Fermentation as cultural heritage
From kimchi to sauerkraut: how the world's oldest preservation method risks disappearing.
Fermentation as cultural heritage
From kimchi to sauerkraut: how the world's oldest preservation method risks disappearing.
Fermentation is older than writing. Before humans could write, they made beer, cheese, sauerkraut and miso. Sandor Katz, who calls himself a fermentation revivalist, documented in The Art of Fermentation how virtually every culture on earth developed its own fermentation tradition. Not as luxury but as necessity: fermentation was the only way to preserve food without refrigeration.
Korean kimchi, German Sauerkraut, Japanese tsukemono, Ethiopian injera, Russian kefir, Indonesian tempeh: each is a local answer to the same problem. How do you keep food safe, how do you increase nutritional value, how do you make indigestible ingredients digestible. The solution is the same every time: let micro-organisms do the work.
Michael Pollan describes in Cooked how fermentation transforms not only food but also the community around it. Making kimchi is a collective activity in Korea, kimjang, which was placed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2013. It is a moment when families and neighborhoods come together, transfer knowledge and strengthen social bonds. The fermentation itself takes weeks. The social function is immediate.
What we are losing is not just a technique but a relationship with time. Fermentation requires patience. You set something in motion and let it do its work. In a culture optimized for speed and control, that is a radical concept. A jar of sauerkraut sits on the counter for two weeks. There is nothing to accelerate. The bacteria set the pace.
The industrial variant, pasteurized sauerkraut from a can, yoghurt with cultures added after heating, kombucha that is essentially lemonade, misses precisely what makes fermentation valuable. The living cultures are dead. Complexity has been replaced by uniformity. The product resembles the original but is not.
The good news is that home fermentation costs virtually nothing and almost nothing can go wrong. A cabbage, salt and a jar. That is all you need for sauerkraut. The knowledge fits on a single page. The skill is in the doing, and in passing it on to the next generation before this chain breaks.
Sources: Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation (Chelsea Green, 2012); Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (Penguin, 2013); UNESCO, Kimjang: Making and Sharing Kimchi in the Republic of Korea (2013).
Source: Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation (Chelsea Green, 2012); Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (Penguin, 2013)