Sandor Katz: Fermentation as a catalyst for social transformation (Ep445)
“Wherever in the world our ancestors come from, fermented foods that are rich in bacteria are part of our cultural legacy.”
What does it mean to recognize that so much of the world has become “anti-microbial”? Why is it that some bacteria make us sick while others are vital to our wellbeing? And how can we understand social transformation as a form of fermentation?
In this episode, we are joined by fermentation revivalist Sandor Katz, who guides us through the foundations of what fermentation is.
Sink into this discussion as we explore the ways that wild fermentation invites us to deepen our relationship to place and our local environments.
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About our guest:
Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. He is the author of five books: Wild Fermentation; The Art of Fermentation; The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved; Fermentation as Metaphor; and his latest, Fermentation Journeys. Sandor's books, along with the hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world, have helped to catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, the New York Times calls him “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.” Sandor is the recipient of a James Beard award and other honors. For more information, check out his website www.wildfermentation.com.
Artistic credits:
Song feature by Wondrousound
Episode artwork by isadora machado.
Dive deeper:
Check out these five books by Sandor Katz: Wild Fermentation, The Art of Fermentation, Fermentation Journeys, Fermentation as Metaphor, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements.
Learn more about microbiologist, Louis Pasteur
Find out more about the organization, Truelove Seeds
Cumin, Camels, and Caravans, a book by Gary Paul Nabhan
Expand your lenses:
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interview transcript
Note: Our transcripts are minimally edited for brevity and clarity as references only and do not have word-for-word accuracy. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored.
Kamea Chayne: I would love to begin by welcoming you to share a little bit about your background as it relates to how you first became interested in fermentation. So how did this curiosity and devotion start for you?
Sandor Katz: I would say it started when I was a kid. I loved pickles, and my grandparents, who I grew up with, were immigrants from what is now Belarus . The pickles we were eating in New York City, along with millions of people from the Eastern European Jewish diaspora, were sour, fermented cucumbers. I didn't know they were fermented. I wasn't thinking about them. But I loved the flavor of them, which I now can recognize as the flavor of lactic acid. So as a kid, I just had a predisposition for certain flavors of fermentation.
Then when I was in my early 20s, I spent a couple of years following a macrobiotic diet. Macrobiotics place some emphasis on the digestive benefit of pickles and other kinds of live ferments. So I started noticing that these pickles that I'd been eating my entire life, along with sauerkraut and kimchi, would make the salivary glands under my tongue squirt out saliva. I really began to associate these foods in a very tangible way with getting my digestive juices flowing. And in accordance with the macrobiotics idea, I was trying to eat some pickles or fermented vegetables with every meal as a digestive stimulant. I also began to read that there were some immune-stimulating benefits of these kinds of live fermented foods.
But I still had no real motivation to make them myself, until 1992 when I moved from New York City to rural Tennessee and started gardening. And the first season that I was gardening, I was so naive coming from a big city that it never occurred to me that in the garden all the cabbage and radishes are ready at about the same time. So the first season when I faced this reality, I had this little epiphany. I love sauerkraut and that has something to do with fermenting cabbage. How do you make it? I learned how to make sauerkraut from the Joy of Cooking. But that first batch I made was so delicious, so deceptively simple to make, and so satisfying, that I just started playing around.
What happens if I add some carrots and some turnips? How do you make yogurt? How do you make wine from fruit? I just started experimenting with all different kinds of fermentations and went down the rabbit hole. I started getting obsessed with all things fermented.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much for sharing this introduction. To take us through the basics first, I know a lot of people might know that fermented foods, like you said, include things like sauerkraut, kimchi, and so forth. But what exactly is fermentation? And what are some historical contexts around this way of processing food, and the purpose and the intentions around it, that you'd like to set the stage with?
