Status Updates From Cooked: A Natural History o...

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest against the homogenization of flavors & food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of our ourselves & the places we live.

As I learned from Sandor Katz and Sister Noëlla and Chad Robertson, and all the other fermentos I met, ***mastery is never more than partial or temporary***. (“Dude, I don’t make this beer, the yeast make the beer. My job is just to feed them really well. If I do that, they’ll do the rest.”)

These [foods] are not just products- in fact are not really ‘things’. Most of what presents itself in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves & all other species on which we depend. Eating & drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways the industrial economy, with its long & illegible supply chains, would have us forget.

The economic and ecological lines that connect us to the distant others were now rely on for our sustenance have grown so long & attenuated as to render both the products and their connections to us & the world utterly opaque. You would be forgiven for thinking- indeed, are encouraged to think!- there is nothing more behind a bottle of beer than a corporation and a factory, somewhere. It is simply a “product”.