Cultures of fermenting

Shanti Mathias (she/her)

“At the moment I’m trying to grow mould in my flat [...] unfortunately it’s white mould so it doesn’t grow as well as the black stuff we’ve got on our windowsills”, James Morgan tells me. James, a student at Otago in Ōtepoti, is an avid fermenter, which, he tells me ruefully, gives people “great roasting ammunition towards me”. This is his fourth batch of white mould, and he’s hopeful that this will be the one that works, because not all of his experiments do. “There have been a few attempts that haven’t gone as well as the others”, he explains. “You’re working with these things that have their own agenda, trying to grow them in a way that you can benefit from it too.” This is fermentation. Experimentation. Flavour. Mistakes. Reward.

Fermentation might seem like something new; certainly the commercial value of explicitly fermented products has increased drastically in the last decade. Kombucha, a kind of fermented tea, is a valuable industry—New Zealanders bought $27.4 million dollars of it in the year to June 2021. A MBIE report from 2015 calls yoghurt (fermented milk) a “growth star” of the dairy export industry, predicting exports will grow 27% by 2025. More broadly, learning home fermentation is popular too: It’s Alive with Brad, a Bon Appetit (yes, that accused-of-racism Bon Appetit) series on YouTube that teaches people how to ferment has hundreds of thousands of views on each video.

But it’s not just ‘health food’ products like kombucha, yoghurt, and kefir that are fermented. All alcohol is made by a process of fermentation; fermented beverages are worth more than $700 billion USD worldwide. Cheese is fermented. Cacao beans are fermented. Soy sauce is fermented. Tofu, yoghurt, ginger beer, kimchi, sourdough: all fermented, processed by the metabolic action of microbes. Most days, you probably eat something that was at least partially made by microbes.

The recent commercial popularity of fermented products did not come out of nowhere. Fermentation is an ancient and global phenomenon; most cultures have traditional food that is fermented. Dr Amir Sayadabdi is a lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University, with a specialisation in food cultures. He says that there is “a great deal of archaeological evidence from the Fertile Crescent, Babylon, Egypt, and Mesopotamia” proving that fermentation has been carried out for at least 8000 years. To consume a fermented product is to enter into an ancient relationship between people and microbes, carried across borders and generations.

Fermentation has particular advantages for those wanting to preserve food. It can make food last longer, make more nutrients available (as the live cultures do some of the work of digestion), and makes food taste better. Sayadabdi says that it is Western appreciation of the health benefits of fermentation that is recent. “If one is willing (or able) to look closely enough at non-English/non-Western sources [you will] find that people from different regions and different cultures were well aware of the health benefits of fermented foods well before the advent of nutrition science.”

To the commercial outlets that sell fermented products, especially products which still have living microbes in them, their nutritional benefits are one of the main parts of their appeal. As I researched this article, I browsed websites selling kombucha, kefir, yoghurt, and sourdough. Skinny white people with lustrous hair stretch in the sun as the website text explains the importance of bacteria to gut health, suggesting that fermented food is easier and better to digest. The living things in fermented products are integral to their marketing. Dr Sayadabdi sees the rise in the popularity of fermented products as linked to diet and health trends. “Products like kefir can often contain twice as many bacterial strains as yogurts, so they’re considered ‘double healthy,’ and thus trendier”, he says.

The contemporary trend of fermented products is marketed as Pākehā, even though many popular fermented products come from non-European cultures. Most companies selling kombucha do not acknowledge its Chinese origin; so too for kefir and Central Asia, sauerkraut and Germany, chocolate and Mesoamerica. The people making money from these long traditions of experimentation and expertise are largely not connected to the cultures that initially produced the food.

When considering fermentation, it’s important to remember that the air is alive, and that that life can be tamed. Wild yeast—the kind that ferments sourdough or apple cider vinegar—can be captured and tamed with water and sugar or flour, an ideal environment for the microbes to live. Other fermentation is harder to begin at home, and requires a live culture shared from others. James, for instance, was given a cutting of a friend’s kombucha SCOBY, which stands for symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast.

As living things, fermentation cultures need to be taken care of. On TradeMe kefir grains are sold in both the “lifestyle” and, hilariously, the “pets” categories—a pack will cost about $10. They are a kind of pet, a living being that needs food and a friendly environment, and will reward you with, if not cuddles, at least something good to eat. The microbes might be domesticated, trained to eat the milk or sugar that you give them, but they still have a will of their own.

“We rely on the yeast”, Mika Hervel tells me. A first year Law and Politics student (and my flatmate), Mika and his friend George Burgess started brewing their own beer when they moved to Wellington. The yeast they use to make beer is alive, and that means that they don’t know how it will react. “In winter, it has taken us three times as long [to brew]”, George says. “It’s a little bit symbiotic [...] we’re living with this yeast.” Working with other living things to prepare food makes results unpredictable.

