Unplated: an interview with Sophie Strand

On unseen worlds, storytelling, and what we can learn from roots

This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.

Image source: https://www.themythicmasculine.com/episodes/sophie-strand

Sophie Strand is by far one of my favorite writers and thinkers working today, and it’s been such a pleasure to get to know her and to get to talk to her for this issue of Unplated.

I love how she self-identifies on her website: Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.

Sophie’s writing touches on so many things I care about deeply, and our conversations tend to meander across topics, philosophies, and time periods. This is one of my longer interviews, but also one of the most fulfilling as we deep dive into all kinds of exciting rabbit holes exploring everything from unseen microbes to whole forests.

I hope you enjoy!

J:

I wanted to start off asking about your work and its evolution. How did you come to writing, and how did you come to this space of doing this sort of writing you do now?

S:

It’s so interesting because you get asked these questions in slightly different ways, by so many different people, and you’re like, how can I give a better answer? My parents are writers. They’ve taught writing, and they worked in publishing, and they write about the history of religion and spirituality, so I was raised inside a culture of writing where my dad was an authority on haiku poetry and the history of haiku poetry, and he ran a Zen Buddhist magazine called Tricycle that he’s still vaguely associated with today, and so my dad taught me how to count syllables on my fingers and write haiku as a child. That was my introduction to making things where they were both tactile and completely imaginary objects deeply wedded to place. Haiku poetry is about describing place and seasonal observations. It’s very much not about the human, so it was an interesting genesis to think about haiku is actually being the beginning of my practice of writing.

But I always wanted to be a writer. I always knew that I wanted to be a writer of stories, long format historical fiction, textured, sensual, you know. You write about food. I was fascinated with questions like how did they make the wine? How did they make the bread? I wanted to know all the details. I want the book where I can smell and taste everything. But I would say that by the time I got to college, I was in a pretty academic, sterile realm where it seemed like I was going to go the root of just being a straight medievalist who started with codicology and then specified and specified and specified until no one read my work.

But the thing that has kept taking me off of this hyper-sterile academic path has been genetic illness. I became ill when I was 16 and it has oscillated in and out of incredible severity, and so I’d say that these bottleneck events where I get increasingly ill, and it seems like maybe I won’t make it, have often taken me out of this cultural narrative of what I’m supposed to do as a writer, and put a slightly more experimental lens on things where I’m just writing about the subjects that I care about. So a kind of microcosm of that was quarantine.  You know, I was a ghostwriter. I was writing other people’s books, and then I wrote my own book, which I loved and felt very devoted to, and that my agent said was going to sell. It didn’t sell immediately, and my health was very bad, and the world was a mess, and I started doing this experimental writing about the stuff I care most about, and shared it publicly for free in a totally balls-out way, with no sense that it would have any traction with anybody, and I kind of just did it because I was like, why am I waiting to publish if I’m going to die? That’s the answer. I was like, why would I even wait? I’ll just share it right now, and a lot of people showed up, and it became a kind of interactive experience, so that’s a long-winded answer, but yes.

J:

I know I had read about kind of the genesis of your current writing practice, and your mortality really informing the idea that these ideas need to be born into the world, and I’m the one here to do it, and so why am I waiting to put them out here?

But I didn’t know about the haiku part, and it’s so fascinating to me of the physicality of it, the sensuality of it. It reminds me a lot of fermentation and how preparing fermented food requires full sensory engagement. You can’t just be like, oh, I don’t know. I’m making some sauerkraut, whatever. That’s not how it works. You have to get your hands in there and smell the things and taste the things and be fully involved.

S:

You know, there’s always a kind of reflux effect, I think when you’re fermenting something. You’re infusing it with yourself, and it’s impactively infusing into you, so it’s a very sympoetic event. I love that about working with smalls. As you’re working with them, they’re working on you, very intense.

J:

Yes! In my essay on Traces of Use, I thought a lot about the concept of ephemera and palimpsests and all these other kinds of book history terms and how that applies to our microbial relationships because I find it so interesting that food itself is inherently ephemeral, but so are the microbes. Most of the fermentation microbes you eat don’t make it into your gut necessarily. They die beforehand, but their presence still shapes your body, and it’s so cool. I don’t know. They’re just so cool.

