Fermentation
Olga Goriunova
This is a longer version of an entry written for More Posthuman Glossary, Eds.
Rosi Braidotti, Emily Jones and Goda Klumbyte
(London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021).
Living with kefir is difficult. I start with a few grains. There are not enough for the
quantity of milk in the jar, and the kefir is watery. The grains keep growing. Now,
the kefir is good. The grains keep growing. Only a day later, the kefir they make is
too sour. There are too many grains in the jar. What to do with extra grains? The
grains keep growing. I get a second jar. There is now too much kefir. I become
irritated. The grains keep growing. They demand attention. They make me feel
guilty. I can’t throw living things down the toilet. Guilt makes me angry. I am now
angry at bacteria that take care of me.
The theme of fermentation ties together emotional investment in some of
the most intimate aspects of culture, such as food, with primeval biochemical
metabolisms core to cellular life before the existence of the atmosphere; the politics
of the food industry with the diversity of locations and cultures, many under threat
of extinction; the genomics revolution and biology’s fascination with bacteria with
critical theory’s de-centring of the subject, multispecies living, and an anti-fascist
commitment to impurity. All in all, fermentation unites some of the most abstract
scientific theories with personal politics, conceptual commitments and activism.
This entry will consider some of these points while recognising that the fermenting
topic itself will always exceed the vessel of a short text.
Making kefir, sauerkraut, miso, beer, wine and kombucha are practices of
fermentation, i.e. working with bacteria and yeasts (fungus) to achieve a
transformation in food or beverage, whether at home or on industrial scale. Used by
humans from the Neolithic age, fermentation has a range of meanings: from a
narrow definition in biochemistry that refers to anaerobic process of energy release
to a wider use in food-making (or composting) which covers any microbial process,
with or without oxygen. In strictly biochemical terms, the process of fermentation
refers to the use of carbohydrates to produce energy without the presence of
oxygen. With oxygen, the generation of energy starts with glycolysis, where glucose
is converted into pyruvic acid that is used to generate adenosine triphosphate
(ATP), which delivers energy to cells. Without oxygen, lactic acid is produced,
which also leads to ATP. Fermentation, thus, is anaerobic respiration. Microbes
and individual cells have the ability to switch between two different modes of
respiration: the fermentation mechanism is present in cells in “higher” organisms.
We feel the results of fermentation in our muscles when they ache from lactic
acid produced during intense exercise.
Fermentation was the main method of energy-production before the
presence of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. It is the oldest “metabolic pathway”
that unites eukaryotes (cells with nucleus enclosed within a nuclear envelope) and
bacteria (prokaryotes without the envelope). Margulis and Sagan write, “When
stressed, our bodies … ‘remember’ the times before the atmosphere became
suffused with oxygen. Such physiological flashbacks re-present past
environmental conditions and the bodies that evolved to live in them” (Margulis,
Sagan, 1995, 66).
This capacity shared between prokaryotes and eukaryotes makes
fermentation not only a process that occurs in the human gut, which should be
attended to for healthy living, but also a lense for the form of attention that gave
birth to the hypothesis of symbiogenesis. The collective work of its development
from Konstantin Mereschkowski’s proposal dating from 1905 to the labours of
indomitable Lynn Margulis, whose paper was published in 1967 after multiple
rejections, was widely supported only in the 1980s, after the development of quick
DNA analyses, which showed that organelles of complex cells (like organs within a
cell enclosed in their own lipid barriers) had different genetic signatures from those
in cell nuclei (McFall-Ngai, 2017, M54). The theory of symbiogenesis claims that
organelles in complex cells with nuclei were once independent bacteria
(prokaryotes) before becoming assimilated into other organisms. Lynn Margulis’s
fascination with bacteria and work on the origin of eukaryotic cells changed
contemporary biology and had a huge resonance in cultural theory (Margulis, 2002).
It challenged linear evolution, the neo-Darwinian focus on competition as the driver
of change and the classificatory impulse of reason running from Aristotle to
Linnaeus and Whittaker’s five-kingdom model. Emphasising the importance of
cooperation in evolution and undermining essentialist ideas of autonomy and
wholeness of species or individuals, endosymbiosis (“living together on the inside”)
inspired affect theory (Clough, 2008), work on gender and reproduction (Parisi,
2004), body theory, bioethics and the cultural analysis of chimerism (Shildrik, 2015).
The conceptual effervescence of contemporary biology in its focus on
bacteria continues being a great resource for critical thinkers. One book that brings
them together, The Arts of Living on the Damaged Planet, emphasises the
importance of bacteria for life on earth, with nitrogen-fixing bacteria living in
symbiosis with the roots of legumes feeding everyone, and sulphide-oxydising
bacteria sustaining low oxygen marine environments. The genomics revolution
allowed biologists to see that humans are literally made of microbes: at least 50% of
cells in a human body are bacteria. Biologist Scott F. Gilbert presents a 6-point
argument to demonstrate the difficulty in conceptualising animals as “individuals”
(rather than holobionts - an “an organism plus its persistent communities of
symbionts”, M74): animals are not whole in terms of their genetic, immunological,
anatomical, developmental, physiological or evolutionary individuality. Bacteria
bring 8 million more genes to the DNA of the human body; they are key for body
development, metabolism and the building of our immune systems. “We are
multilineage organisms” (Gilbert, 2017, M83). Bacteria, thus, not only sustain life but
also create an understanding of being that is profoundly porous, symbiotic,
relational, cooperative and incomplete.
