Weeks ago, wanting to help in the preparation of a friend’s architecture exhibition, I took on the task of preparing jars of fermented vegetables, which served as decoration. With no previous experience and a vague fear instilled by my parents’ veto against any self-made canning experiment, I called upon my equally unprepared friends¹, and embarked on a culinary journey that would take me on unexpected philosophical and political paths.

Immediately, the internet search for a recipe projected me in an underground, somehow punk world of pirated recipe books and affectionate talks on bacteria and yeasts, closely reminding me of my academic readings on more-than-human philosophies. As an occasional target of tradwife social media content², this community of rebel homesteaders resisting consummerism and enacting indigenous and feminist practices through their reproductive labor - theoretical term for unpaid care work happening in the home - sparked something in me.

Advised and inspired by these badass fermenters, I got into the kitchen, with the best intentions but the (provident) intuition that I would have to freestyle and enjoy the mess. So it was: the vegetables were not releasing any of the promised water necessary to cover them and avoid mold; my shared flat surely had a rich bacteria biodiversity³ and an extensive dusty jar hoarding cabinet, but no tool preventing salt from spilling everywhere or any precise measure to be taken; and in absence of official weights to keep the food submerged I had to hunt for rocks (the pains of urban life), arrange them precariously in the jars and pray that somethig in my highschool Geology classes stuck with me, and no dangerous chemicals would be released.

Despite the afore-mentioned stress peaks and the great resistance of the brine smell to any hand washing, something shifted in me during the process, as if something had opened up. I could perceive new relationalities forming with food, my own senses and the invisible bacteria inahabitants, and, as I sent my friends home with cutsie and hopefully not poisonous jars, I prayed for what the brewster of Pink Boots Society say to be true:

“Women that ferment together stay together”.

As the traces of salty water, spilled spices and vegetables’ remnants disappeared, I found myself increasingly obsessed with both the process and the politics of fermenting. The care phase began, and tending to the ferments starting to seem inequivocably motherly. I had to make them burp daily and to be present with them with every sense, smelling and tasting them too. On the other side, the bacteria were also performing an involuntary but somehow maternal action, predigesting and making nutrients bioavailable. And these relations extended to places, as I learnt that the fermenting body interacts with local bacteria and yeasts and is thus site-specific. As I will soon move out of this city, I like the idea of carrying home with me in a jar of sauerkraut.

Through the repeated, simple actions of opening of the jars and observing the transformation, I started attuning to microbial beings that before I had either ignored or feared - a widening of my radius of compassion that I sensed to be inherently political:

To ferment is thus to expand our nets of belonging, recognising and claiming the bacteria communities that inhabit us and our surroundings. This is uneasy, as the mantra of sterilisation has been inscribed in our minds: disinfect your hands, don’t touch that, consume only what is perfectly pre-packed on a supermarket shelf, be careful about expiration dates. However, our bodies can only be maintained through the synergies with bacteria, and we can only truly understand ourselves when we see “the human body as biocultural and (...) the constant, cross-species permeability between inside and outside, human and nonhuman” (Fournier, 2020, p.98).

Fermenting offers us a better comprehension of the world altogether, as it makes visible that materials are vital. Without any knowledge of the microbial word, latins encapsulated in the word “Fermentum” the mystery of food coming to life, moving towards a renewed condition rather than decay. Knowledge on bacteria gave us clarity, but made us oblivious to the vitality of matter. When we reappropriate this awareness and decenter ourselves, we become able to see how matter is in constant transformation and interaction with us, “such as the way omega-3 fatty acids can alter human moods or the way our trash is not ‘away’ in landfills but generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane as we speak” (Bennett, 2009, as cited in Fournier, 2020, p.93).

In my mothertongue, Italian, the words of fermentation are lived as metaphor in daily language. “Che fermento!” one says when there is agitation, the foreshadowing of a transformation, an upheavel or a revolution. Fermento is a bubbly atmosphere anticipating new paradigms, a movement changing the status quo, even if briefly. Beyond the symbolical, fermentation reveals itself as a tool for resistance in varied, concrete ways. It exposes the extractive and hyerarchical relations that rule our everyday life, it opposes food homogenization and nutritional impoverishment, it protects cultural richness, it allows to create (or, more specifically, to co-create with our local non-human neighbours) rather than only consuming. Fermenting can even imply breaking the law, as the rules posed on food production⁵ can be harsh, keeping these ancestral practices withheld in factories.

There is then a time revolution. Firstly, fermentation operates at a rhythm that breaks the habit of quick rewards and fast paces. Secondly and more radically, it requires stepping out from capitalism’ demands on how we organise our time. There is a “normative” time, which is the one of “family, heterosexuality, and reproduction”(Fourier, 2020, p.107), and a “queer” time, which is the one reorganised “in opposition to these institutions” (p.107). Queer time is the one in which we are able to prepare sourdough and tend to a scoby, and can be seen as feminist and anti-capitalistic time in the measure that it’s communitary and chosen, that it validates and equally distributes reproductive labour, and that is not dominated by the purpose of (retributed, or not) profit.

In the exhibition where my jars will feature, fermentation stands as a representation of both centenary, deeply cultural practices, and as a to-be-rediscovered remedy against food waste and loneliness. The project is an interrogation of the heritage of the Gasthaus⁶ and it moves on a precarious balance between appreciation and subversion of identity and traditional values. The building is redesigned to host a lively communal life in a spacious kitchen and a futuristic looking fermentation tower, but it is the approach itself to transformation that resembles fermentation: the good - community spirit, belonging and appreciation of local food - is made tastier and more digestable, while the bad - gender roles, misoginy, exclusion of minorities and marginalised groups, and conservatism - are dissolved and neutralised, in this case through socio-spatial interventions.

This is the approach that Fournier (2020) adopts in her series of writing and artistic exhibitions, which take fermentation as a guide to navigate the concepts and frameworks of feminism and decolonisation. She asks what it would mean to ferment feminist theories: which parts do we reenergize? Which require fizzy change across preservation and transformation? Which should be left to decay? (p.100). This process is, similarly to the making of kombucha and any other ferment, filled with unexpected turns and based on trial-and-error. When critical spirit and self-accountability are missing, it can turn sour, even deadly, as it happens when it leads to the appropriation and theft of indigenous knowledge⁷, co-opts countercultural ways of being, or makes practices that should be financially and socially available to everyone exclusive.

So, how do we keep our fighting for justice, equity and circularity lively and explosive? Perhaps the answer can be found in and with our microbial allies, so I encourage you to gather your community, get your hands full of brines and yeasts, and observe.

Ethimology and history of the word “Fermentation”: https://unaparolaalgiorno.it/significato/fermento

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

Fournier, Lauren (Ed.). Fermenting Feminism. Laboratory for Aesthetics & Ecology, 2017.

Fournier, Lauren. Fermenting Feminism as Methodology and Metaphor. Environmental Humanities, no. 12 (2020): 88-112.

Katz, Sandor. The Art of Fermentation. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Tuck, Eve, and Wayne K. Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

Substack account @chefsamblack

The book “The Noma Guide to Fermentation: Including koji, kombuchas, shoyus, misos, vinegars, garums, lacto-ferments, and black fruits and vegetables" (2018), by R. Redzepi and D. Zilber

The book “The Cultured Club: Fabulous Funky Fermentation Recipes” (2016), by D. Reynolds

https://www.daywithmei.com