An unfortunate side effect of Britain’s much-lauded culinary revolution is that it is becoming ever harder for us food pseuds to get much in the way of attention. There is nothing daring about raw fish in a world where even Boots sells sushi, so it was a rare treat for me to find myself repulsing my travelling companions practically every day while we were on holiday this summer.
My first victory came in the famed Pike Place Market in Seattle, where I was immediately drawn to the intriguingly sour scent of a “naturally fermented” pickle stall. Sensing that a jar of curry kraut wouldn’t be an entirely welcome passenger on our forthcoming road trip, I decided to take the picklers up on their kind offer of a “free brine shot” instead. When I looked round, my friends had vanished.
Apparently, fermented food just wasn’t their thing, which is a shame, because later, as they stocked up on blueberry muffins for a picnic breakfast, I happened upon some organic kefir in a small-town co-op. Kefir is a fermented milk drink from the Caucasus, and this one only came in litre cartons, so we were stuck with it in the back seat for days as Washington sweltered in an August heatwave. My attempts to make peace over a glass of kombucha fermented tea were not an unqualified success.
Their loss. As any pseud worth their fleur de sel knows, food made with the “mysterious action of microbes”, as Sheila Dillon put it in an edition of Radio 4’s Food Programme, is super-hip right now, whether it’s kefir or strawberry cheesecake frozen yoghurt.
And it’s not just sour milk: wine, beer, cured meat, chocolate, coffee, bread and cheese (“basically, all the really good stuff”, according to the American food writer Michael Pollan) owe a debt to the tiny organisms that break down their sugars into gases, acids and alcohols – and bags of funky flavour. They exist in what Sandor Katz, a self-styled “fermentation revivalist” and teacher, describes as the “creative space” between fresh and rotten food, “where most of human culture’s most prized delicacies and culinary achievements exist”.
Pollan claims rather loftily that the act of fermentation puts us “in touch with the ever-present tug, in life, of death”, though of course many fermented foods, such as yoghurt and traditional, unpasteurised sauerkraut, are in fact teeming with life.
You don’t have to be a cheese to teem: the human body hosts about 100 trillion microbes of its own. In his new book The Diet Myth, the epidemiologist Tim Spector argues that we can encourage the useful ones with a microbe-friendly diet based on fruit, vegetables, nuts, olive oils and pulses – and, as I pointed out post-Picklegate, live, fermented foods.
My friends’ cruel indifference to their own microbes puts them seriously behind the times – the home fermentation revival has been active in the US for over a decade under the evangelical leadership of Katz, who sees it as part of a wider “resistance movement that rejects dead, industrialised, homogenised, globalised food commodities in favour of real, wholesome, local, unadulterated food”.
He may have an appetite for “political and social ferment”, but when Michelle Obama tweeted her recipe for spicy Korean kimchi and Gwyneth Paltrow came out as a fan of “raw organic” kombucha, it was clear that a taste for fermentation was bubbling right at the heart of the American establishment.
Sadly, neither of these celebrity endorsements did much to endear my tepid kefir to its reluctant seat mates; one man’s freedom fighter has always been another’s smelly hitchhiker. But even as I sat alone with my breakfast, I felt a wave of love from my 100 trillion tiny house guests. Friends don’t get much closer than them.
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This article appears in the 09 Sep 2015 issue of the New Statesman, Syria: the world order crumbles