This book is so exciting! I love reading books written by passionate people and Sandor Katz has a serious fermentation fetish! Before the book gets into the recipes we are treated to several enlightening chapters extolling the health benefits of fermented foods, the importance of micro-biodiversity, how fermentation can remove toxins from food and lower infant mortality rates, and the cultural history of fermentation. He even quotes Claude Levi-Strauss, one of my favorite anthropologists (I was an anthro major in college!) regarding fermenting foods as one of the benchmarks from nature to culture.
He has quite a bit to say about the commercialization and industrialization of food; I love the following quote. "Resistance takes place on many planes. Occasionally it can be dramatic and public, but most of the decisions we are faced with are mundane and private. What to eat is a choice that we make several times a day, if we are lucky. The cumulative choices we make about food have profound implications... we do not have to be reduced to the role of consumers selecting from seductive convenience items. We can merge appetite with activism and choose to involve ourselves in food as co-creators."
Eventually, he gets to the recipes, although it's worth a trip through the preceding chapters for some background information and some righteous indignation about the state of the Standard American Diet first. The recipes are amazing and fascinating; brined garlic, miso, coconut chutney, tsatsiki, sunflower sour cream, amazake, kombucha... I've tried a couple, below is the beginnings of some sour pickles, but I'm excited to get into some of the really crazy ones!
Despite the fact that wild fermentation seems like such a foreign exercise, it's quite easy. It's just a matter of a little paradigm shift and jumping into something new and, at first, a little weird. And these are totally the kind of recipes your middle schooler will love to get involved in!
