When a Head of White Cabbage Becomes Sauerkraut

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Foodthink Speaks

This October, Foodthink, together with dozens of farmers’ markets, ecological farms, fermented-food artisans, restaurants, publishers and non-profit organisations across the country, co-founded the Fermentation Awakening Festival. In November, we hosted four reading groups centred on Sandor Katz’s The Art of Fermentation, and the guest at the first session was Sun Shan, a long-time friend of Foodthink. Sun Shan currently runs Chi Garden, an ecological farm and fermentation kitchen in Ottawa, Canada. Over eight years of her ‘Half-Farming, Half-X’ lifestyle, she has amassed extensive experience in making fermented foods. The farm’s kimchi and its Mountain Kraut made from kale have sparked a ‘kraut craze’ at local farmers’ markets. Below is Sun Shan’s talk from the The Art of Fermentation reading group.

I. Fermentation: Both Science and Art

● Sandor Katz and the English edition of The Art of Fermentation – the title literally means “the art of fermentation”.

The English original title of this book is The Art of Fermentation – quite literally, “the art of fermentation”. But why “art” rather than “science”?

As someone with a background in biology, I find that fermentation is in fact a thoroughly scientific process. For instance, we know with certainty that once the acidity reaches a certain level – a pH value below 4.6 – harmful bacteria cannot develop, which is why sauerkraut and similar fermented foods are classified as low-risk under Canadian farmers’ market regulations and food safety standards.

● Homemade fermented pickle from Sun Shan’s fermentation kitchen – two kinds of radish in a special recipe with kale, perfect for stir-frying with meat. Opening the jar releases a deep, sweet, intensely fragrant aroma that makes your mouth water instantly.

Many people place too much faith in the “science” of fermentation and worry intensely about the safety of homemade fermented foods: will pickles, homebrew or fermented bean paste upset your stomach? Could I be poisoned by what I’ve made? They feel that food culture is simply too complicated – it is far easier to leave it all to the factories.

In reality, whether it is fermented vegetables, grains or meats, fermentation requires collaboration with microorganisms – and the industrial fermentation sector is no exception. Factories must establish the safety of their processes based on existing fermentation research and results. Every country has regulations to this effect: for example, if a traditional fermentation culture has been used in a given region over a sustained period without a single food safety incident, then standardised mass production using that method can be deemed feasible.

Fermentation is indeed a scientific process, but it does not always follow the expected course. You may not achieve the “standard” flavour in the traditional sense, and you may even doubt yourself. But that is precisely the charm of fermented food – it is unique and will never be exactly the same twice. Along the way, you consult and seek advice from elderly family members and the fermentation community – the fun is endless.

● A fermentation community built around kombucha by Happy Lab – members visit each other carrying their homemade kombucha and organise blind tastings. Image: Diane

This, too, is the central idea of The Art of Fermentation: fermentation is the art of collaborating with nature and microorganisms.

For the author, Sandor Katz, fermentation represents not only the transformation of food under the action of microorganisms, but also a form of social practice. The Fermentation Awakening Festival that Foodthink launched this October is, of course, not concerned solely with the fermentation of food – it also speaks of the fermentation of community and culture.

Fermentation is science, and art, and at the same time a form of community work. Seizing the opportunity to connect with fermentation enthusiasts is itself a tremendous reward.

●Foodthink is truly honoured that the Fermentation Awakening Festival and the The Art of Fermentation reading groups gave us the chance to connect with Katz himself across the Pacific.

II. Why Do We Need Fermentation?

Sandor once said, “Fermentation is a cultural universal.” The sense of this is something like “fermentation is a food language spoken by the entire world.” No East Asian kitchen would be complete without soy sauce and vinegar; in Western cooking, red wine is a staple in the kitchen, while cheese, chocolate and coffee are everyday pleasures – all of which are fermented foods. If fermentation were missing from the world of food, how monotonous it would become: how many fewer layers of flavour, how far impoverished the depth and richness of our meals, and how utterly different our life at the table would be.

