In what might become a tradition for FoodMoves, I took the summer off. I took my first math class in 27 years (I got a huggable B.) I picked up a wooden canoe, built for me by this guy, as a tribute to my late father who died in the water during COVID. And I tried to fix some things around the house. When I left off, my fridge was on the fritz. I’m happy to report it is currently running. However, it’s so hot in Austin that I’m (literally) making yogurt in the ambient temperature in the back yard. As I consider the disasters swirling around us, I’m thinking the fermentos might have had it right. Things could get so bad that refrigeration isn’t available, at least not for everyone, and/or at least not all the time. Some people living on solar or off grid may choose to downsize their fridges and make more room for fermentation. Fermentation is the ultimate disaster move when it comes to saving food, from putting up pickled foods for the future, to making sure a bumper crop of cabbage doesn’t rot, to preserving fruits that are available only for a moment (like the mustang grapes that were ripe and then gone in the blink of an eye this summer).
Fermentation is also the ultimate disaster move because it moves people collectively, socially, in body and en masse. As fermentation expert Sandor Katz is fond of saying:
In our social lives, bubbliness is dynamic, a manifestation of new ideas. In the social realm, fermentation is an engine of change, as bubbliness breaks down old ideas and inspires new ones.
It is no surprise, then, that early social networks coalesced (literally “grew together”) around fermented drinks. Steven Johnson wrote about how cafés created (and dispensed) “liquid networks.” Before coffee houses, it was pubs. And, of course, America defied colonial rule around tea. In India, there are reports of so many people gathering around lassi (a version of which I’ve been enjoying this summer with my backyard yogurt), that it had to be made in washing machines. You get the idea. People congregate around fermentation and they ferment ideas and they are fermented themselves and it’s a whole ecology.
I’ve been wondering about what old ideas need to be broken down and what new ones need inspiration in this moment. I see a lot of need–and a lot of natural and man-made disasters that create more need–around food insecurity. Because I’m making yogurt, I’m wondering about the role of fermentation in social movements for change. Maybe the heat is making my logic more fragmented than normal, but I started making connections between fermentation, social movements, food storage, and food insecurity. I recently finished a book called Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries: New Tools to End Hunger, by Katie S. Martin, which got me thinking about the kinds of foods stored and distributed in and through food banks and pantries. When I think of food banks and pantries, I think of food drives with the circle bin of non-perishables in the corner of the school or church. I think of rows of non-perishable food items in a food-bank warehouse. I think of blocks of government cheese. (Which made me think of another book I read a number of years ago called Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal by Melanie Warner. You can imagine from the title and the era how that book goes, but it is still a good read.) However, as Martin writes, there are changes happening in food banking and fresh food that members choose themselves is starting to be a larger part of the mission. There are challenges to banking and transporting fresh foods, and I think the food banks and pantries will continue to figure out the logistics. The logistical shifts coincide with cultural shifts in the ways food moves through networks of food banks, food pantries, and community-based organizations. This is where I want to circle back around and connect hunger-relief work to both fermentation and the kinds of embodied, emplaced social networks that Johnson writes about.
Feeding networks are social networks. All feeding networks contain living beings doing labor, places where food is transported and stored, and techniques for transporting and storing food. How all this is done both creates and governs the culture in which it is done. This is not static. It changes over time. While Katz notes that social fermentation “breaks down old ideas,” it also maintains other old ideas. This is how cultural fermentation works. We hope that the good bacteria thrive and crowd out the bad bacteria. So I want to argue that fermentation created the original food banks. Milk stored in an animal’s stomach became cheese. Cabbage stored in a barrel under water became sauerkraut or kimchi. Meat hung to keep out of reach of animals became cured sausage. These caches of food were very much alive and, over time, became delicacies. So the idea of banking food and fermenting food aren’t antithetical. They come out of the same need to save food for later distribution and consumption. However, the non-perishable food that we associate with food banks (perhaps incorrectly) doesn’t perish because it’s already mostly dead.
So I wonder what it would look like to give fermentation a more prominent role in food banks. Of course larger food banks with refrigeration could stock and distribute Bulgarian yogurt and other living probiotic foods, but that’s only part of what I’m thinking. Martin writes about the desire to transition food banks into food hubs–kind of like a central market that is financed by non-profit money, corporations looking for tax write-offs, charitable donations, and the like. In short, she envisions a place where people willingly gather around food. So how does one go about making a food hub? If I put everything I have learned about food and social movements, liquid networks, and fermentation together, my thinking is that you can’t force a food hub to happen any more than you can force milk to become yogurt. You have to add the right culture to the right ingredients in the right environment and then nurture the whole ecology without too much interference. The right culture for a food hub might be one that embraces living foods.