Sandor Katz: Almost every individual in pretty much every part of the world eats and drinks products of fermentation, every day. All alcoholic beverages are products of fermentation. Bread is fermented, cheese is fermented, and cured meats are fermented. The ancient condiments of the world are directly fermented. Most of our contemporary condiments rely upon vinegar, which is a product of fermentation, to stabilize them. Coffee is fermented, chocolate and vanilla are fermented, and certain styles of tea are fermented. The list goes on and on. They include our most basic staples and our most beloved luxuries and treats.
My thinking about why fermentation is practiced everywhere is the simple reality that microbiology has enabled us to recognize that all of the plants and all of the animal products that make up our food are populated by microorganisms, so there's a certain inevitability to the microbial transformation of our food. In my imagination of the distant past, our ancestors didn't specifically know of the microorganisms they couldn't see, but they could see food decomposing and rotting. Over time they observed that under certain conditions food could be preserved for long periods safely, that foods could be turned into alcohol, and that foods could be made more digestible or less toxic by manipulating environmental conditions.
And really what the practice of fermentation amounts to, is manipulating environmental conditions in small ways like getting vegetables submerged under liquid to protect them from the flow of oxygen, getting foods in certain temperature ranges to encourage the growth of certain organisms and simultaneously discouraging the growth of others. So this is why I think fermentation is practiced everywhere, because people learned lessons of under what conditions the food is improved in some way versus the conditions in which food just decomposes or rots.
Fermentation has been important as a way for people everywhere to make effective use of food resources.
As I said, to produce alcohol, to preserve food from seasons of relative abundance, to get people through seasons of relative scarcity, to make foods more digestible and nutrients in foods more accessible, and in certain plant-based foods to remove some toxins.
And of course, fermentation has many applications beyond food and beverage. Every compost pile is an example of fermentation. So fermentation has been an important part of how people have maintained, built, and restored fertility and soil. Many fiber arts, dyeing, and even certain kinds of building with natural materials include fermentation. And of course, in our modern world with biofuels, they are all about fermentation. So many different applications of fermentation are very practical in people's day-to-day lives.
Kamea Chayne: It sounds like it's much more widespread than a lot of us realize because it's so integrated in a lot of the ways that the world works in general. And I think that to understand the role of fermentation, we also need to remember the role of microbial life in our own lives.
So with this, what does it mean to see our bodies as these superstructures of microorganisms that are also ecosystems in and of themselves? And how is it that some microbial developments from ingested fermented foods are beneficial for our ecosystems, while other ones might be toxic or disruptive to our bodies and even make us sick? How does that all kind of play out?
Sandor Katz: In general, to address the last question first, fermentation is a strategy for safety. There can exist, in certain kinds of foods, pathogenic bacteria that can make us sick. But in every case, when you bring an intentionality of fermentation to the food, it becomes safer than the food that you begin with. Fermentation is a strategy for safety. But I would say that the fact that microorganisms are present in all of the foods that we eat, and the fact that each of us is host to more than a trillion microorganisms, both of these facts speak to the reality of biodiversity.
The emerging consensus among evolutionary biologists is that all life is descended from simple, single-cellular, prokaryotic organisms like bacteria.
Prokaryotic is just a word that scientists use to describe organisms that don't have a nucleus, where the genetic information is free-floating in the cell. In general, the thinking is that it is the symbiosis among prokaryotic organisms that gives rise to eukaryotic cells, the cells on which all multicellular life forms are built. Humans, plants, and fungi evolved from bacteria and other prokaryotic cells. The trillion-plus organisms that are part of us provide us with many of our functionalities. The same is true of a carrot, a wheat plant, a soybean plant, or a cabbage. All plants, animals, fungus, carry bacterial symbionts with them that provide us with a certain amount of functionality.
On the one hand, this is why fermentation works, because all the plants and animal products that make up our food are already populated by microorganisms. It's also part of why these foods can be so profoundly beneficial to us because it's a way of basically restoring and increasing biodiversity in the gut by ingesting bacteria-rich foods—as well as ingesting various byproducts of the fermentation processes, metabolic byproducts that can sometimes feed the organisms that are within us.
