loved and that sauerkraut had something to do with preserving cabbage. And I went about looking for a recipe for how to make sauerkraut. I found it in the most obvious place, The Joy of Cooking. I followed The Joy of Cooking's recipe for sauerkraut. And it was incredibly delicious and I couldn't believe how simple it was.
And it just sort of set me off experimenting and playing. And, well, what happens if I incorporate other vegetables? What happens if I use a different kind of seasoning? What happens if I leave it longer? What happens if I taste it sooner? And I started playing around with fermenting vegetables and that led me very quickly into wanting to experiment with fermenting other things. How do I make yogurt? How do I make country wine? You know, that first year I even learned how to make tempeh and how to make miso. So, you know, I really went down the rabbit hole and started experimenting with all different kinds of fermentation. And my obsession with all things fermented has, you know, continued to this day.
Ayana Young Yeah, I can almost feel my mouth watering as you're talking, thinking about really good crowds and pickles. I haven't had a good pickle in a long time. There's a few other maybe foundational questions I want to go over in your book Fermentation as Metaphor you write, quote, "The only thing that makes do-it-yourself fermentation radical is context. Our contemporary system of food mass production, which is unsustainable in so many ways, our dominant food system is polluting, resource depleting and wasteful and what it produces is nutritionally diminished, causing widespread disease," end quote. I think there's often this myth that our food system, because it's so big, is more efficient, or maybe that's just what they want us to believe. Or that the only way to feed all the people on the planet is through this mass agriculture and food processing system. So I'm wondering, how does your work debunk this idea?
Sandor Ellix Katz Well, I mean, ideas like this are very pervasive, and because the vast majority of people are so completely cut off from the realities of food production, it's very easy for people to believe that feeding ourselves requires factory farms, centralized production. And with respect to fermentation, specifically, because fermentation is simultaneously part of everybody's everyday life, and completely invisible to most people, it's easy to project complexity upon it, and imagine that you need a laboratory and an environment that you can control in an absolute way. And, people imagined that it's a very high tech process, when in fact, all of the fermentation processes that we work with around the world, we've been practicing for, you know, hundreds, or in most cases, 1000s of years. And so, they actually don't require huge amounts of technology. But, I think because food production is so far from most people's lives, it's easy for people to believe, whatever.
I see my work with fermentation as part of a, you know, broader process of reclaiming food and reclaiming food can take many different forms from having a garden, shopping at a farmers market, buying food from local people who've directly produced it, to just learning how to cook things, from scratch in your own kitchen. There're many different forms that reclaiming food can take, but it all involves demystifying the process of producing food and taking it away from the large centralized actors, and making it something that we participate in our own homes, wherever we live, and in our communities wherever we live. And I don't dispute that there are certain kinds of foods, maybe that can be efficiently produced in, in centralized ways at high scale, but, you know, they're only as reliable as our distribution networks are. And one thing is for sure, which is the distribution of food resources or any other kind of resources that are centralized. I mean, it's great as long as it works, but it's always subject to disruption. And that disruption could have to do with climate and climate change. It could have to do with fuel and international control of food, fuel and economics. It can be certainly affected by wars and political violence. And I think that pandemic illustrated for us how vulnerable supply chains can be. So I think that it behooves the people of every region in the world to expand the productive capacity for food at the local and regional level. Certainly I'm not against trade in food, I mean, I think it's really sort of fun and expands everybody's experiences to have access to foods from faraway places, but I think that it puts us in an extremely vulnerable position to all be completely dependent upon food resources that are coming from faraway places.
So, you know, I think that in whatever ways we can, at whatever level we can, it makes sense for all of us to get involved as producers of food and to support local and regional food production so as to get away from complete dependency on this sort of centralized globalized food production system. And in fact, if we're, if we're thinking about maximizing food production, let's say, per acre of land. You definitely can produce more food on an acre of land with labor intensive methods that involve lots of people and not so many machines. Our system is all about maximizing production really, per hour or day of human labor, and, honestly, that's not the thing we have a shortage of. I'm not an economist and I certainly don't know how we would get from point A to point B, but if truly our concern was maximizing production, per unit of land, doing it in more labor intensive ways could increase that.
