Fermentation is Low-Tech
This has finally become a series. I feel the need to explain (even to myself) why I am so hooked up to fermentation. Even the definition of the word is confused and heterogeneous. For this reason, I will collect some posts tackling the subject from various perspectives. I will try to explain what fermentation is and why it is so important to me. The format, as you guessed it, will be called Fermentation is …
During the last year, I came in contact with the Low-Tech movement. It is not something very well defined and there are whole essays 1 2 trying to describe it.
To sum it up, its main focus is to revisit the relationship between society and technology. The main idea is that by simplifying the tools, anybody would be able to understand them and use them with better awareness. This would have a whole set of advantages: a more sober use of resources, a more inclusive society, a more clear purpose for workers, and so on. One of the main common references in these essays is Ivan Illich, with the concept of conviviality and convivial tools.3
Another great reference for the Low-Tech approach is the Solar Powered website of Low-Tech Magazine4. If you dive into the great articles published there, you will probably notice a familiar keyword somewhere and that’s for a reason. Fermentation is Low-Tech in many aspects and here I will discuss them.
the opposite of high-tech
The dominant approach to food in industrial countries is the obsession with sterilization. Everything that is not pasteurized or sterile in some way, is seen as a health risk. This is closely linked to refrigeration, which is an essential technology nowadays. Some common foods, though, are intrinsically fermented, but their process is seen as mysterious magic, like most high-tech processes. Bread, alcoholic beverages, cured meat, just to name a few. However, even they are commonly sterilized as well, before they arrive on the consumer’s table.
Despite being more modern, it is not as efficient as it seems. In this context high-tech, as it usually does, locks the consumer into a very expensive system that is more advantageous for the production processes, than for the final result. This approach is very expensive in terms of energy, because of refrigeration, but also in terms of food waste. Sterilization, ironically, makes the food less stable and more susceptible to external pathogens in the form of uncontrolled fermentation. This is why it is so important to respect rigorously the cold chain as well as expiration dates. Nowadays the main household food preservation techniques also involve sterilization and canning. But most people don’t consider that it is also the most delicate and risky way of doing that. If not done perfectly (e.g. wrong temperature, jar not hermetically closed), the smallest contamination, could spread very easily into the food, making it unsafe to eat.
an easy solution to food preservation
How could people survive without a refrigerator back then? Did they eat only fresh food? Were they more used to eating rotten food? Or do they just die young because of food poisoning? The answer is in fermentation itself. As I like to look at it, the answer is to embrace it. In fact, as for plants or fungi, not all microbes are bad for us, only some of them. By studying and practicing fermentation processes I discovered that they are way easier to manage and safer than killing all microbes in food. For example, one of the easiest ways of preserving vegetables is lacto-fermentation. It is enough to add some salt and make sure that the solid parts are submerged in the brine, to make sure that the food is safe. With this technique, anybody can preserve any vegetable for longer than a year. Adding salt creates an environment, where only some kinds of bacteria can thrive. These are called lactobacilli because they are a special kind of bacteria that transform sugars into lactic acid. The effects of this process create an acidic environment, that thanks also to salt, is not suitable for the development of undesired microbes.
This is just one (very simple) technique, but there exist many others, that can be implemented literally in any household. This is a perfect example of a convivial tool, a tool that anybody can understand and put into use to become more aware of the food we’re eating and less reliant on expensive technologies that monopolize our everyday lives.
a (mostly) forgotten tradition
The refrigeration era didn’t just kill all the microbes in our food, but also the millennial tradition and knowledge that let people preserve food and eat it throughout all seasons. Some are lost forever, along with the culture of people. Some are still used and practiced, and some have even turned into industrial processes.
However, some studies state that microbes are not only part of our traditions and practices but also our very genome since we evolved together with them. A good example is alcoholic beverages. They are produced by yeasts from sugar. Alcohol is toxic for many animal species, but for others it’s safe, since they assumed it for a very long time, enough to adapt to it. In many cases, we even bred them to make them more suitable for the use we needed. It is the case of Koji, a Japanese mold, which is white because producers isolated the albino strain, which was easier to inspect and make sure was growing correctly. It is used for so many purposes that it would need a dedicated post.
Fermentation techniques are rapidly disappearing in favor of industrial processes. This is a sad loss, comparable to the one of cultivars or animal species. We can say that by losing this connection with the microbial world, we lose a part of ourselves.
think global, act local
All around the world, there are plenty of fermentation practices. Now we can know them, by easily getting in contact with other people, with totally different cultures and traditions. This is a great opportunity to enrich the local agricultural productions with new techniques. Like kimchi with sauerkraut, garums with miso. This is already a common practice in fine dining like they commonly do at Noma 5. The next step would be to bring this approach, as a practice, to the daily life of the common person.
This is another important aspect of the low-tech movement. Sharing knowledge in an open-source way, in order to make anyone capable of using it.
Mateus, Q., & Roussilhe, G. (2023). Perspectives Low-Tech. éditions divergences↩︎
Lefebvre, O. (2023). Lettre aux Ingénieurs qui doutent. Éditions L’échappée↩︎
Illich, I. (1974). Tools for Conviviality. Harper & Row↩︎
De Decker, K. LOW←TECH MAGAZINE. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/↩︎
Redzepi, R., & Zilber, D. (2018). The Nome Guide to Fermentation. Artisan Books↩︎
