When Cabbage Becomes Sauerkraut
Foodthink Says
I. Fermentation: Part Science, Part Art
The English original of *The Fermentation Bible* is titled *The Art of Fermentation*, literally meaning ‘the art of fermentation’. Why choose ‘art’ over ‘science’?
For someone with a biology background like myself, fermentation is fundamentally a highly scientific process. Take, for instance, the well-established fact that once acidity reaches a certain threshold—specifically, when the pH drops below 4.6—harmful bacteria cannot thrive. Consequently, fermented foods such as sauerkraut are classified as low-risk under Canadian farmers’ market guidelines and food safety regulations.
Many people place undue faith in the ‘science’ of fermentation and harbour deep concerns over the safety of homemade batches. They worry whether kimchi, home-brewed drinks, or soybean pastes might cause stomach upsets, or if their own creations could be toxic. Finding food culture altogether too complex, they conclude it is far simpler to leave fermentation to industrial producers.
In reality, whether one is fermenting vegetables, grains, or meat, the process inherently involves collaborating with microorganisms, and the industrial sector is no exception. Manufacturers must base their safety protocols on established fermentation trials and data. Regulatory frameworks worldwide reflect this principle: for instance, a traditional fermentation strain must have a documented history of safe use in a given region over an extended period, with no recorded food safety incidents, before it can be approved for standardised mass production.
While fermentation is undoubtedly a scientific transformation, it rarely unfolds exactly as predicted. You may fail to replicate the ‘standard’ flavour associated with traditional methods, and you might even doubt your own skills. Yet, this unpredictability is precisely what makes fermented foods so captivating: each batch is unique and will never be quite the same. Navigating the process by consulting older generations at home, tapping into fermentation communities, and seeking advice is endlessly rewarding.
This captures the central thesis of The Art of Fermentation: fermentation is an art of collaboration with nature and microorganisms.
For author Sandor Katz, fermentation is more than the biological transformation of food by microbes; it is also a social practice. Foodthink’s “Fermentation Awakening Festival”, launched this October, naturally extends beyond the fermentation of food to explore the fermentation of community and culture.
Fermentation is science, art, and community work all at once. By taking this opportunity to connect with fermentation enthusiasts, we stand to gain immensely.
II. Why Do We Need Fermentation?
As large-scale industrial food production becomes the norm, the traditional cultures and crafts associated with food are gradually fading away.
Take China, for instance. Just a few decades ago, it was commonplace for households to preserve vegetables, make pickles or brined greens. People in Sichuan and Chongqing would brew doubanjiang (fermented bean and chilli paste), those in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions specialised in huangjiu (yellow wine), Yunnanese would ferment practically everything, and northerners had a fondness for fermented soybean pastes. In every household and neighbourhood, someone knew how to ferment food.
Today, however, fewer and fewer people retain this knowledge. In their place stand vast factories conducting fermentation on an industrial scale. At this rate, we may soon lose fermentation—a craft that has long served as a universal language across cultures.
This is precisely why Sandor began sharing his knowledge of fermentation: he hopes to spark a cultural revival through it. In previewing a reading session on *Wild Fermentation*, Foodthink published an excerpt from the book’s foreword, deliberately using the phrase ‘food sovereignty’ in the title. This echoes a practice Sandor has championed for decades—almost a kind of performance art—using fermented foods to reclaim and assert our food sovereignty, and to push back against cultural homogenisation.
We live in an era dominated by global fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. If a portion of chips doesn’t taste like McDonald’s fries, we might half-jokingly question whether we’re eating chips at all. In a food landscape so monolithic, homogenised and stripped of character, why does Sandor continually return to themes of microorganisms, culture, and the symbiosis of life throughout *Wild Fermentation*?
To begin with, I’d like to share two pages that I found particularly striking.
III. Sandorkraut
*The Big Book of Ferments* is not his first book on the subject. His debut, *Wild Fermentation*, was published in 2003, roughly a decade before *The Big Book of Ferments*.