S:

I think about this all the time. Even their smell is communicating memories to you, and it’s like a biosemiotics language. It’s reaching your brain and changing the way you think even if it’s not reaching your stomach.

J:

I love that it’s changing the way you think, like the Korean concept of son-mat like you were talking about with hand taste and infusing yourself into the ferment in a reciprocal exchange. In my last book I thought a lot about just how widespread fermentation is.

Every culture has ferments. They’ve had such a big impact on our world. We evolved from bacteria, we need bacteria to live, and this process is everywhere. Everything’s so intertwined, and one thing I like about your writing is that you talk about that, and you also talk about mycelia and take this expansive view of the lessons we can learn from mycelia. Where did you initially get your inspiration to do that, to start thinking in those ways?

S:

I grew up in the woods. I loved fairies. I loved little gross things. I loved mushrooms and dirt and sifting through dirt. I actually wanted to be an archaeologist when I was little. I was obsessed with sifting through dirt and finding stuff, and you could, back where I grew up, find ancient indigenous charcoal, and you could find trilobites, and you could find things that for a little kid were really exciting.

But for me, the thing I love the best were the root systems. I’ve always been obsessed with root systems and with mushrooms, and I didn’t know that root systems evolved from mycorrhizal systems. That came a lot later. But the interesting thing that happened for me was that it wasn’t magic mushrooms that inspired my love of fungi. I think a lot of people think I took psylocibin mushrooms early on, and I laugh. They’re great, but that’s not my focus. For me, mostly, mushrooms seemed, as a poet, to be a lyrical ideogram, just are so metaphorically fertile. They decompose. They mate. They arrive overnight. There are so many ways you can use mushrooms conceptually and practically, you know. So, I was coming at them from an herbal root, learning about them through herbal apprenticeships and walks, and spending a lot of time with them.

I was kind of an amateur mycologist growing up, and the really critical moment happened when I was in college, and I’d arrived at Gilles and Deleuze’s rhizomatic philosophy. I was really using this frame to think through myth and storytelling and developing this kind of loose idea of a triple-lens of looking at storytelling and myths.

I was finally diagnosed with connective tissue disease, and it was this critical, wild moment, you know, of synchronicity where, the mycorrhizal systems in the mycelia are the connective tissue of the soil, and my body had connective tissue issues, so from there on out, I was like, okay, this is something I really have to pay attention to. My body wants me to pay attention to it. I would say that at that moment it became deeply rooted, but it had always been there kind of crawling along the surface like ivy, and then it really put down roots.

J:

Thinking about the body as teacher in that way, the ways that certain plants will appear as our body needs something, is just fascinating. I had a similar thing with pepperweed. I can’t remember what the binomial is, but it just showed up in my yard one day out of nowhere. At the time I had a sore on my arm, and I had this dream where the plant said "Hey, just mash me up in some clay as a poultice." And I did, and then it was gone the next day.

S:

I mean, across the globe, Indigenous cultures know that we have this intuitive ability to interact with the plants and the fungi and the microbes in our environment in ways that heal them and heal us, but we’ve gated that out so hard in our culture.

J:

I think people are starting to get back into reconnecting with plants and fungi, and thanks to Sandor Katz and other folks who have really made it so that the stuff feels safe and accessible, I think more people are reconnecting with microbes. But, I feel like we’re not as far along on the microbial journey, and one thing I really like about your work is that you help people see that journey in an intuitive light and in that way that’s not just didactic.

S:

I think that’s a thing that I do feel is crystallizing around what I want to be able to do. I love science. It’s always been the thing I want to read, and it’s mainly written about terribly. And trying to access it is hard. I mean, there are paywalls up for most scientific articles in general. Often you can’t access the jargon and the terminology and the concepts, but you also actually, legitimately can’t access the articles, and one thing especially with microbiology that I want to do is I feel the poetry when I read the dry work. I feel it in me. I don’t have to do much work to feel it, but I know that that doesn’t translate for a lot of people. So how can I be a vessel of translation for the little teeming beings that are pretty much like the kings and queens and the ancestral empires that undergird everything?

J:

It's interesting to think of our work as an act of service for these beings that we came from. It’s a really powerful way to frame our work and to undergird the importance that these most unseen things are also the most important, and there’s not more important work you could be doing.