Ayana Young Yeah. And in an interview with GQ, you say, quote, "What we're seeing largely right now in the US is this reaction to that. In our parents and our grandparents generations, there was this unprecedented amount of processed convenience food available, and in the supermarket, and for many of them that really represented liberation. But when you talk to people in their 20s to their 50s now, there's a recognition that a lot of this mass produced food is of pretty poor quality. And they're like, Well, I'm actually interested in understanding what I'm eating. I want to know how it's produced and where it comes from. Fermentation is a part of that answer," end quote.
So I'd love to break down this quote a bit. And I'm wondering, if some of the reaction to this process food craze has also come in to the idea that in order to be healthy, we need to have constant access to fresh produce year round in a way that doesn't honor this specific rhythms of the earth, in the areas where we live, which I think is tapping into a similar consumer-based mindset, just with a different, you know, product. So yeah, how can fermented food challenge this idea and encourage us to think of health and seasonal eating differently, and building community?
Sandor Ellix Katz I just think that, you know, all of the repetitive tasks that go with food production, from the garden to the harvest to cooking and fermenting, this is really at the core of cultural knowledge. And so the practice of these processes, it's the continuity of culture. It's passing skills and methods down from generation to generation. It's a way for people of different generations to spend mutually enriching time with one another. When people are sitting together, let's say, hulling beans or any other kind of harvest related task, their hands might be very much occupied, but they're, they're talking, they're listening, they're singing. These are important cultural moments. And a lot of people's happiest memories, let's say of their grandparents, involve food preparation with them.
So the cultural aspects of it are not insignificant and it breaks my heart when I meet people who just like, categorically don't cook like. Whatever they eat is what's been prepared for them. And it just seems like that's a very disempowered place to be and these are really important skills to acquire. In terms of fermented foods and how that fits in with it. I mean, sure, a lot of fermented foods preserve the harvest. So certainly, like the fermentation of vegetables is generally, above all else, a strategy for preserving vegetables from seasons of relative plenty for people to eat in seasons where they don't have fresh food resources available. But there's a whole range of practical benefits to fermentation and preservation is only one of them. Just to give you an example, like nobody has ever fermented a grain or a bean in order to preserve it, because these foods in their mature state are very stable as long as you keep a grain of wheat or a bean dry, it will preserve.
And so generally the first step in fermenting these foods is to introduce water to reawaken dormancy to microorganisms that haven't been able to function because of the lack of water, but the fermentation can make these things more easily digestible. They can make these things lighter. They can make these things more flavorful. So yeah, there's a whole range of potential benefits from fermented foods and beverages. And of course, we can't forget alcohol, because far and away the most widespread form of fermentation is the fermentation of every different kind of carbohydrate source you could imagine into alcohol.
Ayana Young I think it's really important for us to understand the value of culture, community building, especially as an antidote to what's happening to our communities now. But anyways, I could stay on that topic and really dig through it the whole session, but I do want to talk about gut health with, you know, the concept of it as a trend versus reality and, as you often say, quote, "Fermentation is not a fad, it is a fact," end quote. And it's clear that fermentation is vital to human life, as we know it. You know, something that does seem to be more of a fad, though, is the way we talk about and market fermentation and fermented products. And I'm thinking especially of the recent rise of gummies and diets and the probiotic sodas that are sold to us as ways to improve gut health. So I would just love to hear why you think this has recently cropped up as a marketable trend and how we can talk about fermentation in ways that are evergreen, you know, not focused on selling a particular product in that immediate moment.
Sandor Ellix Katz Really, fermentation is a manifestation of the fact of biodiversity. Fermentation historically was a bit of a mystery and it was really only in the 19th century that science came to understand that fermentation was a biological phenomenon based on the activity of microorganisms, bacteria, and fungi that are part of the food. The emerging science of microbiology since then has come to the realization that all multicellular forms of life—including ourselves, including all animals, including all plants—are host to elaborate communities of microorganisms. So really, you know, no organism is an island. Every organism exists in the complexity of biodiversity. And I think that the reason why fermentation is practiced everywhere on the earth is the simple reality that all of the things that make up our food—all of the plants, and all of the animal products that we eat—are populated by these elaborate communities of microorganisms. And these microorganisms can develop in different ways. So, these microorganisms could decompose our food into a disgusting, ugly mess that nobody would ever want to put into their mouths or, with certain simple environmental manipulations, we can guide the microbial development so that organisms that either help preserve the food for a longer period of time or, you know, break down some toxic compounds that could be in the food, or just break down macronutrients into simpler, more elemental forms that our bodies can absorb more easily or just make the food more more flavorful or produce alcohol. There're all these potential positive outcomes.
