Sublime

reclaim a relationship, not only with food production, but with traditions and communities and ultimately with the living world through the simple act of fermentation.

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.

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.

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

the mystical dimension of fermentation: the beauty of the unseen and working with mystery, which you describe as also what appeals to people; the way they tap into that broader unknown with a sense of what’s possible and out there.

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.

I think that many of our biggest problems relate to the ways in which we have become so distanced from our environment.

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