● Did you know that foods of different colours each fall into their own category of fermented food?

Yet as large-scale industrial food production becomes the norm, the traditional cultures and crafts tied to food are quietly fading away.

Take our own country as an example. A few decades ago, nearly every household would make its own savoury pickles, sauerkraut, or fermented pickled vegetables. Families in Sichuan and Chongqing would make doubanjiang, a fermented broad bean chilli paste; the Jiangsu–Zhejiang region was renowned for its huangjiu yellow rice wine; in Yunnan, people would zhà-preserve just about anything; and families up in the Northeast lived on da jiang, their thick, beloved fermented soybean paste. Every home, every neighbourhood had someone who knew how to make fermented foods.

But today, fewer and fewer people still hold that knowledge. In its place, vast factories carry out fermentation on an industrial scale – and it may not be long before we lose “fermentation” altogether as a language the whole world shares.

This is part of why Sandor began sharing his fermentation knowledge: he hopes to reignite a cultural revival through fermentation. The preview for Foodthink’s reading group reprinted the introduction to The Art of Fermentation, which uses the term “food sovereignty” in its title – a phrase that echoes the performance art Sandor has been practising for decades: through fermented foods, finding and reclaiming our food sovereignty, resisting homogenisation.

In an age when fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola dominate the landscape, we might even begin to doubt that our fries are really fries at all if they don’t taste like McDonald’s. In such a vast, uniform, characterless food world, why does Sandor keep returning, page after page in The Art of Fermentation, to topics like microorganisms, culture and the symbiosis of all living things?

Let me first pick out two pages I find absolutely wonderful and read them aloud.

In these passages, Sandor is making the point that the entire food system is being reshaped into a model of large-scale, industrialised commercial processing, and that this is bringing grave problems not only for the Earth but for the world of plants and animals living alongside us. Nature is being wounded by humanity’s unsustainable farming and food-processing practices. He also keeps emphasising that fermentation is a form of cultural revival – a way to engage with food, to take part in cultivation, and to reclaim our dignity and our rights. He reminds us, too, that humans do not stand outside the living world; we exist in symbiosis with all living things, and fermentation is a beautiful expression of that symbiosis between people and nature.

III. Sandorkraut

From a complete beginner to one of the most prolific authors in the field – a walking encyclopaedia of fermentation – Sandor Katz has poured his heart and soul into this work. The Art of Fermentation was not his first book on the subject. His debut was Wild Fermentation, published in 2003, roughly a decade before The Art of Fermentation.

The success of that book gave Sandor the freedom to sell, teach, and travel at the same time, gathering more stories along the way – more fermentation methods, more fermented foods, more tales of regional variation – until they became The Art of Fermentation.

After Wild Fermentation was published, Sandor spent two years on the road across the United States and Australia, interviewing all manner of individuals and communities who were “disobeying” in the food world. He wove their stories of defying food monopolies and homogeneity into The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, and tells us that food must not be artificially heated by microwave.

During the pandemic lockdowns, the indefatigable Sandor turned years of stories gathered from fermentation journeys around the world into Fermentation Journeys, published in 2021.

Though Sandor has written many books on fermentation, he is no academic researcher. In truth, he is a wonderfully laid-back, unbuttoned sort of person.

I once heard Sandor speak at a fermentation festival. Right there in the workshop, he casually whipped up a batch of sauerkraut – red cabbage or purple, it didn’t matter; it didn’t matter whose smallholding it came from either. He chopped it all up and piled it into the bowl without measuring out a single gram of salt, just poured it in, tasted it – “Hmm, needs more salt” – and added some more.

The illustration in this children’s picture book depicts Sandor making fermented food, and it is remarkably true to life.