So whenever you ferment food successfully: A) you prevent it from decomposing into a disgusting, ugly mess that nobody would ever eat, and B) you're turning it into something with these additional practical benefits for us. And so I think that fermentation is a manifestation of biodiversity. Everything we could possibly eat is a manifestation of biodiversity. And, you know, the cultures that have developed in different parts of the world largely have to do with how people interact with the other life forms that are around them in acquiring food. And so, our very sort of cultural existence, and our ability to have food is sort of also based on this. biodiversity. So, it's all very interesting, and yet, the fact that so few people are directly involved in this sort of speaks to humans trying to let's say opt out of these most basic relationships that define every other kind of organism. I mean, every kind of organism is interacting intimately with its environment as it feeds itself. And we have tried to take ourselves out of this equation. And, supposedly we have liberated ourselves by not having to spend each day procuring the food resources to get through that day. But, you know, in fact, it has alienated us from our environments, and led to this incredible environmental destruction. So, I think it's just made us less attuned to our environments and care less about them.
So our gut health also is a manifestation of this biodiversity. And I think one of the reasons why, over the last 20 or 25 years, there has been so much more interest in fermented foods and beverages, awareness about fermented foods and beverages. Marketing related to fermented foods and beverages is this growing awareness of the biodiversity within us. So like, in my growing up in 20th century United States, I never heard a good word about bacteria, bacteria were the cause of disease period. And we needed to avoid them, and we needed to destroy them by any means necessary. I would say pretty much since the dawn of the new millennium, probably dating to the Human Microbiome Project, there has been growing awareness that bacteria are actually an important part of our own human functionality, and that the incredible populations of bacteria that exists in our intestines most prominently, but in many other parts of our bodies—that these bacteria give us a lot of our functionality. They enable us to effectively digest the food that we eat. What we call our immune systems are largely the work of bacteria in the gut.
And bacteria play a role in regulating lots of the chemical processes in our bodies. So for instance, serotonin and other chemical compounds that determine how we think and how we feel, are regulated in ways that are not fully understood by bacteria in the gut. So the health and vitality and biodiversity of the bacterial communities within us have great significance to our health and well being. And I think that this fact newly established for many people is driving a lot of the awareness of fermentation, interest in fermentation, and certainly the marketing of a lot of different kinds of fermented products.
Now, the products of fermentation themselves, I mean, they have enjoyed enduring popularity and wherever our great grandparents might have been from, fermented foods and beverages were just as prominent in their diets as they are in anyone's diet today, potentially much more so. So the products themselves are not new. It's just people's awareness and thinking about them and some of the marketing strategies are the things that are new.
Ayana Young I really feel so relieved learning about the truth of the immune system and bacteria. It's actually been a really healing journey for me just in intellectually understanding my own body a bit more, I think it's just really interesting. And it actually kind of brings me to this idea that I feel like you've spoken to in a few of your interviews, which is being open to new forms of life. And in an interview with Emergence Magazine, you say, quote, "In our human societies, this idea of protecting the purity of our society against the contamination of outside ideas is well, it's been weaponized, really. The way people project fear of the quote "other" has been such a theme throughout human history," end quote. And so yeah, I guess I'm kind of combining this idea of purity in terms of bacteria and purity of thoughts, too, and wondering, how does this idea of purity come to hurt us and separate us from key aspects of ourselves and our communities?
