Cultures of Fermentation

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeCultures of Fermentation Wenner-Gren Symposium Supplement 24Danilyn RutherfordDanilyn Rutherford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore“A form of microbial metabolism that converts carbon compounds to energy in the absence of oxygen” (Hendy et al. 2021). This definition of fermentation sounds straightforward enough, but the process can mean and do many things. Fermentation plays a central role in digestion when it happens inside our bodies. At some point in the history of our species, it started playing the same role outside our bodies as well. Fermentation depends on communities of yeast, bacteria, plants, animals, and people. It is at the heart of global industries, from industrial dairying to the production of craft beer. It is also a figure of speech, a metaphor for productive and unruly mixtures that violate taken-for-granted boundaries. It is not surprising to see the authors of the introduction to this special issue describing the gathering that led up to this publication as a “ferment.” The turn of phrase was too evocative to pass up.From October 11 to 17, 2019, five months before the world shut down, 20 scholars met in Sintra, Portugal, to bring their unique perspectives and sensibilities to bear on this capacious topic (fig. 1). They were trained in microbiology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and biological anthropology. They were based in Japan, Australia, Germany, Finland, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The premise that united them was that fermentation is a matter of culture. A culture is a community of microbes in a medium of nutrients. But the word can also refer to the institutions, ideas, and lifeways of people involved in the care of nonhuman groups. In Sintra, this double meaning opened what the historian of science Peter Galison would call a “trading zone,” a site where researchers with different goals and approaches could come together (1997:783). Jessica Hendy, Matthäus Rest, Mark Aldenderfer, and Christina Warinner, who organized the symposium, were not looking for a neat division of intellectual labor. There were spaces of overlap, but the conversation also veered into realms well beyond the reach of any one approach. In between talking about ferments, the participants tasted them—miso, peaso, raw milk cheese—each characterized by an intricate tangle of flavors. Even with everything these scholars were learning from one another, there was still so much more to know.Figure 1. Participants in the symposium “Cultures of Fermentation.” Seated: Megan Tracy, Salla Sariola, Katie Amato, Jamie Lorimer, Heather Paxson. Standing: Eben Kirksey, Shinya Shoda, Eva Rosenstock, Matthäus Rest, Dolly Kikon, Mark Aldenderfer, Roberta Raffaetà, Rob Dunn, Danilyn Rutherford, Björn Reichhardt, Christina Warinner, Oliver Craig, Daniel Münster, Jessica Hendy. Not pictured: Amy Zhang.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointFor some participants, what was most interesting about fermentation was its role in human evolution. Katherine Amato (Amato et al. 2021) surveyed research on nonhuman primates to develop an intriguing hypothesis: that fermentation played a central role in enabling our earliest ancestors to survive in the forested grasslands in Africa where key anatomical features of our species emerged. Fermentation occurs spontaneously in nature. Most nonhuman primates cannot metabolize fermented products, but humans evolved the capacity to use them as fuel. If Amato is correct, by breaking down tough and toxic plant species, fermentation helped humans meet the caloric requirements associated with their growing brains and shrinking guts. These anatomical changes both stemmed from and fueled the emergence of collective forms of know-how—microbial and human cultures fed on one another, in this view of the human past.Moving forward in time, the archaeologists in the group combed the archaeological record for evidence of fermentation. Eva Rosenstock (Rosenstock, Ebert, and Scheibner 2021) tracked the emergence of lactase persistence in sites where dairying made an early appearance. It appears that people ate cheese and yoghurt well before they drank milk: only a small subsection of the human population retains the enzymes needed to digest lactose into adulthood. Fresh milk spoils quickly in warm weather; not surprisingly, lactase persistence is found in places cold enough to stave off spoiling. Oliver Craig (2021) explored the link between fermentation, pottery production, and the emergence of sedentary and semi-sedentary societies. To domesticate microbes, people needed a place to keep them; pots proved central to people’s ability to amass the kinds of surpluses that allowed human communities to lay down roots. Shinya Shoda (2021) focused on a parallel story from prehistoric Japan and Korea. Here, the rise of fermentation coincided with a range of other cultural achievements: from salt production to the fashioning of new tools and utensils to the emergence of new cooking techniques.Fermentation produces products that are good to eat—and store. In what sense is fermentation good to think? The cultural anthropologists in the group took up this question in a range of contexts with an eye to fermentation’s