But I think that we mostly are encouraged to think of ourselves as isolated individuals. The reality is that in addition to being individuals with a brain of our own and thoughts of our own, we're also these incredible symbiotic creatures that rely upon trillions of bacteria that are part of us for our ability to effectively digest food and extract nutrients from the food we eat. What we call our immune systems are largely the work of bacteria that reside within us and upon us.
And we're learning that various aspects of our brain chemistry and chemical systems in other parts of our bodies are regulated in ways that we don't fully understand by bacteria in our intestines. Bacteria have to do with every aspect of our functioning and well-being. Fermented foods are a source of probiotic bacteria which we can just understand as increased biodiversity.
Kamea Chayne: I don't think it's a stretch to say that, in a way, we are more-than-human. And as you said, we are descendants of microbial life. Our bodies consist of microbial life that's constantly engaging with and interacting with the microbial life in our so-called environments. And at the same time, you talk about how we've been taught to fear bacteria in a world that is very antimicrobial in a lot of senses.
What comes to mind immediately for me is the overuse of things like antibiotics and even things like the obsessive use of non-discriminatory antibacterial hand sanitizers, which have been normalized as a practice. And I think there's still so much we don't know, but I do think about how when we introduce certain species into an ecosystem, those species can cause disruptions to the existing community dynamics and wreak havoc on existing balances.
And so I wonder whether similar things might happen at a microbial level and how that might relate to things like allergies, skin sensitivities, gut and digestive challenges, and so on. There are a lot of questions that we likely don't have answers to just yet, but I guess to start with a bigger picture here, how would you elaborate on our world as antimicrobial and how might that come to impact our bodily ecosystems?
Sandor Katz: The early discovery of microorganisms, interestingly, was in the context of fermentation. Louis Pasteur did his original investigations at the behest of an alcohol manufacturer, trying to figure out how to have more consistent results in the context of the Industrial Revolution as they were scaling up production. And so the variable results that wine-making and beer-making had always had, became more and more costly as they were scaling it up. So Louis Pasteur is credited with first identifying fermentation as a biological life process, identifying various organisms involved with fermentation, such as yeast, and some different bacteria.
But as soon as he started tuning into bacteria, his next discoveries were vectors of disease. And so in the popular imagination, bacteria became associated with disease, danger, and death. Ever since that time, we've been living in the midst of what I would describe as the war on bacteria and this idea that many of us were raised with, that bacteria are scary, we need to avoid bacteria. And when we do have the misfortune of encountering bacteria, we need to try to destroy them by any means necessary.
I think there's no denying that there exist bacteria that can be pathogenic. But I think the error in this simplistic thinking is the fact that our greatest protection from the very relatively small range of bacteria that can be problems for us, is a thriving biodiverse population of bacteria on our bodies, on all the surfaces, in our intestines, as well as in our food. So bacteria are our greatest protection from the relatively limited range of bacteria that can make us sick.
One of the reasons why fermentation is so safe is that many of the major byproducts of fermentation—lactic acid, acetic acid, and alcohol—most of the pathogenic bacteria just cannot survive in an environment that's high in any of those byproducts. This is the major reason why fermentation is so safe and protective of food. We are living amid the war on bacteria.
But my primary focus is not on healing. I don't like to advise people to take or not to take antibiotics. I certainly, in my life, have taken antibiotics, and sometimes they're important and they can be a miracle. But as you say, they are wildly overprescribed and there's a huge crisis looming in pathogenic bacteria which are resistant to the current arsenal of antibiotic drugs. And this is a very compelling reason to limit the use of these drugs to when they're necessary.
I think there's no denying that bacteria are important to our well-being. Each of us is host to more than a trillion bacteria. If we were to wipe out all of those bacteria, we couldn't possibly survive. We need bacteria, we need to find balance with bacteria. And bacteria-rich foods are everywhere.
Wherever in the world our ancestors come from, fermented foods that are rich in bacteria are part of our cultural legacy.