S:

Yes. I mean, I really also think that fermentation, for me, has just become this dominant metaphor. I was writing this book about second temple period Palestine, and about vegetal gods and fermentation rites and Yeshua, Rabbi Yeshua, and I was really interested in the spiritual and historical component, but at the end of the day as a poet, I was just like, it’s all fermentation.

J:

Everything is.

S:

I’ve been thinking lately about how life is really just a container. And I’ve been reading this great book called Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon. Have you read this? It’s crazy.

J:

I haven’t, but it looks like it would be right up my alley.

S:

It’s fascinating. I disagree with some parts of it, but mainly I’m just really engaged with the thinking. But the concept he’s bringing forth is that life, individuated self-generating life, depends on a container, and I was thinking that fermentation is this way for human beings to experiment with this idea of the container, of understanding that life needs to be held so it can create these alchemical processes. So, no wonder so many religions and spiritual experiences and civilizations are obsessed with containing these beings that are mostly invisible and watching them “make gold.”

J:

I love that idea of fermentation as alchemy. My favorite definition of fermentation is Sandor Katz’s "the transformative action of microbes" because it embodies what we find most fascinating as humans about the process of microbial interaction. It’s inherently changing. You cannot be a fermentation enthusiast and be stagnant. It just can’t work. You have to be willing to evolve and change and reflect and transform yourself in order to do that.

S:

You risk being changed, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how states of equilibrium are actually states of extraordinary perturbation of cells constantly changing to keep homeostasis in line, and that anything that looks solid actually requires a great amount of microscopic change.

I think microbes teach us about the change that is required for the body to maintain itself and to maintain right relationship with the environment. They show that, yes, things look stable, but behind the scenes, we are changing all the time to keep these things in place.

J:

In some of your recent writing, you’ve talked about these very expansive views of love and home that include things that aren’t what we tend to think of in western culture. Would you be willing to talk a little bit about both what those ideas are, but also how the microbial world fits into that space?

S:

So, I’ve been thinking a lot and was very inspired by Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, especially not even the surface-level fungal story, but the kind of lower-level story about evolution. He says that there are two different refrains in evolution, and one of them is the Darwinian impulse forward and to fork, constantly be differentiating and changing and forking off, but there was this other impulse to fuse, to create an anastomosis, and that’s the genesis of our very cells, which is mitochondria and prokaryotes fusing together.

And so, for me, I’ve been thinking about how perhaps in human history, in deep time, there have been moments where forking was the dominate refrain and was the important thing to do, but that right now we’re in a moment of fusion, and that fusion isn’t about creating homogenized universalisms where differences are erased. It’s more about realizing that we are constituted relationally and that there is a messiness and a constant revision happening biologically, spiritually, and in our embeddedness in our environment.

J:

Like you’ve been talking about, viewing love within those terms and viewing community in those terms is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about in my work, too, and what can we learn from microbes to help us better build community. Mycelial networks are, of course, a great example, but just the microbes themselves and the fact that there’s a keen recognition that even if two microbes do not live their whole lives around each other, simply their passing interaction with each other changes them, and I think we don’t necessarily acknowledge that as humans: How even the briefest connection can have a really profound impact on us, and how when we take that expansive, connective view our community is altered.

Sophie Strand:

And I also think that all of these smalls, these viruses, these bacteria, these spores and fungal systems are all so…they’re so entangled. We study them as separate species, but you know, bacteria are using mycelial networks as highways. You know, they’re all working together, and not in a necessarily collaborative, beautiful, domesticated way. You said they’re sedimenting in each other. They’re changing each other even in these completely brief, flash-in-the-plan moments. Yes. They teach us something about sedimentation, and you know, we’re thinking about this a lot in terms of semantics and trauma that, you know, experience is sediment in the body, and they change the body, but the truth is that everything we do sediments in us and moves through us.

Sometimes people ask: How do I connect to my microbes in an animist way? I want to say well, if you drink, have a glass of wine. Feel how the fumes play you like an instrument. Or ferment something and smell and taste the beings that you’re interacting with as you bring them into the world.

J:

Yes! I always like to have people take just a jar with some honey and water and shake it up and make mead, just shake it every day and then after a few days it's ready. It’s pretty hard to mess it up. You get actual mead at the end, but I really like the symbolism of mead, because you’re using this product [honey] that in and of itself is so powerful and so ritually important to humans, and requires kind of this sort of symbiosis as well and working with something that already has everything you need to ferment within it, literally just add water and there you are.