social force.Roberta Raffaetà, Heather Paxson, and Eben Kirksey focused on the temporality of fermentation. Raffaetà (2021) took us to the Trentino Alps, where a new generation of cheese makers is using fermentation in projects that call up different configurations of time and space. In a regional university, a group of scientists have developed a standardized starter that combines traditional strains. Farmers in one high mountain summer pasture have severed all connections to contemporary methods, when it comes to cheese making; the only microbes these utopian farmers use are those found in their own meadows and barns. At the other extreme, one finds an outfit representing the atopia of industrialized cheese production, which breaks off all ties to the alpine past. Raffaetà found the most promise in the heterotopia created in a third high mountain pasture. Here farmers mix elements from different times and spaces. They make use of the standardized starter, when needed, and their own local culture, when they can. They use their earnings from agro-tourism to subsidize an approach to farming that pays tribute to traditions rooted in the land.Heather Paxson (2021) explored the time of microbes at a later stage in the life cycle of cheese. Paxson reported on her fieldwork in a Boston cheese shop that specializes in varieties imported from Europe. Once made, cheese must be aged, and yet this process adheres to different rhythms given the type of cheese involved. Parmesan and other hard cheeses improve with time. Soft cheeses, especially those made with raw milk, taste best in the brief window between “finished” and spoiled. Pasteurization casts the human-microbe relationship in the idiom of war. For the officials who oversee the trade, the point is not to kill microbes but to regularize their effects. The outcome is ironic: labeling systems that make little sense and safety protocols that allow delicate cheeses to rot. The same untamable liveliness loomed large in Eben Kirksey’s (2021) research on the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition in Boston. In his discussion of the young researchers who took part in this contest, Kirksey described a fantastical series of imaginings. One team was trying to induce photosynthesis in humans—in essence, turning people into plants. But it wasn’t all fun and games. Homeland Security had a prominent place in the proceedings. So did finance capitalism. Here, microbes did not conjure the past or embody duration: they pointed to a future bound up in global structures of surveillance and profiteering, with existing structures of power constraining visions of the new.For Raffaetà, Paxson, and Kirksey, temporality offered an entry into “microbiopolitics,” Paxson’s (2008) term for a form of power that governs humans by governing microbes. Other cultural anthropologists in the group explored this dynamic by investigating the relationship between fermentation and the politics of identity. Megan Tracy (2021) focused on the hidden role of gendered reproduction in industrial dairying. In China, a challenge to the industry is antibiotic-resistant mastitis. The scientists whom Tracy studied are seeking a solution in a treatment that transfers components of human breast milk to cows. As recent research on the microbiome is making clear, humans and other animals benefit from the diverse communities of microbes that live in the bodies. Normally, the lactating breast and the gut are connected: nursing infants transfer bacteria between sites. Industrial milk production silences this “cross talk.” Because cows are violently separated from their newborn calves, the microbiome is disrupted; to make up for these missing microbes, a new bond between cows and women comes to play a therapeutic role. These entanglements are opaque to consumers, who have little sense of the multispecies maternal landscapes that go into the making of a simple carton of milk.Jamie Lorimer, Amy Zhang, Salla Sariola, and Rob Dunn explored fermentation and the politics of identity on a national scale. Lorimer (Evans and Lorimer 2021) focused on Noma, a Michelin star restaurant in Copenhagen. Fermentation has allowed these pioneers of New Nordic Cuisine to thread the needle between ecologically responsible localism and the nativism associated with the rise of Denmark’s anti-immigrant right. Noma’s chefs have hit upon kōji, Japan’s “national fungus,” which they turn loose on Danish ingredients. Instead of rice, they use pearl barley as a medium for the ferment and make miso out of a local variety of yellow pea. At the start of the symposium, Dunn, with John Wilson, Lauren Nichols, and Michael Gavin (Dunn et al. 2021) provided a fascinating mapping of the emergence and divergence of the world’s many varieties of fermented food. Noma has used fermentation to draw and confound global boundaries—creating a cosmopolitan translation of the local and a culinary innovation that has met with much acclaim: Noma has been named one of the best restaurants in the world.The politics traced by Zhang and Sariola were equally creative. Zhang (2021) told us about urban waste activists in China who are practicing a quiet form of resistance to the policies of the authoritarian state by using the fermentation of eco-enzymes heal sickened rivers, bodies, and soils. Their