In every part of the world, this is just part of how people make effective use of available food resources. And it's not even like people would call it fermentation. There have been all kinds of conceptions about this. Major world religions and Indigenous cultures alike saw divinity or life-force in fermented foods. Fermented foods in many different cultural contexts have been attributed with various health benefits and powers. So this is not an isolated phenomenon. It's something that occurs everywhere.
I would say since about 2011, I've been seeing, every year, people who are writing about food trends, naming fermentation as a hot new trend in food. While there's no denying that there's increased awareness of fermentation and interest in fermentation, the fact is that products of fermentation have just been so integral to the culinary landscape everywhere and for longer than recorded history. So all of our great, great, great grandparents were eating plentiful fermented foods, just as our grandparents were, just as we are, and just as our grandchildren will.
Kamea Chayne: I think when we remember our bodies as ecosystems, it's easy to understand how having a biodiverse microbial community as a part of our bodies is akin to a farm ecosystem that is also very biodiverse, and therefore more resilient against things like pest issues and things like that. And so things like the overuse of antibiotics can also be parallel to indiscriminately using pesticides and herbicides. Not to say that there's never a need for those things, but just to think about them in similar ways.
I think the world being antimicrobial also translates in a sense to the world being anti-diversity. And on this, you talk about how mass production and mass marketing demand uniformity which then leads to homogenization and works against diversity. I think what's interesting, is looking at how we've traded, in many senses, real diversity for an illusion of diversity. Mass production has driven agro-biodiversity loss and the loss in diversity of the species that we engage with for food, fuel, fiber, and medicines.
But when we go to a lot of big box supermarkets, the same types of corn-base cereal or potato chips might be packaged in 10 to 20 different ways, maybe with slight variations in flavor, look, and feel of the packaging. What more would you like to share in regards to how our broader economic incentives and systems are also antimicrobial, and show that things happening at the macro level also affect the micro world?
Sandor Katz: I am a big proponent of eating locally as much as possible. I'm certainly not dogmatic about it. Here I am talking to you, sipping on a cup of coffee. But I think that it makes sense for people in any region of the world to be primarily eating things that grow in your area. And even more specifically, supporting local food production.
I think that the COVID-19 epidemic illustrated beautifully how fragile all of the global systems for distributing food really can be. Whether it's a pandemic, whether it's war or political violence, whether it's climate disasters, there are just so many things that can interrupt this big global system.
The only real food security we have is to encourage increased food production at a local and regional level.
And that's not to say that you can't enjoy a pineapple once in a while or some other tropical treat if you live in a temperate environment, but to try to focus your eating on things that grow in your area and everything else follows from that. In the history of fermentation, nobody is fermenting rare, precious food ingredients. What people are fermenting are things that are grown in great abundance. And those are the things that it makes sense to ferment.
In some places that might be cabbages or daikon, soybeans, black-eyed peas, or African locust beans. But in different regions of the world, people ferment different things because they have different kinds of foods in abundance. And I think it makes sense for us to eat following the same kinds of concepts.
What you can ferment and how you can ferment it also is a function of climate. If you live in a tropical place that gets very hot every day you're not going to be able to preserve your sauerkraut for eight months the same way as someone who lives in a cold place that has a short growing season and then eight months of cold where there's no fresh vegetables. It’s easier to preserve food for long periods in a colder place.
And that's good because there's no real necessity for long-term preservation in a hot place where fresh food is growing all the time. But then in the tropics, you might have certain things like cassava. Cassava has cyanide in it, and typically, it's fermented before people eat it. So this really important food that's the primary source of calories for about a billion people on the earth right now requires fermentation to make it safe to eat.
There are different applications of fermentation, and different practical benefits that people get from it, but what you can ferment and how you can ferment it is really gonna be different in different places depending on the climate.
Kamea Chayne: I want to stay on this local piece a little more. What I find powerful is your reminder to see wild fermentation as the opposite of homogenization and uniformity. I participated in an event earlier this year to make poi—a fermented taro or kalo food that is a really important living cultural food for Kānaka Maoli. And I was talking to a kalo farmer and a mentor at the event and I was asking him, “So we're pounding cooked kalo, which means that the kalo was sterilized through cooking. So the probiotics of the result of poi must then come from our hands because we're working the kalo with our bare hands?”
