it's alive!

I feel that I’ve crossed some sort of line. A few years ago, my best friend bought me a copy of Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions. The book is unabashedly confrontational: the front cover boasts a challenge to “politically correct nutrition and the diet dictocrats.” I was on board with her central message, which is that eating minimally processed foods is healthy, but I found other ideas a bit off-putting, such as her chirpy proclamation that an avoidance of vaccines enhances the benefits of eating lacto-fermented foods. It seemed to be a bit of a totalizing proposition, that things would start out with homemade ketchup and then I’d be compelled to home-school my kids and weave clothes out of hemp fibers I’d grown and processed myself. I’m all for self-reliance, within reason. I enjoy the challenge of preparing complicated dishes from scratch. I’m crafty, I sew, I plant things in dirt. I enjoy the transformation of raw materials into finished product. But realistically, I also enjoy living in a world where the division of labor and mechanization allow me not to spend my days procuring food and garment by stalking prey and tanning hides. I don’t particularly enjoy washing clothes by hand, nor would I last long on a diet of, say, fish I’d caught myself. There are problems with the current system, but I’m not sure a whole-scale, back-to-the-land movement would solve them. After all, things like vaccines and industrial agriculture, despite their unintended consequences, came about as a means of mitigating the risks involved in living.

One thing that Sally Fallon and I do have in common, though, is a love of fermented foods. Bread, cheese, pickles, kefir, miso, tempeh, beer, wine; there’s something almost miraculous about foods that are alive and that use that life in the service of creating more complex flavors and, often, increased nutritional value. (Another thing that proponents of fermented foods seem to share is an evangelical tendency regarding the purported virtues of their favorite foods.) Until recently, my forays into the realm of fermented foods had involved bread and kefir. I have now made sauerkraut, and it was good. About a month ago, we helped Kendall’s parents crush grapes they’d grown themselves and bottle the juice for wine; a few days later, Kendall and I made lacto-fermented pineapple-cilantro chutney for fish tacos. Thus, it would seem, I have leaped willy-nilly into the world of fermented foods.

I’m not sure what any of this says about my political leanings, but I’m not alone in this. People are making jam, building yurts, raising chickens in their backyards; a friend of mine quit her job and is devoting a year to investigating food and farming around the country—on her bicycle! Some point to the recession, others to frustration with the pre-fab, have-it-now nature of contemporary life. There is pleasure in work well done, certainly, but there is also a weird sense of nostalgia, even luxury, now attached to tasks that were once considered drudgery. Maybe the days of industrial civilization are numbered and my pleasures really are as guilty as they sometimes feel. Maybe the economics of green jobs really will pan out, and we can somehow have the best of both worlds. Or perhaps what we should hope for is something on a smaller scale, so that as more people bake their own bread and do their own laundry and grow their own food, we’ll start properly valuing the labor of those who do these things for a living.