Sandor Ellix Katz Well, I mean, certainly in the literal realm of our lives and the foods that we eat purity is completely a fantasy. And I would argue that in terms of ideas and heritage, purity is an abstraction in that realm as well, and in every wellness realm, I mean, purity simply does not exist. So, in terms of making fermented foods, sometimes people who watch me demonstrate fermenting vegetables are shocked that I'm not like using some kind of a chemical to sterilize the jar that we're about to put the vegetables in. Or that I'm not like wearing gloves or doing something to prevent the bacteria on my hands from getting on to the vegetables. But the point is that all plants growing out of soil on planet Earth are hosts to lactic acid bacteria—the ones that are going to ferment them for us, but also their host to many other things. And, which organisms are going to dominate just depends completely on the environment that we create, and that's what the practice of fermentation is. And in the fermentation of vegetables, generally, it's just about getting the vegetables submerged to protect them from the steady flow of air with oxygen. And protecting the vegetables from air with oxygen means that the spores of molds that are present there can't develop. So getting them submerged is really all it takes to assure that the lactic acid bacteria are going to dominate and this happens every single time.
I mean, fermented vegetables are about as safe as food gets. There's just no recorded case histories of food poisoning or illness from fermented vegetables. And I would just point out that we have plenty of case histories of illness from raw vegetables. You know, this year it was red onions. One year it was scallions. One year it was lettuce. One year it was tomatoes. One year it was apples. So clearly there's the possibility that vegetables or fruits could become contaminated by salmonella or other organisms that can make people sick. Usually, the story is manure from a factory farm uphill washes over a field of vegetables and they're contaminated that way. It could just as easily happen from sloppy handling—people failing to wash their hands at critical moments of handling the food. But even if you took vegetables that had cells of say salmonella on them, if you shred them, salt them, get them submerged under their own juices, and ferment them, well the lactic acid bacteria will always dominate. And as they metabolize carbohydrates into lactic acid and acidify the environment, if there happens to be some cells of salmonella or other potentially pathogenic organisms, they will perish. It's just a very convenient fact for us that the organisms that have the potential to make us sick can't survive in an acidic environment. So fermentation really is a strategy for safety as much as anything. But in my career as a fermentation educator, I have encountered a lot of people projecting their generalized anxiety about micro organisms and bacteria or about food preservation in general onto the idea of fermentation. But the reality is that, you know, fermentation is a strategy for food safety, above all else really.
Ayana Young Going back to the Emergence Magazine article, you continue by saying quote, "In both literal fermentation and metaphorical fermentation, the fermentation is breaking down previous forms into new forms," end quote. And so I'm wondering, how can we come to embrace a way of being that is open to experiment and open to new forms, and to the messiness that comes from allowing the old forms to rot and decay into something else entirely?
Sandor Ellix Katz I guess I would challenge a little bit of how you phrase that question, because generally when food is fermenting, it's not rotting. Sure, microorganisms are breaking it down, but generally, we're not inventing the wheel, we're not creating something completely new. We are sort of following a way that other people have done things. And generally it's fairly predictable what will happen in a given setup. So,we're not rotting the food at all. We are processing the food in some generally straightforward way. We are creating conditions that we have seen or been told will yield the desired results, and then we are sort of implementing a plan that many other people before us have implemented. So I think it's like...it's largely a matter of having confidence in these traditional methods.
I want to talk for a moment about starters. One way that people in the present moment start fermentation processes is to buy a starter. I think the most widespread example of this would be the packet of yeast that you can buy in any supermarket. But that packet of yeast, which is a fungus, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. That packet of yeast really has only been commercially available since the 20th century. So we've been baking bread for something like 10,000 years. We've been making wine, making beer for similar periods of time. There was no such thing as a packet of yeast until the 20th century. So for like 9900 years, the only way anyone was making these foods was by working with the foods to develop the yeast that's already there in the food. And that's what sort of all the traditional techniques involve is what I call wild fermentation.
And my first book about fermentation was called Wild Fermentation. But this isn't a phrase that I made up, it's found throughout the literature and it describes any fermentation based on the organisms that are there in the food already, or to a limited degree in the environment around us or on our hands, but generally, it's in the food. So when you shred cabbage or other vegetables to make sauerkraut, the bacteria is already in the cabbage or the other vegetables. When you press grapes to make wine, the yeast is already on the grapes. And, and so this is wild fermentation—just working with the life forces that are already there on the food. And the vast majority of fermentation processes are wild fermentations. And, you know, anything that involves, you know, a little packet of a starter, you know, I mean, that that can be a very effective method to use. But that's like a very, very modern, technological method. But also if we're going to rely upon, you know, the organisms that are there, like they have to exist in, you know, high enough concentration, that they can easily become dominant. And that's why we don't have to worry about sterilizing things when we're dealing with wild fermentation. Because, you know, there's like a critical mass of the organisms that we need. We're creating conditions favorable to them. And in a very reliable way, they come to dominate the environment.
