"Until Further Notice, Celebrate Everything"

An excerpt on fermentation & grief from Dark Mountain 23: Dark Kitchen

I’ve been a longtime reader of Dark Mountain. I was drawn to the publication because I found their assessment of our unravelling world and their efforts to move in integrity from that honesty comforting back when people were still trying to sort out if they “believed in” climate change.

As the mounting troubles of the Anthropocene have become less undeniable, the publication has offered more and more avenues of both grief and repair. The 23rd issue is titled Dark Kitchen and offers “a feast of stories, poetry and artwork that explore food culture in a time of converging ecological crises – from the devouring agricultural machine to the restorative fermenting jar.” It’s a really gorgeous publication and would make a wonderful addition to the library of someone who really *gets* the transformative alchemy of the kitchen.

Manos, Metate y Maíz Azul (Hands, Mortar and Blue Maize) Bacabureachi, Chihuahua, México by David Lauer

My included essay, “Until Further Notice, Celebrate Everything”, is part profile of friend, writer, and fermenter,

Julia Skinner

(whose publication

Root: Historic Food for the Modern World

is a must follow) and part meditation on the transformative capacity of grief. Julia lost her mother, grandmother, and a best friend in the span of a single year, and found solace and something akin to hope in her fermentation practice.

The piece is itself is a truncated version of a chapter from a larger work-in-progress exploring how essential making things is to being a thriving human animal, how the things we shape in turn shape us, and how getting back in touch with our capacity for creation opens a door to a fertile and exciting future - even in the midst of what often feels like a steaming pile of bleakness. I’m not positing scrapbooking will be our salvation or anything, but something in my marrow keeps whispering to me that there’s an abiding, embodied wisdom in our hands that speaks most clearly when we’re making. So buckle up for more on that moving forward…

Because the piece itself is rather long, I’ve included the excerpt I read aloud at the publication launch below as well as the video from the launch itself. If you have a bit of time, check out the full video for some fantastic readings, artwork, and cross-continental conversations. The full essay can be found here or by purchasing a copy of Dark Kitchen.

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(Yours truly can be found at 1:15:25; my efforts at embedding a timestamped video were for naught despite much cursing. Just look for the crazy redhead in the mustard sweater.)

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From “Until Further Notice, Celebrate Everything”:

For Julia, the path through her grief snaked around the backroads of Tennessee. After a few weeks adrift, she was accepted into Sandor Katz’s fermentation residency.

Fermentation may not be grief’s most likely handmaiden, but each process unmakes the world and rebuilds a new one from the rubble. Decomposition is the stock-in-trade of the microorganisms responsible for fermentation’s strange magic. These miniature architects work in reverse. Bacteria, yeasts and fungi chisel apart sugars and starches into alcohols, acids and enzymes. Fermentation unlocks a suite of vitamins, increases the bioavailability of minerals, breaks down anti-nutrients and creates an environment hostile to pathogenic bacteria. Through the chaos of this controlled decay, what would have moldered into rot takes on a vibrant crunch; what might have sickened, nourishes.

In a culture obsessed with individuality, fermentation exposes the lie of the solitary self. We ferry within us an elaborate ecosystem, an entire cosmos. Our cells are, by some accounts, only 43% human. The remainder, the hidden half of us, accounts for most of our DNA. Study after study reveals that the microbiome is responsible for everything from immunity to mental health. We are covered, from eyelash to toenail, in invisible squatters – one hundred trillion of them – whose elaborate comings and goings may determine our wellness. We do, as it turns out, contain multitudes; there are more bacteria in the cloistered coils of our guts than stars pricking our galaxy.

Photo by The Matter of Food on Unsplash

Every jar of sauerkraut is a unique conversation between microbial communities: that of the fermenter, the farmer that cut the cabbage from the soil, the people at the market who palmed its weight and passed it over. Each touch changes the ecosystem that calls the cabbage home, ever so slightly altering the final flavor of the ferment. The ingredient list for a jar of sauerkraut may be brief – cabbage, salt – but in truth, it encompasses entire lineages.

If you’re paying attention, the depth of this connection can feel dangerous. To recognize everything as kin renders you vulnerable to a host of heartbreaks. Climate change. Late-stage capitalism. Mass extinction. We are beset on all sides by loss – of cultures, creatures, certainty. The grief is so overwhelming that we pathologize or anesthetize it to banish it from our consciousness. We amputate whole slabs of experience in an eagerness to distance ourselves from discomfort.

But fermentation whispers that death is not a diminishment. It hitches us in intimacy to everything. After all, decomposition does not end life but merely makes it fractal. Each of us carries the engine of our own transformation within us from the moment we slip into this human skin until microbes rename us, too. 

Grief charts the territory where love has lived. It reveals the holy, messy tapestry of relation. In the same way that it’s revolutionary and subversive in the Frigidaire Age to leave crocks percolating on the counter, filling the kitchen for days with the pungent smells of decay turned delicacy, it’s equally radical to invite the pain and ecstasy of grief for the world into our experience. And in the liberated laboratory of Katz’s backwoods cabin, Julia found a spell allowing her to reach across time, distance and even death.

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Following the launch, I was contacted by the lovely and inquisitive Hazel Kahan. On her Tidings radio program on WPKN, an independent community radio station out of CT celebrating its 60th year in operation, she interviews people from all walks of life to better understand what moves them through the world. We had a wonderful conversation exploring the importance of the handmade in an unraveling world, the danger of “skills amnesia,” the ways in which fermentation builds community, and so much more. You can check out the interview and her other compelling conversations on her website or below.