He affirmed that and also said it also comes from the pounding stone material and the environment and so on. He made a remark that stuck with me, which is that when we eat locally fermented foods, that is different and possibly has more beneficial impacts on our bodies compared to, for example, buying and eating bottled yogurt, which is fermented and imported from someplace that is different and from really far away. Because the fermented foods that we're working with locally become living food that also embodies our local ecosystems, and supports our bodies to be in deeper relation with our local more-than-human environments.
This reminded me of how people say similar things about consuming honey harvested by local bees, because that honey was produced in conversation with local pollinating plants. At first, I wondered whether there might be scientific research in this area. And maybe there might be, but then I also recognize that this type of finding is unlikely to come from institutional research because of funding biases, and also because Western science tends to look to things like generalizability and replicability as reliable. And it requires controls and standardization to deduce findings.
I also think about how mushrooms can't be replicated because they are unique syntheses of their specific context. So it feels like a similar thing with fermentation going on, being relational and place-specific. I know I shared a lot here, but I'd be curious to hear what you think about the idea of fermentation in place, bringing nuance to the broad term of “probiotics”, because there are context and relationships at play here. And also this reality that some of these curiosities that we have may never be able to be answered by scientific research, at least as it currently functions.
Sandor Katz: Let me start by addressing the question of wild fermentation. So my first book about fermentation was called Wild Fermentation, but it's not a phrase that I made up and it's a phrase that's found throughout the literature. What wild fermentation describes is fermentation based on the organisms that are on the food that you are fermenting. So for instance, in fermenting vegetables, although there do exist people who will try to sell you a little white powder of lactic acid bacterial starter, you don't need it because all plants growing out of soil on planet Earth are believed to be host to lactic acid bacteria. So you're always gonna have some kind of lactic acid bacteria on the plants.
But the broader community of which particular strains of lactic bacteria and organisms that you're gonna find on the plants is gonna be different everywhere. And of course, where are the organisms on the plants coming from? They're coming from the soil. So it's sort of the ultimate in terms of local food and local terroir. It is the local communities of organisms that are found in your food and that are driving the fermentation. If you made a bunch of sauerkraut from vegetables that you grew outside of your house and your friend who lives down the street a couple of hundred feet away has a garden and grew some things and fermented them, you're going to find different microbial communities, even just down the street. So it's extremely localized.
In terms of science, it's only since the new millennium that science has had any tools for looking at communities of organisms. Up until then, our knowledge about microorganisms was always about singular organisms that could be cultivated in isolation. But it's only in the age of genetic analysis that we could look at more complex communities of organisms. I've met some investigators looking at fermentation, going to different farms, doing soil testing and genetic analysis of the microbes in the soil, and then taking leaves of vegetables that were grown on the farms and doing analysis of that. And then doing sauerkraut at different stages of its development and seeing how much correlation there is between soil bacteria, leaf bacteria, and what bacteria are found in the organism.
So I know that there are certainly some investigators who are interested in these more, let's call them, micro-textured realities of biodiversity. But it's a hard thing because there's just so much difference. There are certain predictable similarities, such as there are lactic acid bacteria present in all plants. But in the particulars, there's just an incredible amount of variation. And of course, the majority of bacteria have not been characterized.
Many microbiologists think that it's inappropriate for us to use our concept of species with bacteria because bacteria are inherently shape-shifters and not stable for the course of a lifetime. Two bacteria can dock together and exchange genetic information. Bacteria can shed genetic information that's no longer relevant to its functionality. And if it can find genetic material in the environment, it has ways of incorporating that. So bacteria are not necessarily stable. We're really at the beginning of our learning curve with bacteria, and there's more that we don't know than what we do know.
When you’re fermenting local vegetables, you are literally eating your environment and making your environment part of you.
And I think that can be very profound.