Ayana Young I love talking about wild fermentation and yeast. It's really exciting to me. And I remember when I first tried it myself, maybe I don't know, 10 years ago, now I did it with wine berries in Pennsylvania. And I actually experimented. I had a couple of starters I bought from the store and then I just did the wild ferment. And I love wild fermentation. I love the taste. It honestly feels much better on my body. Like with wines, there's such a movement with organic wines, but like organic wine doesn't mean that it has wild fermentation. It just means that the grape itself is organic, but it could have sulfites and could have all these additives in there. And yeah, there's just something about wild fermentation and the flavor. It's so complex to me. And it really calls to me and I am thinking about home fermentation, wild fermentation more and I'm wondering how traditional ferments also connect us to the unique biodiversity of the areas around us. Yeah, just wondering if you can elaborate more on the ways fermentation can tap into biodiversity in general?
Sandor Ellix Katz And so, all of these ideas of sterilizing things like they are just born by the use of pure culture starters—this sort of new method of fermentation that was developed during the course of the 20th century. And so if you're going to sort of kill all the organisms in your substrate and then just introduce a single pure culture starter, then with that method of fermentation, our notions of sterility and purity become somewhat more important than they are in the traditional context where we're relying on these heavy existing populations of organisms on the foods that we're eating. And by the way, the people who developed and figured out these methods did not have the benefit of microscopes or the ability to identify specific organisms. So they were based on results, that if you do this, it works. But without necessarily understanding the specific mechanisms of the process that's going on.
Well, sure, I mean, just the word that you just used, you know, complexity. What gives fermented foods or beverages complexity in their flavor is precisely biodiversity. Because with a pure culture starter, having a singular organism driving the fermentation typically you'll have just a single byproduct or a relatively small collection of metabolic byproducts. But, the more different organisms are involved in the fermentation, the more flavor complexity you're going to have. And sometimes people appreciate that flavor, complexity, and sometimes people's tastes get so narrow that they only want the one singular, metabolic byproduct. But I mean, I absolutely agree with you that most products of wild fermentation just end up possessing greater flavor complexity as a reflection of the greater biodiversity than ferments made through pure culture starters. And I think that in every realm of fermentation in every category of fermented products, we could talk about breads made with natural fermentation, we could talk about raw milk cheeses where the fermentation is driven by organisms that are present in the milk. We could talk about salamis made without starter cultures. We could talk about natural wines. We could talk about spontaneously fermented beers. In every type of fermented product, I would say that the most outstanding examples are made using wild fermentation.
Now, there's also greater variability. So you could have the most outstanding results. You could have some off flavors. And I think that one of the reasons why mass production has tended towards pure culture starters is just for greater predictability, greater consistency. And I mean, I understand that as a desire. But I, just from my experience of practicing wild fermentation, and of getting to sample many foods and beverages produced by other people by means of wild fermentation, I just think that the potential for flavor complexity and really outstanding results is much greater with wild fermentation.
Ayana Young And in terms of the complexity and the flavor, I think that for folks who haven't been brought up eating fermented foods, it can be really hard for people to develop a palate for that. And so what would you say to people who are like, Oof, like, I don't like kraut or kimchi or It's too bitter or because it doesn't taste like sugary processed high fructose corn syrup. You know, it doesn't taste like the highly processed food that a lot of us have been conditioned to gravitate to. So how can people get over that hump, do you think?
Sandor Ellix Katz Well, I would say that many of the flavors of fermentation are what we could describe as acquired tastes. And I think about...let's talk about cheeses for a moment. I'm 61 years old, I have really come to like, you know, very, very strong, flavorful cheeses. If I try to imagine like my nine year old self looking at some of the cheeses that I get excited about eating at this stage in my life, you know, nine year old Sandor would be just utterly horrified. As a kid, I did not like strong flavored cheeses. I...like, I don't even think I tasted them. I mean, just the smell of them was enough to put me off, but I watched my parents enjoying cheese. And I think that the way we come to acquire tastes that didn't come to us from birth is by watching other people take pleasure in them. So I mean, I have a long list of things that as a kid were not appealing to me, I mean, coffee was not appealing to me. Now, I can't imagine getting a day without coffee. Beer was not appealing to me as a kid and now I love beer. You know, these strong flavored cheeses, I mean, many other examples. So, I mean, we learn to acquire the tastes that we do acquire by sort of watching other people take pleasure in them.