For Hwajin Sahng, my friend Jenny’s mother*, making kimchi, traditional Korean spicy fermented cabbage, is a way of life. Kimchi making is not exact, but it is taught—Hwajin learned how to ferment with her mother, who taught her the intuition necessary for a good end result. “My learning comes from the cooking process, tasting as we go and asking my mother, who is in her eighties, lots of questions.” She still calls her mother who is in her eighties, for advice.

Because the culture of microbes has to be passed from person to person, fermenting necessitates interacting with others. Hwajin has previously taught kimchi workshops in Christchurch. She says there was “little awareness or knowledge” in the people she taught how to make kimchi. To beginners, the process of learning from taste is difficult, but it can accommodate the variety of results that the bacteria produce. “We make it by taste and feel. That’s why every household has a slightly different flavour or method.” In Korean, Hwajin says this is called “son- mat” (손맛), which literally translates to “taste of the hand”.

Hwajin attributes the increasing popularity of kimchi to health food trends and the hallyu (or Korean wave), where Korean pop culture has become known to devoted global fans. This has changed through her lifetime. “When we first moved to NZ it was hard to find ingredients to make kimchi [...] but now you can buy them ready-made.”

When microbes find a good home, they thrive. They grow and replicate, making more of themselves each time. This process of replication is echoed at a different scale by human enthusiasm about fermentation, the tendency of a culture to spread between friends and family. Mika, as a second generation German immigrant, has a great deal of beer appreciation in his family history, but he attributes his enjoyment of brewing to growing up in Nelson, where home and commercial brewing have become increasingly common.

Mika and George were taught to brew by Bailey, their youth leader at church, who also gave them the equipment to get started. The learning is mutual; Mika and George still call Bailey when they’re brewing. “‘We tell him what we’re doing, he tells us what he’s doing”, George says; the knowledge and expertise spreads like bubbles on top of a barrel.

Fermentation takes time, days or weeks or months, and that time is social. Saydabdi remembers seeing this as he grew up. “Every winter my grandmother would gather her friends in her house which had this huge yard, and in this yard they would make different sorts of pickles together... During these collective preparations, bonds were strengthened, stories were told, knowledge was transferred, struggles were shared and solutions and help were offered.”

Kimchi making was also social for Hwajin. “Kimchi- making (“kimjang”) in autumn is a family event. Everyone arrives with their contribution of ingredients, and spends the day making a huge batch of kimchi to last through the winter. It usually takes two days and by the end, everyone takes a share of the kimchi home.”

For George and Mika, fermenting beer together has become part of their friendship. “It’s a great thing to do together, it has a great end product, and we just drink beer while we make it, so it’s a never ending cycle”, George tells me. Once they’ve bottled the beer, it leads to more friendships: homebrew is shared with others, leading to more conversations, and feedback for further experimentation.

As fermentation has become more popular, stereotypes of the home fermenter have developed. The “lockdown sourdough” person, caring for yeast in a jar in a dearth of friends. The “beer bro”, who will talk your ear off about hoppiness and maltiness, as if you can taste anything but beer. The “fermented vegetables aunt”, known for terrorising airport security with her mystery pressurised jars (that last one might just be unique to me). “I guess there’s a stereotype of these mad people running around brewing beer and making sourdough and stuff”, James says.

Over the COVID-19 lockdowns last year, many people started making and talking about sourdough bread. James was one of them. So was I. “You get attached to [the sourdough starter], you see it growing, it makes such nice bread, you have to part ways with it, and it’s like... oh no”, says James, whose starter died due to neglect.

What about fermentation makes it so easy to talk about? Hwajin compares it to baking: the measures are not exact, and the results in flavour can vary (deliciously). In the uncertainty of results, conversations with other people guide fermenting. James loves to talk to people about fermenting, but finds that “people switch off a bit”. His flatmates have got used to the jars in cupboards and on benches, but it’s been a “negotiation” for fridge space, given that his flatmates will only eat fermented products if he hides it in their food.

To the uninitiated, the obsessive quality of fermenting is difficult to grasp, but once it’s part of your life, it’s hard to escape. Since a friend gave me a sourdough starter two years ago, I’ve been a person who regularly ferments yoghurt, sourdough, and kefir; worse, I have a list of “future fermentation projects” on my phone, and find myself being unironically interested in a friend’s dad’s sauerkraut evangelism.

Everything we ever eat depends on the bodies of other living beings, but that life can easily be concealed by industrial processes: plastic packets, Instagram marketing, the sheen of a SALE in a world that has become nothing by fluorescent-lit aisles. Perhaps fermenters are annoying and obsessive because their craft reminds them that food can still be alive.

*This interview was conducted in Korean and translated by Hwajin’s daughters