You're listening to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture podcast. I'm Alicia Kennedy, a food writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Every week on Wednesdays, I'll be talking to different people in food and culture about their lives, careers and how it all fits together and where food comes in.

This week, I'm talking to Sandor Katz, whom you likely know from his books Wild Fermentation, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, The Art of Fermentation, Fermentation As Metaphor, and now Sandor Katz's Fermentation Journeys, which maps fermentation practices around the world, to show how traditions that preserve abundance have been maintained. It's perhaps my favorite of his books, because it tells so many stories through fermentation and introduces you to so many people around the world. 

Katz has become a legend for his work, but he maintains humility as a conduit of knowledge rather than a keeper. His approach is a real inspiration to me. It was wonderful to get to talk to him about how he organized this book by substrate rather than nation, that why he names the ills of neocolonialism, and a lot more. 

Alicia: Hey, Sandor. Thank you so much for being here with me today.

Sandor: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Sandor: Well, I grew up in New York City, on the Upper West Side. And we ate all kinds of things. I feel very lucky that my parents liked different kinds of foods. They liked vegetables. We ate lots of different kinds of fresh vegetables. 

But I mean, I would say that my mom did most of the day to day cooking. She had her repertoire. I remember she liked to make pot roast. Sometimes she made great lasagna, but also lots of kind of simple things that she would leave me a note as I got older, just to reheat something. ‘Set the oven to this temperature, put this in the oven.’ My father also liked to cook. He was more of the classic weekend chef. But that also meant that he could be—He was very creative in his cooking. And he's 87 years old now. And he still loves to cook. 

And we were in New York City, and we ate Chinese food a lot. China-Latina food, the Cuban Chinese restaurants, we ate them a lot. My mother's parents, who I was close with growing up, were immigrants from what's now Belarus. And my grandmother was a great cook. And she would come over from time to time and make blintzes for us, I mean, she would make dozens of them. And we’d eat some fresh, and then she’d wrap them up and put them in the freezer. And we would defrost them and fry them to eat them. She made a chopped liver. She made matzah ball soup, gefilte fish, all these kind of classic Eastern European Jewish foods. We ate really beautiful versions of them at home.

Alicia: And you've written mostly about fermentation now, to kind of fast forward in life. But I also love your book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, which came out in 2006. And I wanted to ask, because I recently reread it, how do you feel about the food movement it described in 2006 now in 2022?

Sandor: Well, I guess one thing I would say is that it doesn't describe a food movement. It describes a lot of different, grassroots movements. And I mean, I guess, some of them have been more successful over time than others have been. I mean, I think very much, it's not a centralized movement with a singular aim. I think people who get involved in grassroots movements or organized around food have a lot of different ideas and a lot of different objectives. 

I mean, certainly the local food movements have been very successful. And there's a lot in most parts of the U.S. at any rate, there's a lot more variety of locally grown foods available. In some places, I think that there have been more successful efforts to make that accessible. I've visited some farmers’ markets where they take EBT card, and they have some sort of a grant so they're able to double the value of the EBT purchases. So at least in some places, people have been making strides towards making that higher quality locally produced foods accessible to people.

In the seed-saving movements, I mean, I think that there's sort of been amazing strides. And a lot of different people doing seed saving at different scales with different emphases. But I’m really inspired by this project called Truelove Seeds. I buy a lot of seeds from them. And they're working primarily with immigrant and refugee gardeners and with African American farmers and trying to save and spread seeds of different kinds of culturally important crops. 

If we look at the big picture of centralization of production and retailing, that's only getting worse. If we look at issues of wasteful packaging, that's only gotten worse. So I mean, I think, as much as in 2006, more so than in 2006, we need grassroots activism around food.

Alicia: To get to your latest books, Sandor Katz's Fermentation Journeys, it begins with drinking palm wine in Africa and talking about how traditional techniques are so different from the sterile, literally and figuratively, approach in the West. And this inevitably related to how people respond to fermentation, as well as alcohol. 

And so, how in your work have you adapted the traditional, more organic approaches to talk to an audience that might be skittish about fermentation? You talk about this in the book, when you go see the Chinese Chef Guan, who stirs in mold that forms on the top of his pickles, when many people new to fermentation would throw the whole crock out.

Sandor: Well, I mean, honestly, this is really what drew me into fermentation education. And the first time I was invited to teach a fermentation workshop was—which was in 1998, just because I had gotten interested in fermentation and not particularly had any fear about it. It really struck me at that first workshop, when one of the students picked up a jar of the vegetables that we just shredded and stuffed into the jars. And she said, ‘How can I be sure I have good bacteria growing in here, and not some dangerous bacteria that might make me sick, or even kill somebody?’

And I started to realize how easy it is, for people who've grown up with the idea that bacteria are so dangerous, it's easy to project this generalized anxiety about bacteria onto the process of fermentation, which actually is and always has been a strategy for safety in food. So I feel that's part of what drew me into fermentation education was the idea of demystifying this process for people.

So I'm always trying to tell people that like, ‘Oh, you can just skim off the top layer if it gets funky.’ But I also like to let people know that they have options. There do exist very effective technologies for, let's say, protecting the surface of your fermenting vegetables from oxygen. I tell them why I don't use them. Because if you like to smell it, and taste it as it develops, every time you open it up, you're letting the air and the oxygen in and kind of defeating the purpose of your specially engineered vessel or system. But there are options. And people who are really squeamish about that, they can ferment anyway. And there are ways that you can avoid that. But I also try to emphasize that, really, it's harmless, and just skim off the top layer. Don't throw the whole thing away.

Alicia: Right. 

Have people gotten a little bit more, as fermented products have become kind of more commonplace, especially in the US. Everyone's eating kimchi all the time. Everyone's drinking kombucha. Have people gotten a little more easygoing about fermentation, or a bit more interested in it?

(9) Sandor: Well, sure, sure. 

I would say since roughly 2011, maybe every year I've seen lists of the hot new trends in food that include fermentation. That always makes me chuckle a little bit, because fermentation is ancient. The products of fermentation have had enduring appeal. And if you think about ferments like bread, cheese, beer, wine, vinegar, they were just as prominent in our great-grandparents’ time as they are now. It's just that more people are aware of the process by which they are created. They're aware of fermentation. And I think that has everything to do with the microbiome and growing awareness that bacteria are not just our dangerous enemies, but they actually are our symbiotic partners, and we need them in order to function well. But people don't always know when to welcome them and when to fear them.

Alicia: Of course, yeah. 

Well, I'm so struck. And this, I think, is related to the fact that fermentation is this ancient practice that no one can really own. But your writing and practice has such an openness that reminded me of Samantha Saville's