The success of that first book gave Sandor the freedom to travel, sell copies, and share his knowledge, allowing him to gather insights from around the world. He used these experiences to document a wider array of fermentation techniques, dishes, and regional variations, culminating in *The Big Book of Ferments*.
Following the publication of *Wild Fermentation*, Sandor spent two years travelling across the United States and Australia, interviewing individuals and communities who were actively resisting the status quo in the food system. He wove these accounts of challenging food monopolies and homogenisation into *The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved*, making the case that food should never be subjected to artificial heating methods like microwaves.
During the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tireless Sandor channeled years of global travel and fermentation tales into *Fermentation Journeys*, published in 2021.
Despite authoring numerous books on fermentation, Sandor is hardly a stereotypical academic. In truth, he is wonderfully informal and utterly unpretentious.
I once attended a talk he gave at a fermentation festival where he demonstrated how to make sauerkraut off the cuff. He didn’t care whether the cabbages were red or purple, or which smallholding they came from. He simply chopped them up, tossed them into a bowl, and added salt by eye—no precise measurements required. He’d take a taste, pause, and remark: “Hmm? Not salty enough. A little more, then.”
The illustration in this children’s picture book captures Sandor in his element, preparing fermented foods, and is wonderfully vivid.
Sandor maintains a distinctly low profile. He writes every article on his own website, and many of his photos have a wonderfully unvarnished quality—you can tell at a glance they aren’t staged. There he is, holding a loose handful of sauerkraut, with brine still dripping down.
That, in a nutshell, is “Sauerkraut Sandor” himself.
Sauerkraut shaped who Sandor is. He earned the moniker “Sauerkraut Sandor” simply because he couldn’t stop urging anyone within earshot to “make sauerkraut.” Thirty years ago, he might never have imagined that he would become a full-time evangelist for fermentation, spreading the gospel of cultures and brines every single day.
For Sandor, fermentation is also a profound metaphor for life and death.
Sandor is HIV positive. During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, he was living in New York and watched many of his closest friends and community members pass away. He has written openly about these losses, sharing his personal reflections on mortality and the fragility of life with his readers.
As for himself, Sandor turned to a radical lifestyle change: farming, growing his own food, and making fermented dishes like sauerkraut. Through these practices, he restored his health and found a way to sustain and extend his own life.
Fermentation, in truth, granted him a second life.
IV. “Keep Fermenting!”
Shortly after arriving in China, while wandering the streets of Chengdu, the group spotted a woman surnamed Ding with wind-dried sausages hanging outside her window. Auntie Ding and her husband generously hosted the trio with traditional Chengdu cuisine. They also welcomed the camera crew, allowing the filmmakers to document her entire process of making Sichuan pickles. As a result, the first episode of *The Fermentation Republic* was aptly titled *Auntie Ding’s Sichuan Pickles*.
Inspired by *Auntie Ding’s Pickles*, I now share the method for making Sichuan pickles in local fermentation classes across Canada. It is a technique passed down from my father.
Across North America, most people remain unfamiliar with Sichuan pickles. Auntie Ding and Sandor helped spark a wider interest, which is why I also share my personal connection to pickling, alongside China’s own pickling heritage, in the hope of breaking down more cultural and culinary “barriers”.
For the past eight years, I have managed small-scale ecological farms across two regions in Ontario, Canada. I grow certified organic vegetables, transforming both my own harvest and produce from fellow growers into a variety of fermented foods.
Being originally from northern China, I was raised in a culture steeped in fermented bean curd (*jiang doufu*), while my husband, Li Bo, hails from Yunnan and grew up surrounded by the tradition of pickled vegetables (*suan yan cai*). The fermentation processes we employ often honour these familiar, inherited techniques, whilst we also experiment with new methods we have learned along the way.
This journey is rich with lessons, not least the profound connection between fermentation and family life that Sandor explores in his writing.
This is not a transformation that works from the outside in, but rather from the inside out. It begins in our gut, within our microbiome. “It starts with tending a single jar of fermented cabbage—gradually and gently rebuilding, from the inside out, the bond between our bodies, the earth, our food, and the natural world.”
So, keep fermenting! Keep fermenting!
Written by: Shanwei
Edited by: Zhen