S:

I know. I think mead, for me, is my favorite fermented beverage, especially because when I was researching Dionysus I was reading about this idea that rainwater infused hives would create mead naturally, and that Dionysus was originally associated with these kind of miraculous fermented hives, and for me, it was just like, that’s the most magical thing: That fermentation can be this emergent property, and sometimes it doesn't need a human to bring it into being. It just needs its shape.

J:

Like you talked earlier about that container, sometimes that container is like a tree.

S:

Exactly. And that the tree and the bees are working to do this fermentation process.

J:

It’s amazing, and I think, like you talked about with Dionysus, there are Viking myths around about mead and all these other kind of mythologies about the sort of wisdom that we get from engaging with these ferments. Or Cerridwen, the Welsh goddess, a similar story but with beer. The fact that by engaging with these microbial beings and drinking these things that make us feel good, we are accessing ancient wisdom that perhaps we’re not even supposed to have. Perhaps it’s only for the gods, but thanks to fermentation, we’re able to experience it.

S:

I think for me, I’m really interested in how we’re living stories that aren’t necessarily human. I always think about people who bring burrs or pollen or something, and they think they’re going somewhere, but perhaps they’re just like the voyaging ship for a burr that needs to travel across seas, wants to travel using the human being, and I thought about civilization as being a fungal, fermented, microbial story. Human beings are the mouthpiece for that story but aren’t necessarily in control of the narrative. A lot of people have written about that, but for me, the problematic aspect is, is civilization good? Is fermentation good? It’s a complicated thing. I don’t know if you’ve come down on any particular stance.

J:

I think when we apply good and bad, we’re asking the world to fit into artificial metrics, and so, but I think that’s what you’re saying, too, about how it’s complicated. I mean, I would argue that fermentation is good.

S:

Yes. I guess I’m thinking more or less about fermentation as a general term and more about alcoholic fermentation.

J:

Oh, yes, definitely agree that one is complicated. I love alcohol: I enjoy drinking it but also recognize histories of addiction in my family, and writ large in human society, and sometimes wonder is my enjoying it worth kind of the pain those people have gone through? The fact that I have insights when I have a glass of wine that inform my writing, or like you said about feeling yourself being played like an instrument, how do those fit in? I feel it’s very beautiful aspect of alcohol, but how do I engage with that?

And of course, the addiction part, I think, is where I really get stuck on kind of the concept of goodness, and it’s not something I’ve struggled with, but I know that it complicates any conversation when I'm talking about alcohol's positive aspects in history. It’s something we’ve been using in all these different ways for thousands of years. I’m not saying go drink a ton of it all the time, but it does have its uses historically and today. It’s okay to acknowledge that this thing that can be unhealthy in large quantities also is a part of our history, too.

S:

Yes! The thing that I’m interested in right now is how these older fermentation gods actually seem to be antithetical to civilization, and that there’s so many ways you can prismatically reflect around alcohol and fermentation in terms of civilization.

You know, Dionysus inspires Spartacus’ revolt against the Romans. It’s interesting to think of these other examples like Jesus as a fermentation god against the Romans, too. So, wine can be seen as the pacifier that keeps people within the bounds of oppressive systems, but it’s also the spark that ignites rebellion.

J:

I love that. Well, and as you were talking, too, something that’s coming to mind for me when thinking about Ceridwen or thinking about Jesus or any of these alcohol-related gods is it seems like part of their power is to place the individual in a place of power, to strengthen the individual. And I think that’s an interesting sort of civilization or not aspect of it, too.

S:

Yes. They bring you back into the woods. They kind of uncivilize you, which is such an interesting thing. Yes. Have you read David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of the New Everything?

J:

I don’t think I have.

S:

It just came out. You would know because it would take you a second to get through it, but the thing that I thought was really interesting was that he seemed to ignore fermentation as being a main impulse behind certain kinds of changes. He would note it, but then wouldn’t analyze what it meant, and the one part that was interesting was mass breweries would often coincide with mass human sacrifice and all these other examples.

