The follow excerpt is from Sandor Ellix Katz ’s new Word of God , Fermentation as Metaphor(Chelsea Green Publishing , October 2020 ) , and is reprinted with permission from the publisher .
We need the bubbling transformative power of fermentation.
These are very scary and uncertain times . The specter of climate modification alone calls everything we have have sex into question : rising temperature ; melting glaciers ; rise seas and shifting currents ; more extreme weather patterns , with bigger , more serious storms , displacing growing numbers racket of people ; less predictable agriculture with resulting crop failures ; novel vulnerabilities to pests and disease ; and a cascade of effects as yet unrecognised or unimagined .
Mass extinction are already occurring , and ecological balance wheel are destabilized . Our unsatiable appetence for resource not only quicken climate change but also leads to deep and more destructive origin practices . Income inequality originate ever starker as technology and chintzy globalized Department of Labor substitute worker . Racism and sexism persist , both in systemic body structure , and spread and tap by a grow politics of resentment . Magnified sourdough culture ( Sandor Ellix Katz )
The shameful jolt of the COVID-19 pandemic on all societal , public , and economical life illustrates just how vulnerable our integral mass society is to disruption . In this grammatical case it was a computer virus that sent shock undulation that have been feel everywhere , most acutely in thickly populated city . Sometimes beau monde is disrupted by more focalise phenomena , such as wildfire , floods , twister , or earthquakes . Not to mention warfare , going on somewhere always , and in some place for protracted periods .
For all these reasons and more , humanity is dire for transmutation . Our way of life is show to be unsustainable . We call for to reimagine how we live our lives . Now more than ever , we need the burp transformative ability offermentation .
I by all odds do not wish to advise that the unproblematic human action of sour in your kitchen will save the Earth . I wrote inWild Fermentationof fermenting as “ a form of activism . ” I stand by this belief , but not because there is anything inherently political about ferment .
citizenry can be narrow in their focus , and often the reason hoi polloi ferment are specific , for model preservation of garden vegetables , or a desire to improve wellness , or the by-line of compelling flavors . magnify moldy cooked millet ( Sandor Ellix Katz )
Magnified sourdough culture (Sandor Ellix Katz)
The only affair that makes do - it - yourself ferment radical is linguistic context : our contemporary system of food mass production , which is unsustainable in so many direction . Our rife food system is polluting , resource - depleting , and wasteful , and what it produces is nutritionally diminished , causing widespread disease . Perhaps even more profoundly , it deskills and disempowers people , distance us from the rude humans and making us completely dependent on systems of mass product and distribution — which are fine as long as they function , but are vulnerable to many possible disruptions , from viral pandemic to fuel shortages or price spikes to warfare and natural disasters . Expanding local and regional food yield , and in the process transforming the economy that goes along with it , is the only real intellectual nourishment security measure .
Food and nutrient production are quite profound as we attempt to shift our relationships to the Earth and to one another . Food can be a mean value of building and strengthening community of interests . Producing food is a very honourable style to channel one ’s energy . You ’re doing something productive and creating some sustenance for yourself and other citizenry . Localizing food for thought output induce local economy more broadly , by recirculating resources rather than extracting them . Getting involved in food yield can also help us palpate empowered and more affiliated to the world around us .
We must find ways to reorganise our club , to move from being driven by resource origin toward a dedication to regeneration . I do not stand for to voice preachy , here . I ’m not exclusively living what I advocate , so I can be view as a hypocrite . I mean , I wing more than almost anyone else I know in my fervor to deal tempestuousness . And in my abode life in a rural area , I ride almost everywhere I go . I greatly look up to people who live on their ethos and all shun planes , or all fossil - fuel - driven conveyance , but in my life I have defaulted to the path of mobility , like most .
We , admit me , by all odds need to slow down our mobility and along with it our expectations of growth . What we need is con- traction : each of us leaving a much lightsome footprint , with more equitable distribution of resource . We also need to reposition from our focus on individualism to more cooperative , collaborative modeling for work together and mutual help . I have no grand plan , and in our current corporate - dominated political organisation I ’ve become doubting of grand program . But moving in this management by all odds involves getting more hoi polloi plugged into the earth and life around us , the plant and creature and fungus and even the bacteria . This is what food yield force us to do — to be more tuned into our surround . surely this is honest of fermentation .
Magnified moldy cooked millet (Sandor Ellix Katz)
