Our final book club session

On community and the future

First up: Our Food Traditions zine is ready! Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Give it a peek at this link.

Our next zine-making party will be this spring, and I want your feedback about what we cover. Let me know in this poll what you want to see! (If you pick something else, I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments).

Zine parties are casual gatherings, akin to our 1990s-era zine-making parties but held online. They are free for paid subscribers or $10 a piece if you want to sign up without subscribing.

Our final book club session

This is the fifth and final; installment of the Our Fermented Lives book club for paid subscribers.

Our book club includes weekly discussions through the month of January (and the first week of February), 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.

Infusing vinegar at the Our Fermented Lives book party + vinegar-making class at Archestratus

Community and the Future

It’s easy to throw around the word “community” and have folks nod approvingly without really pausing to interrogate what it means for you, and means for you in that context. We all like community, but rarely do we consider it with the intentionality it deserves. One of my goals with this chapter was to really dig into my own interpretation of community, and to consider the different ways we think about community in different contexts.

This meant coming up with a specific framing for understanding “community,” and for me that meant one that fit the context: So micro-scale (microbial communities) and macro-scale (us). I tried to address community on a smaller, localized scale and its influence on fermentation traditions (e.g. passing on a specific variation in kimchi making within your family/town/kinship group) as well as larger collective community contexts (e.g. the impacts of trade, war, tech, etc.)

Preserving stories was also really important for me: and a big goal of this chapter was not just to show what we’ve done before, but to encourage each reader to become an active participant in history by sharing and saving traditions that are meaningful to them.

We’re at an interesting time right now because on the one hand, we still have these traditions and in some ways are better able to preserve and share them than we could in the past, but we also have a lot of fermentation-specific technological advancements. I think we can live in a world where both exist happily and side-by-side because they occupy different roles in our lives, but I also think preserving traditions is critical so we stay connected to our food and to our ancestors.

This week’s bonus material touches on some of this, but also dives into some of the materials I’m asked for most often (like on fermentation and religion). I can’t wait to hear what you think!