J:

You know, I haven’t actually come across anything on that. I mean, I would imagine that has to do with kind of that sort of ritual and empowerment aspect of things, but it’s a bummer that he didn’t dive into it

S:

I know, and then he died, so it kind of.…

J:

So, now he can’t. But it also brings up an interesting issue in studying fermentation and writing about fermentation that I imagine you’ve also experienced is that our documentation of it is messy or missing.

S:

I know.

J:

Because it’s so common that it wasn’t worth documenting in a lot of cases. Even in studies, people would just be like, oh, whatever. They brew beer over there. I don’t know.

S:

You’ve definitely read The Immortality Key, right.

J:

Yes.

S:

Yes. I thought it was interesting how the conversation focused on the cups and the studying of the cups. How big were the cups, for example?

He was basically saying what you were saying, which is that because these are natural ingredients that degrade, and people couldn’t write it down, we have very limited information about how they were made, what was in them, and one of his things is a lot of the cups, like the kanthera used for Dionysus and Persephone and all of those different rituals were extraordinarily small, which indicates that they were for serving something really potent or intense. Just an interesting thing to think about.

J:

Yes. It’s something that like when I was talking with Sandor Katz about my next book, and he mentioned that a lot of studies don’t actually tell us how old fermentation is for those reasons that things degrade and records aren't always kept. It makes it so messy and hard to study. I feel like the book is a lot of me being like, "as far as we know…this and this," but we will never have full documentation. That's why I encouraging people to do more of this sort of documentation, and experimenting, and talking with people, and getting into that aspect of community so that the people who write books like this after me maybe have a little bit more material to look at.

S:

Yes. Well, that’s what I kind of felt like when I saw your book. I was like, yes, this is the book I’m looking to read because where is this information consolidated?

J:

Yes. I feel like if I put everything in there, it would be thousands and thousands of pages. Even just of the stuff that we have, which is not much, but still a lot. It’s such an interesting thing to write about.

And I don’t know if you’ve experienced this or kind of have anything to add to this, but this idea of speaking power back into these processes and these voices that were so often silenced that were responsible for making these ferments. I mean, you know, women and people of color, enslaved people, people who were doing these, very grunt work, common jobs, this absolute unseen labor in the background to feed people with these microbial allies that they’re working with.

S:

I think that’s why it always feels subversive. It always feels like a rebellion because it’s something you can do in your own home that you don’t need classical training. It’s something that your grandmother teaches you how to do. It’s word of mouth. It’s oral. Yes. I mean, I think that’s what makes it difficult to track, but that’s also what makes it spread. You know, the bacteria and fungi and viruses spread, and I think that fermentation has this way of spreading that isn’t dependent on dominant cultural paradigms of how things are supposed to be disseminated.

So, that’s both a problem when we’re trying to systematize this stuff and look back historically, and it’s also a virtue: I always think of Audre Lorde’s essay, The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House, and I think fermentation can never be the master's tool.

J:

Yes! The first time I met Sandor Katz was at this residency that he had up at his house in the mountains, and he said people often call him the world expert on fermentation. But he continued by saying, "that person doesn’t exist. Nobody’s the world expert." And I love that he acknowledges that, but I also appreciate that nobody can control fermentation. Nobody owns fermentation, and you’re talking of it as folk magic, as being this completely democratic way of engaging with food, which nobody can ever harness exclusively. You can't take all the fermentation microbes and hide them somewhere and be the only person who can make sauerkraut. It’s not possible.

S:

Yes. And fermented foods that are homogenized become boring, and nobody wants them. You want things that taste different, too. So, I think that human appetite as tied to and interrogative with fermentation is always going to keep it flexible and moving, too. Interesting to think about.

J:

You also bring up a point of how it’s word of mouth, and it spreads in that way, and kind of in keeping with that human appetite and fermentation, we’re always seeking out new fermented foods or new to us fermented foods from different places.

I’m always curious to see how people take these traditional methods and apply them to their own kitchen experiments. Like people making various garums, but using…I don’t know… beef or something instead and seeing how that goes. It’s inherently playful in a way that I think reminds us of how powerful play and experimentation are, and not knowing what’s going to happen, how powerful those things are because your microbial allies have minds of their own. You might say "hey we're making sauerkraut today" and they're like "no, we're going to make this batch taste real bad. Sorry."

