F O O D
Cultural revolution The revival of fermented food traditions
By gina smith
gsmith@mountainx.com 251-1333 ext. 107
The kitchen of Janelle LucidoConate’s West Asheville home is literally bubbling with life. Its shelves and countertops, decorated with a large and motley assortment of jars and crocks, reflect Lucido-Conate’s passion for cultured foods. Each vessel is packed with a different vegetable, dairy or sourdough ferment, and all are fizzing away contentedly as beneficial microbes go through various stages of the fermentation process. As Lucido-Conate talks about what she’s brewing, she picks up the colorful jars — containing things like pickled brussels sprouts and elderberry kombucha — and offers aromatic samples. The love and care invested in these concoctions are obvious, and it’s clear that the cultures themselves play a role in her life that runs deeper than just what’s for dinner. A recent transplant from the San Francisco Bay Area, Lucido-Conate considers it her mission to share — through local workshops she calls “kraut parties” and via her website — her knowledge and love of the art of fermentation. “I want to help people who need that nudge, that boost of confidence, to take a leap,” she says. “I want to teach people to use what’s fresh, what’s in abundance: If you have a bunch of it, let’s ferment it and see if it tastes good. That’s what I’m all about.” Lucido-Conate taught herself how to ferment about eight years ago after reading Sally Fallon’s landmark food-culture book Nourishing Traditions. Frustrated by a first stab at making sauerkraut, LucidoConate upended her $5 thrift-store crock but then realized that the stuff on the bottom wasn’t rotten: It had fermented and was amazingly tasty.
28
aPRiL 9 - aPRiL 15 2014
Inspired, she kept experimenting and later honed her skills while making monthly large-scale ferments for up to eight families for a year as part of a food-swap cooperative. She also discovered the work of self-described “fermentation revivalist” Sandor Katz (see “Revival Eating” elsewhere in this issue). “He gets fermentation in a way that’s very spiritual,” she says. And like him, she feels that cultured foods “are the food of the people. It belongs to all of us. It’s not just for foodies … or people who can afford to go out and buy raw, fermented foods at the store; it’s for all of us.” univeRsaL Legacy Ethnobotanist Marc Williams was also inspired by Katz’s ideas as well as by his friend and colleague, the late herbalist Frank Cook. Williams, who teaches fermentation and plant identification classes at A-B Tech,
mountainx.com
PReseRving the haRvest: A simple mixture of fresh vegetables, salt and time can yield delicious, fermented results. Photo by Jayson Im
the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine and numerous other local educational institutions, believes the recent resurgence of interest in fermenting is a natural reawakening for humanity. “If you look at the food traditions of pretty much any indigenous culture all over the world, they’ve got some form of fermentation they were practicing,” he says. “So I do believe that it’s literally written into our DNA, and it’s the legacy of all of us, wherever we are from.” Lucido-Conate aims to empower folks to start making their own cultured food so they can enjoy a healthy, tasty way of preserving
the harvest while also moving closer to a deep-rooted cultural tradition. “This is one of the reasons I call my website Our Daily Kraut. We think of bread as a symbol of our culture … that our lives center around, but bread is essentially [made by] a fermentation process,” she explains. “Basically, the yeast we use from a packet is made to mimic what we make with a sourdough starter. The truth is that it’s an industrialization of what already belongs to us. It’s our birthright. When people emigrate from one place to another, what they take with them is their seeds and their starter, whatever that starter is. … This is not just for rich people or poor people; this is of the people.” BeneficiaL micRoBes According to Williams, the rising popularity of fermented foods is also linked to a growing interest in probiotics and the revolutionary concept