Fermentation as Metaphor

in those rural and village settings, the pace of life was slower, and you come to urban settings and the pace of life increases and obviously our modern life is an extreme example of that run rampant, but it seems like one of the things that makes fermentation so attractive to folks, and you kind of intimated this earlier, is that it’s so much slow... See more

I think that in the fermentation revival right now, there’s just an incredible amount of innovation and creativity being applied so it’s not just reviving traditions; it’s also applying them in creative and novel ways to create some new things.

For me one of the most exciting things that’s happening right now is a real cross-pollination of these traditions. And so you might have people in one part of the world learning about traditions from another part of the world and then applying it to a completely different set of ingredients.

It seems like there’s a reclaiming of ancestral roots that is also part of this fervor in fermentation. But it also seems like those ancestral roots that they’re trying to reconnect to are not going to take shape in the same way. They’re not going to appear like they did for their grandparents or their great-grandparents or back in the old country ... See more

Fermentation helps to address this need for a connection to the living world.

Fermentation is ultimately a very hopeful practice because it does not yield immediate gratification. There’s always delayed gratification in fermentation, and so in a quite literal way it’s an investment in the future. If you are despondent and despairing and don’t know if there’s a future, why would you invest your energy into fermenting? It is q... See more

We need bubbliness. We need excitement. We need new ideas. And it’s not that I have any idea what the outcome needs to be. I just know that we can’t keep on doing what we’ve been doing. That we need to shift. We need to adapt because our circumstances are adapting. This is another way in which the metaphor of fermentation really is powerful because... See more

SKIn both literal fermentation and metaphorical fermentation the fermentation is breaking down previous forms into new forms. We don’t know yet what the outcome of this pandemic is going to be on us. I mean, as I was finishing my manuscript, it was clear that society was making this sort of abrupt shift in a way that I don’t know that I had ever se... See more

the greatest promise of metaphorical fermentation is that it generates new forms, which seems very relevant right now in the midst of everything that’s happening during the pandemic when so much has been broken open to reveal the chasms in our society.