counterparts in Helsinki, described by Sariola (2021), approach fermentation as a politically progressive form of performance art. Here, as in China, activists are using fermentation to challenge the modernist regimes of purification that have turned microbes into the enemy. To learn to live better with microbes is to learn to live better with other kinds of difference—those associated with ethnicity, race, national origins, sexual orientation, ability, and age.Dolly Kikon and Daniel Münster had more ambivalent stories to tell. In Northeast India, Kikon’s home region, fermented bamboo shoot is a delicacy, intimately embedded in how Kikon and others in her community “organize, move, and order our lives, contributing to the creation of differences and alliances” (2021). But fermented bamboo is also a source of stigma: migrants living in Indian cities are forced to disguise the smell of this delicacy, which marks them for exclusion from the national mainstream. Münster (2021) described an alternative community that stands in a different relation to the Indian nation. The Nectar of Life, pioneered by the guru and agronomist Subhash Palekar, is a key component in what his followers call Zero Budget Farming. The Green Revolution promised prosperity but ended up impoverishing Indian farmers, who are forced to depend on expensive fertilizers, pesticides, and hybrid seeds to eke out declining yields. Palekar taught practitioners to brew a potent microbial concoction from cow manure and urine, jaggery, and ground pulses, which they use to enrich the topsoil and promote healthy growth. Descriptions of the mixture, which draw heavily on Hindu mythology and nativist tropes, prove troubling, given how they play on the anti-Muslim rhetoric associated with the Hindu Right. And yet, this has not prevented non-Hindus from participating in the movement. As Münster put it, “bacteria and fungi are indifferent to human politics.” As a biological phenomenon, but also as a symbol, fermentation’s effects are unpredictable: there is always more than one story to tell.The same goes for fermentation research. The conference monitor, Björn Reichhardt, and Matthäus Rest each offered a fascinating account of the collaboration that led to this symposium. Along with Zoljargal Enkh-Amgalan, Matthäus Rest, and Christina Warinner, Reichhardt (Reichhardt et al. 2021) has been studying dairying in Mongolia and the Alps. Reichhardt described the Dairy Cultures Ethnographic Database, an open access resource the team has developed featuring photographs and video recordings of dairy production, landscapes, and livestock, along with interviews, oral histories, and folk songs. The two sites make for a fascinating comparison, but they are also connected by 9,000 years of dairying history beginning in the Near East and radiating throughout Eurasia. Rest (2021) described the team’s effort to trace this history. Drawing on methods associated with the study of the biome and ancient DNA, the researchers have tracked the prehistoric spread of dairying in Mongolia, Europe, and the Near East by comparing ancient and contemporary dairy products and documenting the survival of “heirloom microbes” among contemporary groups. Rest ends his discussion by calling on scientists and local producers to work together to protect the “microbial commons” from “patenting and commodification.” Dairying has left its mark on microbes and people, on life ways and landscapes, on politics and economies, and, I would add, on the aims of research, leading to the commitment to support threatened communities rather than just study them.No one discipline or subfield has a monopoly on insight when it comes to the multispecies communities in which we are all living. There is an ethics involved in grappling with this conundrum: this is just one of the lessons anthropologists have learned from Covid-19. People with the luxury of sheltering in place may have found solace in bread baking. These are not the same people who delivered the yeast, flour, and baked goods—the ones who had to expose themselves to the virus to survive. Fermentation alone cannot help us address the inequalities sharpened by the pandemic. But it can, as these scholars each illustrate in their own way, provide us with fodder for thought.If you would like to suggest a topic for a future symposium, please visit us at http://www.wennergren.org/programs/wenner-gren-symposia-and-seminars. We are always looking for timely topics that can spark the kind of wide-ranging conversations that made this symposium so generative. It is a good time to be fermenting new ideas.References CitedAmato, Kathryn R., Elizabeth K. Mallott, Paula D’Almeida Maia, and Maria Luisa Savo Sardaro. 2021. 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Current Anthropology 62(suppl. 24):S298–S310.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarNotesDanilyn Rutherford is President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (655 Third Avenue, 23rd Floor, New York, New York 10017, USA [[email protected]]). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 62, Number S24October 2021Cultures of Fermentation Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715809 Views: 866 HistoryPublished online October 11, 2021 © 2021 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.