#sandorkatz

Sandor Ellix Katz, the fermentation revivalist author and educator was kind enough to talk with me about my own fermentation projects, the perception of fermentation, and the in-and-outs that make small scale food production a joy and a terror. Author of several books including ‘The Art of Fermentation’ and ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved’, Katz is in a unique position of being one of the voices of the fermentation and sustainability movements, even if he may not like that title.  It was my privilege to join him at an ‘Art of Fermentation’ sauerkraut making workshop, where attendees gleaned from his wisdom, roughly chopped vegetables, and got their hands soaked with beet colored cabbage water before taking home their own pints of ‘SandorKraut’.

I watched the piece that the New York Times did on you, and you said that you made your very first batch of Sauerkraut in the community you moved to, but you didn’t say how or why you started.

Well, I mean it was my first year of gardening and you know,  I was such a naive city kid that it never occurred to me that in a garden all of the cabbage would be ready at the same time. So the first year I was gardening, you know, there it was- It’s not like it was a huge amount of cabbage but it was like 20 cabbage plants that were all ready at once and it was like “Oh, I better learn how to make sauerkraut”.

I did that when I was a farmer. I ended up with a ton of napa cabbage and so I made kimchi. I started the same way.

So yeah, it was just the practical necessity of like “Okay, what to do with all of this produce that’s coming out at the same time?”.

Was the whole community that you were living with kind of like minded?  Was self-sufficiency and preservation of foods important?

I mean, it was for some people. You know, our community sort of notoriously lacks a central focus.  It’s not like everyone’s prioritizing that. I certainly wasn’t alone in that,  I had lots of support and people certainly enjoyed eating it.

Do you still live there?

I live down the road, I’m sort of peripherally there.

At one point in the interview, you said that fermentation is close to death, which I really appreciated.

It’s not so much that I think that fermentation is close to death, I think that when you talk about life and death and the cycle of life and death and that everything that dies becomes life again, fermentation is just a really important connecting piece of that cycle. You know, fermentation is what decomposes dead plant and animal matter back into the elements that nourish the soil and nourish the plants.

What do you think about it being close to life? What about the food as medicine frame of mind that people seem to be adopting about fermentation?

Absolutely. I think that in the last few years in particular there has just been a huge amount of new insight into just how important bacteria are in our bodies and all of the different ways that bacteria help our bodies sort of regulate different systems. I would say we’re still not clear on the precise mechanisms by which the bacteria in the food we eat interact with the bacteria that are already present in our intestines, but it’s clear that it’s a very very complex interaction that has ramifications for our health. In general, this sort of idea of rebuilding biodiversity in our guts has the potential to help us not only in terms of digestion and nutrient assimilation but in terms of immune function, mental health, and realms of parts of our health that people have not really thought about before.

There’s another school of people that feels that these preserved foods are not safe, so what do you think about the FDA regulations regarding food- especially raw food, raw cheeses, home canning?

The FDA isn’t saying  that fermented food isn’t safe, are they?

They word a lot of their literature on fermentation and canning in a way where it incites a bit of fear. If you’re canning, you have to make sure it’s at this temperature- or you’ll get botulism. If you’re fermenting, the fear of toxic mold is there. These little bits of fear have taken hold of people- especially among communities of people online who ferment or can together and share advice.

In canning, that’s really important advice. Botulism is a real thing and the reason we all know the word botulism is because of the word ‘canning’. It could happen. It’s really important with canning to understand the parameters for safety.  Vegetable fermentation doesn’t have baggage like that.  According to the USDA, there’s never been one documented case of food poisoning or illness from fermented vegetables.  There is no danger. In terms of how food production businesses are regulated, a lot of times there are these ‘cottage food laws’ where exceptions are made for businesses under a certain scale. Usually five thousand dollars is the cutoff. So people doing very small, marginal home businesses, can under certain circumstances produce things legally in their home kitchens.  Then there’s this division between potentially hazardous and non-potentially hazardous, and what makes me crazy is that fermentation is considered in the potentially hazardous.  Raw cheese is a whole different can of worms. The USDA does allow 60 day raw cheeses which is really an acknowledgement that no matter what you think is in the milk- that fermentation basically destroys pathogenic bacteria. Acidification is a strategy for safety because the pathogens can’t exist in those acidic foods. Sure, at the level of the national bureaucracy there is a huge problem where the people who are writing these regulations have never had their fingers in the food.

What about the influence of food companies and lobbying companies on the governmental regulation of food?

Well, I don’t think that’s a conspiracy. I mean, yes, of course, who is the national government responding to? IS it responding to small farmers? No. Is it responding to huge multinational corporations? Yes.  I’ll say there has been a huge surge in fermentation business. Just because they aren’t letting people do it in their home kitchens doesn’t mean people aren’t doing it in commercial kitchens.  I can’t speak for every state in this country, but almost every state there are small, less than ten year old vegetable fermentation businesses, explosions in the number of microbreweries, micro malteries- the first in the country which was less than five miles from here. So there is this explosion in fermentation, local and regional enterprises. So it’s not like there’s a conspiracy that prevents this stuff from happening. Sure, small-scale food productions over-regulate because most of our food production is large scale, so the regulations are mostly written to regulate the large scale actors which is like 90-something percent of where the food people are eating is coming through. There’s less recognition of the needs of micro-scale producers, but I don’t think that’s a huge issue for the national government. I don’t think it’s a huge issue for the multi-national food corporations either.

Also this fear of bacteria- it’s just the indoctrination. Since bacteria were discovered, they were associated with disease. In popular culture, in medicine, in science…really until the turn of the new millennium and obviously still in so many residual ways. But bacteria was associated almost exclusively with disease and death. They were always used in food, but as microbiology became more influential, bacteria was looked at with fear. I think that even with the new findings about how bacteria are to every biological process in the world, bureaucracy as well as the popular imagination is slow to change.