And I think that I don't have an easy recipe to recommend for people to sort of acquire the taste, but I would point out a couple of things. First, I would point out that one of the great pleasures of fermenting food yourself is you can control a lot of the variables. If you don't like extremely sour food, you can ferment it for a shorter period of time, and it'll be less sour. So, you can make it less sour or more sour as you prefer, or as your partner or your children or whoever you might be trying to feed prefers. You have control over the process—how salty it is, how sour it becomes, how spicy it is, and all of these things. And so you can find, like, the flavor that you're comfortable with.
The other thing is, don't think about these foods as something to be eaten on its own, although they can be very delicious eaten that way. Fermented vegetables are really condiments and therefore, you know, making other foods more exciting and interesting. So if you think about sauerkraut, like let's say on a sandwich, it'll just sort of add a layer of flavor to the sandwich. And I think that sometimes with foods that seem too strong to just eat on their own, if we think about incorporating them into something else, where their flavor will be spread into more food is a great way to make the flavors more acceptable. And third, what I would just say is, I've met so many people who just tell me as if it's a fact that kids don't like the flavor of fermented foods. I mean, that is absolutely not true. Like kids can be very receptive to these foods, young kids. You know, if a kid is nine years old, the first time they're tasting sauerkraut, they're probably going to reject it, because it hasn't been in their palate, but if you take like a young child who is sort of first being introduced to solid foods and start incorporating some of the flavors of fermentation into the food, they very likely will accept them and love them for their entire lives. And, I've even done…I've read a couple of articles suggesting that, if a woman during her pregnancy is eating fermented foods, then the baby will be born with more openness to those flavors.
Ayana Young Yeah, that's really interesting. What I was also hearing in your response was just the creativity and even the culinary artistic aspect of using certain foods, fermented foods. There was an interview with NPR in 2012 and you said, quote, "We reject certain foods because it is rotten. Certain food we can see as fresh, but there is this creative space between fresh and rotten food where most of human cultures' most prized delicacies and culinary achievements exist," end quote. So yeah, I'd like to riff a bit more on how does fermentation allow us to express our creativity alongside practicality and how can we apply an experimental and open approach to the things that sustain us?
Sandor Ellix Katz Well, I mean, as as I've mentioned, a couple of times, the practice of fermentation is, you know, really all about manipulating environmental conditions in ways that encourage the growth of the organisms that we want and simultaneously discourage the growth of the organisms that we don't want. But with fermenting vegetables, what that means is getting vegetables submerged. And that can be done in different ways. The sauerkraut dry salting method—you just shred vegetables to create surface area. You add salt. Salt through osmosis draws some of the juice out of the vegetables. The vegetables get nice and juicy. And then you pack them into the vessel.
Now, what vegetables you use, what combination of vegetables you use, what kinds of seasonings you use, how you shred the vegetables, whether it's coarsely, or finely—all these things are open to interpretation. So as long as you get the vegetables submerged, I mean, you can be incredibly creative about it. And I mean, I had a young woman show up at one of my workshops with vanilla sauerkraut, and she had minced vanilla beans into the shredded cabbage and it was delicious. It wasn't something I ever would have thought of, but it was great. I've had so many curry crowds, where people incorporate curry seasonings into the sauerkraut and that works really well. You can incorporate cooked things. I met a woman whose family was from a town in Poland, where everybody bulked up their sauerkraut with mashed potatoes. So you can incorporate cooked elements, or I've made kimchi with little pockets of sticky rice in it. So really, once you understand the condition that you need to create, well, then you have all of this creative leeway to experiment with different vegetables, different kinds of chopping different combinations of vegetables, different seasonings, different amounts of salt, different lengths of fermentation. So it actually lends itself to as much creativity as you want to bring to it.