Sandor is also remarkably unassuming. He writes every single article on his own website, and many of his photographs look wonderfully plain – you can tell at a glance they are not staged: just a handful of loose, still-dripping sauerkraut held in his hands.

And yes, that is Sandorkraut himself.

Sauerkraut made Sandor. He earned the nickname “Sandorkraut” because he was everywhere, leaning close to people’s ears and urging them: “Make sauerkraut!” The Sandor of thirty years ago could never have imagined that he would become a day-in, day-out missionary for fermentation.

For Sandor, fermentation is also a metaphor that reaches straight to life and death.

Sandor was once HIV-positive. During the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s, he was living in New York and lost many close friends and fellow community members. He has written repeatedly about witnessing the deaths of friends and family members, sharing those experiences and reflections on life and death with his readers.

Sandor himself healed and sustained his life by changing how he lived – through farming, through making sauerkraut and other fermented foods – restoring his body and renewing his own life.

● Sun Shan and her husband Li Bo at the Ontario Fermentation Festival, posing for a photo with Sandor Katz.
In a sense, when we turn a head of white cabbage into sauerkraut, the cabbage dies – yet it is also reborn. As “Sandorkraut, the sauerkraut maker”, his life’s journey and his return to the land, his breaking free of isolation, and his rebuilding of connections with the living world are all of a piece. Fermentation truly gave him a second life.

IV. “Keep Fermenting!”

More than a decade ago, a chance encounter led Sandor to accompany a Chinese-American mother and her daughter on a visit to Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan – China’s fermentation frontier. The entire journey was filmed as an eight-part documentary, A Journey through People’s Republic of Fermentation. When the group first arrived in China and were strolling through the streets of Chengdu, they spotted a string of air-dried cured sausages hanging from the window of a woman surnamed Ding. Auntie Ding and her husband warmly welcomed the three visitors with home-cooked Chengdu favourites and agreed to be interviewed for the film. The camera captured her making Sichuan pao cai from start to finish, so the first episode of People’s Republic of Fermentation is titled “Auntie Ding’s Sichuan Pao Cai”.

Inspired by “Auntie Ding’s Pao Cai”, I have started sharing the art of making Sichuan pao cai in local fermentation workshops here in Canada too. My method is the one my father taught me.

In North America, most people have never heard of Sichuan pao cai. Auntie Ding and Sandor really brought it into the spotlight, so I also share my own story with pao cai, China’s story with pao cai – hoping to break down more “barriers” between cultures and cuisines.

● Sun Shan organising a pao cai fermentation workshop in Canada.

Over the past eight years, I have run small ecological farms in two areas of Ontario, Canada, producing certified organic vegetables and turning the produce from our own land and that of fellow growers into all kinds of fermented foods.

I am from the north; my husband, Li Bo, is from Yunnan. I grew up immersed in the culture of fermented bean curd; he grew up steeped in the culture of soured pickled vegetables. Many of the fermentation techniques we use draw on the traditional methods we both grew up with, while we also experiment with new approaches we have learned along the way.

There is so much to learn along this journey, including the connection between fermentation and family that Sandor explores in his book.

This process does not move from the outside in – it moves from the inside out. It begins in our gut, with our microbiome. “Start with a jar of sauerkraut – from the inside out, slowly and gently rebuilding the connection between body and land, food, and the natural world.”

So keep fermenting! Keep fermenting!

● Scan the QR code on the poster to watch the replay of the first The Art of Fermentation reading group session.

Foodthink Contributor
Sun Shan
Currently running Chi Garden, an ecological farm and fermentation kitchen in Ottawa. A graduate in ecology from Peking University, she founded the university’s first nature and environmental protection society, the Green Life Association, and later earned a Master’s degree in Environmental and Public Policy from George Mason University in the United States. After several years working across research institutes, environmental organisations, the sustainability sector and non-profits, she is Chair of the Shan Shui Conservation Center.

 

 

Transcription: Shanwei

Editor: Ze’en

Published by Foodthink