Fermentation as Metaphor – An Interview with Sandor Katz

Fascinating conversation about the fermentation process, its role in history and our current lifestyle, and as a metaphor for our investment in the future of the planet.

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 quite literally an investment in something that you’re going to be able to enjoy in the future, so there is an intrinsic hopefulness to any practice of fermentation.

[…] like any aspect of food production, requires us to cultivate a connection to the natural world and in the case of fermentation specifically to invisible forces in the natural world.

[…] so many people who are fermenting now in the West don’t have those same traditions in the same way because they’re transient. They’ve moved from those places, or the generations that held those no longer practiced them in the last generation or two and they became disconnected. 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 where they might have come from. It’s going to take on new shapes and forms but it’s still about this desire to find roots and go deeper.