Ayana Young It's exciting to hear you speak about this, and the creativity and of course, the health benefits and the cultural benefits. It's really, really beautiful. And I am thinking, how we've lost the practice of fermentation and how we get that back and why teaching is so important. And in your book Fermentation as Metaphor you write, quote, "Our dominant food system deskills and disempowers people, distancing us from the natural world and making us completely dependent on systems of mass production and distribution, which are fine as long as they function, but are vulnerable to many potential disruptions from pandemics to flu shortages to price spikes to war and natural disasters," end quote. So yeah, it makes me think of just how many practical skills people have lost over the last few 100 years and I'm wondering, how is teaching fermentation, and as you've witnessed that, what it means for people to reconnect to these skills?
Sandor Ellix Katz Well for 20 years now, I really have been devoted more or less full time to being a fermentation educator. And, my experience from the very beginning was that there is a hunger for this information. Because so many people possess in their living memory, images of something that a grandparent was doing every year--whether it was making sauerkraut, making wine, making vinegar, whatever, whatever it was. But then as supermarkets, convenience foods, you know, all these things became more and more available in a lot of families. These practices ended up, you know, falling by the wayside, the practices didn't get passed down to the next generation, but sometimes just like a generation or two later, people still have the memory and regret that they didn't learn. And so I mean, my life as a fermentation educator has just been full of people getting excited that they can reclaim something that they remember their grandparents doing, that sort of fell by the wayside in the interim, and that's very exciting and very gratifying.
And the things that get people interested in fermentation are quite varied. I mean, sometimes people are interested in the probiotics and improving their health or their digestion. Sometimes it's these sort of cultural ideas and people wanting to reclaim some aspect of their cultural lineage. You know, sometimes it's people who are moving back to the land and just want to sort of learn skills for turning the produce that they can grow into the foods and beverages that people like to drink. So, there's a lot of reasons why people are interested in this, but, my general experience is that many people are extremely interested in fermentation and find it relevant.
And sometimes I'll meet people who hear about what I do, and they'll make...they'll make a face sort of indicating that they hate fermented foods. And they're probably just associating fermentation with like the strongest flavored fermented food that they ever ate that was too strong for them or something like that. But almost every individual in almost every part of the world eats and drinks products of fermentation every day. Your coffee is fermented. Your bread is fermented. Your cheese is fermented. The condiments that you put on your food are either directly fermented or rely upon vinegar, which is fermented. Chocolate is fermented. Vanilla is fermented—just an incredible range of the foods that people eat and drink every day. And I'm just giving you examples, that would be pretty common in a standard American diet, but in different regions of the world, there would be different kinds of, of fermentations that people are, are eating regularly, but it is just like a prominent feature of human culture in every part of the world.
Ayana Young I had no idea chocolate was fermented. That's new to me, and makes me feel even better about the chocolate bar I ate yesterday, although it was milk chocolate, I don't know if that cancels out some of the health benefits.
Sandor Ellix Katz Well, I would also just say things don't have to be healthy to be fermented. I mean like it just an incredible range of foods and beverages people people eat and drink are fermented. And many fermented foods are extremely healthy. But just because it doesn't mean that if you switched your diet to eating only that you would be healthier. I don't think anyone who's eating only bread is healthier. I don't think anyone who's eating only cheese is healthier. I don't think anyone who's eating only sauerkraut is healthier. I don't think anyone who's drinking only beer is healthier. I think with all of these things, moderation and balance are what sort of make it make it healthy or unhealthy.
Ayana Young It's so fascinating, everything that we've covered today. It's really inspiring, because so much of its practical. And I love that, like I really love that it can be done by anybody in their home and you don't need to buy packets of yeast and you don't need to have so much experience to start. And I think there's something so beautiful about the grassroots quality of getting in touch with your food in this way. So thank you so much, Sandor, for your time and your inspiration and your knowledge that you've been cultivating over so many years.
Sandor Ellix Katz Well, it's a pleasure to be with you and to have the opportunity to speak with you about fermented foods and beverages and biodiversity.
Evan Tenenbaum Thanks for listening to For The Wild. The music you heard today was by Matthewdavid. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Julia Jackson, Jackson Kroopf, José Alejandro Rivera, Bailey Bigger, and Evan Tenenbaum.