Kamea Chayne: I appreciate that this is raising a lot more questions than we might have answers to right now. And I appreciate how provocative it is to think with the microbial community because of all the things that they put into question about how we understand and relate to the more-than-human world.
To go back to the process of fermentation, it's about, at the core, manipulating the environment of what we're trying to ferment so that it becomes more favorable to certain types of microbial community development while discouraging other forms. The key thread I want to bring out here is that manipulation and change aren't by definition bad, because once we understand what a particular community needs, we can then help to create conditions that best support that community to proliferate.
So with this in mind, I want to ask what we can learn from fermentation as we look at how we manipulate and engage our bodies and our broader ecosystems so they ferment towards health and balance, and biodiversity and climate stability. What lessons can we scale up from fermenting foods to fermenting our bodies and fermenting our planetary bodies as well?
Sandor Katz: I would love to just give your listeners a one-minute sauerkraut-making lesson because I just think that is the most accessible, straightforward thing that anybody can ferment at home. As I said, the bacteria that you need are present in all vegetables. Generally, it's easier if you select firm vegetables. Carrots, radishes, and turnips are all great, but you can certainly experiment with any kind of vegetable. There's no vegetable that I would say cannot be fermented. I've just given you a list of some of the more common ones.
For a fermentation vessel, you can just use a jar. Any kind of jar—it could be a mayonnaise jar, it doesn't have to be a canning jar. It's easiest if you have a wide-mouth canning jar that you can mostly fit your hand inside, but not necessary. A quart or liter-size jar will take about two pounds or a kilogram of vegetables.
Chop up those vegetables, just create surface area. It doesn't matter if they're shredded consistently, they don't have to be super fine. Shred them however you like and then salt them. There's no magic amount of salt. Some directions will say two percent salt. You don't have to weigh your salt, just lightly salt it, mix it, and taste it. It's always easier to add more salt if you haven't added enough than to remove salt if you've added too much.
I like to salt slowly as I'm shredding the vegetables and then mix it around and just adjust the salt to taste. Add other seasonings if you like. Chili peppers, garlic, caraway seeds, dill, anything. You can be wildly experimental. I've had vanilla sauerkraut, beautiful curry krauts. Use whatever kinds of seasonings you like, or keep it simple and don't use any. And what the salt does with the vegetables is it starts drawing water out. And this is really what I mean more than anything when I say we're manipulating the environment.
We're trying to get the vegetables submerged, and we get a more concentrated flavor if we don't add water to dilute the flavor. So we're just trying to draw some of the juice out of the vegetables, which the salt does, and then you can compound that by a few moments of massaging the vegetables, squeezing them. And that breaks down cell walls and releases juice.
After a few minutes, the veggies you're squeezing are juicy, and then you just pack them into your jar. Pack them tightly so that as you press down, water is forced up and the vegetables are submerged under their juices. And then you just wait. A little pressure will build up in the jar. So especially in the first few days, it's great to release the pressure. And then you can just leave them in the jar.
The million-dollar question is, how long do you ferment them for? There's no objective answer to that. The lactic acid accumulates over time. So if you like a milder flavor, that suggests a shorter fermentation. If you like a stronger flavor, you can leave it for a longer period. If you live somewhere that's very hot, the metabolism of these organisms goes faster in a warmer environment. If your kitchen is cool, it'll go more slowly.
Taste it periodically, and press it back down. If one day you taste it and you think, wow, this is strong. I don't want this to get any stronger. Well, you have a fermentation-slowing device in your kitchen, probably if you're listening to this, and that's your refrigerator. Just move it into the refrigerator. I like to leave people with something practical.
But as you're saying, manipulating the environment could be a terrible thing, but it's something we do all the time. If we're closing the doors to keep the heat in the house, to keep us warm. If we're opening the windows to let the breeze through to cool off, we're manipulating our environment. That's just something that we do.
But what fermentation is, is transformation. We're taking what's there and then we're transforming it into other forms.
Fermentation is a powerful metaphor for thinking about our human situation and the adaption we’ll need to make to a changing climate.