S:

It’s fascinating. And I also think that it’s the medicine we need conceptually and physically. We live in an antibiotic culture: culturally, ecologically, and in the medical-industrial complex. We think that by killing everything off, we can somehow create stable ecosystems and stable gut biomes and stable etc. but it's insane. Sometimes I talk about capitalist patriarchy as a narrative dysbiosis, and we’re in this moment of a narrative dysbiosis, and also a real gut dysbiosis, having been given massive doses of cultural colonial antibiotics and having been dosed with environmental pollution.

Fermentation is also kind of the medicine we need in so many different ways because it’s something that can’t be homogenized and can’t be made into a product. It’s a medicine you can make for yourself, so it kind of goes back to what you were saying before, which is it gives the individual back the healing, sacred, sacramental power.

J:

Yes. And I think, going back to the community, too, when the individual has that power to care for their body and has this food that tastes good and is really interesting. Like you said before, smelling it, tasting it is a cultural memory as well as personal. What does that do for our interactions with each other when now our interactions are not commodity-based, and we have something that helps us get outside of that view? How do ferments help with that?

S:

Yes. I mean, it’s so interesting to think of us as giving microbes to each other because on the flip side there’s been this whole narrative and very real experience of contagion, and we wanted to keep microbes out, but then with fermentation, it’s the opposite, which is you want to give people microbes as a gift and actually physically heal them.

I also think it’s a way of healing this rift we have with microbiology that perhaps COVID has amplified.

J:

Yes. Yes, and it’s, you know, it’s always a very interesting thing to teach fermentation classes and talk about fermentation during COVID. It was already kind of interesting because you get students with perspectives on both sides of that, either fully on board with ferments or perhaps intimidated by microbes. Some people think ferments are a panacea, and they heal everything, and that they'll never get sick if they eat sauerkraut everyday. I have to remind them that it's good for them, but it won't cure every single thing ever.

S:

You need a combination.

J:

Yes. It’s kind of it works in symbiosis with your body, and it’s all very beautiful, but it’s not a panacea. But on the other hand, you have people who are like, it’s so irresponsible for you to be teaching classes aboutworking with microbes when so many people are dying from microbes. Echoing what you said earlier, I’m not giving people jars of COVID. I’m giving them jars of sauerkraut that have, you know, lactobacteria in them, and have these things that are actually already in your body.

This conversation of contagion and beneficial microbes being seen as two sides of the same coin simply because they’re both small is something that I think is a really interesting and reductivist view that we’ve adopted here.

S:

Yes. And that’s another thing that I’m always stressing is people are always asking "what do fungi want to tell us?" because I write about fungi. I want to say, there are a billion fungi, so there are that many stories, and the same thing for microbes and for smalls and for viruses. There are a lot of different divergent stories. It’s important to acknowledge the biodiversity.

J:

Yes. There’s this quote that I really love, that’s there are as many species of microbes as there are stars in the sky.

S:

Ed Yong put that in his book, which is a great book on microbes also.

J:

Yes. I listened to it as an audiobook and then loved it so much that I also bought the physical copy so I could go back through it.

S:

Yes. I mean, I wish that book had gotten a little bit more attention. I feel like it kind of missed the train. If it had come out last year, it would have been a really, really big deal, because it really does show that there’s so many different microbial stories, and none of them are…none of them are neatly good or bad.

J:

Yes. Yes. I mean, I think framing them as microbial stories is important because yes when we’re doing this work, we’re serving as storytellers for creatures that can’t speak in our language.

S:

So, I was talking about evolution as being the refrains of forking and fusing, and fusing the word used in biology is anastomosis, which means to provide a mouth for, so it’s a moment of anastomosis, of fusion, where we’re providing a mouth for it.

J:

Yes. Well, and I think it also brings up a good point that storytelling isn’t always written. That storytelling can happen through all of your senses, and this is a way of storytelling that, goes back to the smell of the sauerkraut being a story, like you talked about before, that we’re not only being a mouthpiece for these microbes by putting pen to paper. We’re being a mouthpiece for them through this sensory storytelling, through this edible storytelling as well.

S:

Yes. I mean, I’ve been thinking more and more of storytelling as just being movement. Anything that moves is a story. It’s creating change. It’s connecting different places, different experiences. And microbes are very good at that kind of storytelling.