Work on bacteria, funguses and viruses is not only the preserve of biologists
and critical theorists. Understanding the importance of bacterial and mycorrhizal
fungi webs in topsoil (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) is foundational to indigenous and
traditional knowledge and to movements such as permaculture (Mollison and
Holmgren, 1978), do-nothing farming (Fukuoka), and the use of growing techniques
such as agroforestry (forest gardening), urban and suburban permaculture,
Hügelkultur (burying wood in growing beds) and many others. These are the
practices of living well with microbes. They extend from planting in gardens or
guerrilla gardening with a view to bacteria, as well as to bees and other insects, to
fermenting food in kitchens.
During my Soviet childhood in the 1980s, the time of various deficits,
including of food, I ate large amounts of sauerkraut, gherkins and fermented
tomatoes. In the autumn, my parents would ferment cabbage in 30 kg batches. It
would last us through winter and spring, when vegetables and fruit were scarce. My
family also made kvass (a non-alcoholic drink from fermented rye bread), cherry
liqueur, and a tea drink that I only recently learned is equivalent to kombucha (it is
known as Chainyi Grib, literally tea mushroom, in Russia). We also fermented apples
and watermelons. In the kitchen, something was always brewing, accompanied by
fruit flies. Growing food and preserving it by fermentation was a key element in
sustenance across the territory of the Soviet Union. Love for some of fermented
food is still strong. Kefir, which was obtained at the beginning of the 20th century
from the Northern Caucasus and spread globally via Russia, is extremely popular,
together with other fermented dairy and vegetables. However, as the great
populariser of fermentation Sandor Ellix Katz reminds us, the barrier that separates
fermentation from rotting is cultural (Katz, 2016, 2020). Practices of fermenting and
aging marine mammal products in Chukotka (Bering Strait region of Russia and
Alaska) were almost annihilated during the Soviet times when the smell and taste of
such food appeared undesirable (Yamin-Pasternak et al. 2014). Here, indigenous,
traditional knowledges are under the threat of extinction sharing the fate, if not of
bacteria then of insects, fish, and other living beings. Fermentation can be enjoyed
by connoisseurs lucky to live in areas with long-standing traditions of cheese, or of
beer and wine-making, which appreciate unique strains of yeasts that only occur in
the soils and plants of those regions (part of the concept of terroir) or can be
deplored as disgusting when non-conforming to the dominant modern taste. With
fermentation, however, even homogenisation is not linear: Swedes, for instance,
love their fermented herring, surströmming, which is supposed to be one of the most
pungent foods. While fermentation is a knot that ties together privilege and
resources for taking care of one’s health and savoire vivre with traditional practices
of healthy survival under threat from intensive farming and fast food, there is no
denying that fermentation is key to the art of living and eating.
While this entry is getting way too long, it is worth saying a bit more about
fermentation, nutrition and food (see also Katz 2017). Fermentation preserves
nutrients, but also breaks them into a more digestible form; it is a kind of pre-
digestion (Mollison, 1993). Fermentation can reduce or eliminate toxic compounds
found in roots, grains and legumes, which is especially important for equatorial
Africa and Asia relying on cassava that can contain toxins. It creates new nutrients,
including B vitamins, with ferments having anti-oxidant and anti-carcinogenic
effects. Fermented foods boost gut microbiota, improving immune function and
mental health. Katz mentions studies showing that live-culture foods improved
infant survival rates in Tanzania and generally reduced diarrhoea episodes (Binita,
Khetarpaul, 1998). While the whole world is undergoing “the nutrition transition”
(Popkin et al., 2012), feeding on a global standard diet (Khoury et al., 2014),
becoming fat and living fast (Popkin, 2009, Wilson, 2019), the knack of fermentation
is going the way of other food habits - out of existence. Linking to the food justice
and social inequality concerns of food and fat studies, fermentation maintains
heterogeneity - in bodies, cultures, environments - reorganising the ontologically-
weighted distribution of the luck of being born and to live in a certain place, be of a
certain ethnicity, gender and class.
Heterogeneity also includes ambivalence. Bacteria are not humans’
benevolent angels. Apart from producing nutrients, vitamins and enzymes,
fermentation also generates carbon dioxide and methane. The methane produced
in cattle’s rumen is a substantial contributor to global warming. The politics of food,
animal rights, ecological activism and the business of laboratory-grown protein are
also brought together by fermentation, but differently again. Fermentation is also
not ontologically anti-capitalist: it is, for instance, core to the production of cacao
and coffee - the beans of which ferment in the pulp of the fruit before being
processed - and which are some of the key foods that drove colonial expansion and
are amongst the most exploitative, inhumane and ecologically disastrous industries
in the world.
A chemical process that unites the cells of my muscles with the making of
vodka, fermentation seems to be in the middle of everything. Personal, political,
biochemical, cultural, conceptual, activist, everyday, abstract, lively and deadly, -
it is a perfect subject of the posthumanities.
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