Thinking of ourselves as being actors in transformative processes is important because we are part of the transformations. All kinds of things ferment, not only food. Ideas ferment, emotions ferment, and social movements are born out of fermentation and are manifestations of fermentation. So, fermentation takes many different forms.
Kamea Chayne: I really love it when you invite us to see social change also as fermentation. Especially during a time when so many people feel like the socio-political economic conditions of today that we've been immersed in aren't conducive to our fermentation and our collective thriving. How would you invite people to see ourselves as starter cultures for the other types of transformations that we might yearn for?
Sandor Katz: When we have ideas about how to live better, how to live in more harmonious ways, how to live in more sustainable ways, when we talk about those ideas to people, or when we put them into action at the scale that's within our reach and then invite other people to see them and be inspired by them, I think that that's all part of the fermentation of social movements.
I also don't want to discount the importance of food. Food is something that we all need to survive and thrive. And if we're lucky, we have choices to make about what kind of food we eat. Are we going to use our power as consumers to support some of the biggest, most concentrated businesses and industries in the world, or are we gonna use our power to build different systems and support more decentralized systems of production? Can we break out of the infantilized role of consumer and become some kind of producer? I'm not talking about total self-sufficiency, but I'm just saying it’s about making something. In my life, that's sauerkraut.
Just the other day, I had a hundred-liter vessel and I filled it up with shredded daikon radishes. And so starting about a month from now and through next June, I'll just be like Santa Claus with jars of radish kraut. I think that the more we can produce something that we can share in an informal reciprocity economy, or a barter economy, or sell to people, all those things are viable ways of sharing what we're producing.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. We're starting to wind down our main conversation and you mentioned an invitation to make sauerkraut and experiment with that. So I have one question on that. And then I also welcome you to share any other calls of action or deeper inquiries that you have for our listeners.
In terms of making sauerkraut for people who haven't done this before, what are the chances that we might be doing it incorrectly to the point where we have to worry about whether the result is safe or not? Or is this process in and of itself about making it safe, and therefore the chances of it not turning out the way that we intend is quite slim?
Sandor Katz: There's no case history of food poisoning or illness from fermented vegetables. It's about as safe as food gets. Certainly, statistically speaking, it's much safer than raw vegetables. And I hope nobody is scared away from eating raw vegetables just because every year or two we're reading about outbreaks related to onions, lettuce or some other raw vegetables. But once you ferment it and the lactic acid bacteria get going, even if there were cells of salmonella, E. Coli, or other pathogenic organisms on the food, they will perish because of the acidity.
This is a strategy for safety, which isn't to say nothing can go wrong. We're trying to get the vegetable submerged, but there's generally a surface, and the surface where it comes into contact with aerobic life forms, yeasts, and potentially molds, those can grow. And sometimes people are put off by that. The kind of yeast, which is called “kahm yeast”, which commonly grows on the surface of these things is harmless. Every time, in 35 years of doing this, when I have seen any kind of surface mold, it's been a white mold—which is regarded as harmless and you scrape it away as best you can and try not to worry about it.
My worst failures have been when flies have found their way to the surface of the sauerkraut and laid their eggs, and I found little maggots crawling out. Certainly, we could have a conversation about strategies to enhance the protein value of sauerkraut, but most of us are pretty put off by maggots crawling out of our food even though there are places where people eat maggots. It's not specifically dangerous, but you probably want to avoid that, so definitely try to keep flies off of your fermenting kraut.
But don't worry about the safety of it. This food is as safe as food gets. And there's virtually no case history anywhere in the world of illness or food poisoning from fermented vegetables.
Kamea Chayne: And then maybe it's a whole separate conversation to ask about governmental regulations around living foods and how they deem a lot of this to be not safe.
Sandor Katz: Fermented foods are produced all over. At least in the United States, and really in the world, they're produced everywhere. The licensing authorities, and the regulating authorities, all acknowledge it. In the case of fermenting vegetables, generally, the producers are required to test the pH of each batch. And it is widely acknowledged that the magic number in the United States is 4.6. Once the pH goes down to 4.6, it's understood that nothing we would be worrying about can survive. That generally happens within a handful of days. So it happens pretty quickly.
