| It used to be the way we made or preserved much of our food- cheese, wine, yogurt, sourdough bread, soda and pickled vegetables. For Alex Hozven food is either living or dead. At her Cultured Pickle Shop in Berkeley, California, she tends 20000 pounds of vegetables that "breathe" carbon dioxide. She's simply pickling vegetables, but to most of us used to "dead food", it's a foreign concept. For four millenia, fermented foods were part of every culture's diet- eg sauerkraut, kimchi, pickled herring, giardiniera, miso, kombucha, kefir-, but today with our modern industrial food system, even our "pickles" aren't usually pickled, but are simply cucumbers soaked in vinegar and heat-treated to kill any pathogens. Even our sauerkraut is pasteurized. Instead of using the modern shortcut (vinegar and pasteurization), Hozven pickles her vegetables (cabbages, carrots, radish, beets, etc) relying on the slower method of fermentation. Pickled vegetables may pack more vitamins than the plant pre-fermentation (Korean research points to high doses of vitamin B). The probiotics in fermented foods have been credited with being antioxidants, immunity-boosters and anti-inflammatories. While Hozven warns against treating these foods as medicine, she says there's no doubt they're good for your gut. Perhaps the most fun part of fermentation are cultured soft drinks. The earliest sodas used fermented vegetables for the fizz. Even as recently as a century or two, it wasn't so uncommon to drink a ... |
