Ferments for Health

And the many facets through which we view our bodies

This is the fourth installment of the Our Fermented Lives book club for paid subscribers.

Our book club includes weekly discussions through the month of January, plus a live author Q&A session and over 60 pages of never-before-shared material from early drafts of the book, footnotes and rambling historical asides intact.

If you don’t have a copy of Our Fermented Lives yet, you can snag one from your favorite local bookseller or from Bookshop.

The car packed with future ferments for my book launch party

Chapter Four: Ferments for Health

When I was writing about health, I ran into some of the same considerations I ran into with flavor: Did I want to provide a distant, objective birds eye view? Or did I want to write something that people feel invested in and that makes them curious about their bodies and their world?

Writing about health in particular introduces a conundrum because you want to make it clear that you are talking about health and medicine but not offering your reader medical advice. This is easier to avoid in a historical discussion than a contemporary one. To use a non-fermentation example, if I’m talking about herbs used to “treat” hysteria (talk about a case in point of sexist medical history), you probably aren’t going to assume that I’m offering you advice for how to fix your wandering uterus.

But when I talk about foods we’re still eating today, and the health benefits we’ve long derived from them, a bit of intentionality is required (as Sandor Katz says, no food is a panacea, ferments included).

I also wanted to include non-Western medical systems, and to discuss how ferments continue to be a part of medicine not just for probiotics. A big theme of the chapter is balance, as well as intentionally considering the lenses through which we view health and the various social and personal contexts undergirding our perspectives.

In our materials for the week, I include the text of a poem that helped me understand our ancestors’ relationship to microbes centuries and centuries ago, as well as an excerpt from another one of my books (Afternoon Tea: A History) that relates to the Our Fermented Lives drafts.

There’s so much to cover here, so let’s go ahead and dive into our resources and questions!