In a system as decentralized as ours, businesses that are engaged in fermentation daily have wildly varying experiences. Some have found very knowledgeable, supportive people in their regulating authorities. Some of them have had to become educators and find literature describing the safety of these foods and teach the people regulating them about something that they have no background in.
Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. We're now moving into our three lightning-round closing questions, so just the first thing that comes to mind for you. What has been one of the most impactful books you've read lately or publications that you follow?
Sandor Katz: I do a fair amount of reading. I'm going to say that a book by an ethnobotanist friend of mine named Gary Nabhan, wrote a book about the spice trade called Cumin, Camels, and Caravans. And I think it's just an incredibly insightful book.
The spice trade, I'd say we could describe as the beginnings of globalization. And it brought a lot of very interesting different things into play in the world. And it's a sweeping epic history. It just has made me think about all kinds of interesting things. So I'm just going to throw that out as a provocative book that I read recently.
Kamea Chayne: What is a motto, mantra, or practice that you engage with to stay grounded?
Sandor Katz: I'll say my garden. I do a ton of traveling and most of it is related to teaching about fermentation. I love to travel, but the garden keeps me grounded. And it's just this thing to keep coming back to. It's this thing that feeds me. Year to year, some things come back. I especially love plants that self-sow. So every year I have more things that I'm looking for coming up on their own in the garden.
One of the places where I buy seeds is Truelove Seeds, which is based in Philadelphia. Their special niche is providing seeds to immigrants, primarily. And so I bought these seeds two years ago for a hot weather green called Lagos spinach. It's sort of related to amaranth, but it's very, very specific. It has these beautiful red and green variegated leaves. It thrives in the hot and humid weather of a Tennessee summer. But then the surprise for me is when it goes to seed in the late summer, it has the most beautiful flowers. It's related to celosia flowers. So it has the most beautiful pink flowers and it just comes up all over my garden. And I'm so thrilled about that.
Kamea Chayne: Beautiful. We'll definitely check out that resource. And what is one of your greatest sources of inspiration at the moment?
Sandor Katz: I'm going to say, my partner, who is studying microbiology. It's so exciting seeing how excited he is about science and trying to explain to me these scientific concepts that he's learning about. I really love what joy he gets from scientific understanding and it makes me want to understand things more. I love the sheer pleasure and joy that he takes from it.
Kamea Chayne: Well, Green Dreamer, we are coming to a close here, but we will have more links and resources from this conversation shared in our show notes at greendreamer.com, as well as links to Sandor's work.
And Sandor, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been an honor to have you here. As we close off, what would you like to share about any upcoming projects you have in 2025 and any final words of wisdom that you'd like to leave us with?
Sandor Katz: These days mostly I'm devoted to fermentation education and I would invite people to check out my website, which is wildfermentation.com—where I post all of my upcoming workshops. I do a certain amount of teaching here where I live in Tennessee, but I also do a good amount of traveling to different places to teach.
In the coming months, I'll be teaching in South America in both Colombia and Peru. I'll be teaching in Baltimore. So check out my website and you can find out what I have coming up. And of course, check out my books. I have five books: Wild Fermentation, The Art of Fermentation, Fermentation Journeys and Fermentation as Metaphor. And also a book, which sadly is mostly out of print, called The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements.
Kamea Chayne: As we conclude here, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as Green Dreamers?
Sandor Katz: Just don't be intimidated. Because of this whole war on bacteria thing, a lot of people imagine that fermentation is highly technical and you need a microscope or a laboratory or a lot of knowledge. And I just like to always remind myself and remind other people that these processes were all developed by people who knew nothing about microscopes or bacteria, and mostly worked in much simpler kitchens than most of us have today. So don't be intimidated.
Just try to understand what environment you're trying to create by looking in my books, looking in other books, looking on the internet. There's tons of information available. Don't be intimidated. Don't be afraid. Experiment as much as you like.
