UrbanUpdate

If you’ve ever put away a serving of house-fermented vegetables at a fancy restaurant or had a roommate taking up your counter space with a crock of slowly bubbling sauerkraut, it’s likely you have Sandor Katz to thank. The self-styled “fermentation revivalist” has become a globe-trotting mascot for the power of bacteria and yeast to create delicious food, a kind of modern-day Johnny Appleseed of tangy, savory flavors. 

Katz discovered fermented foods in the early 1990s when, after receiving an H.I.V. diagnosis, he moved from his hometown of New York City to a queer community in rural Tennessee, where preserving the surplus from the garden was a matter of practical necessity. He began teaching and writing on the subject, and his book Wild Fermentation is still a standard reference for how to turn milk into yogurt and cucumbers into pickles. His third book, 2012’s definitive The Art of Fermentation, carried a foreword by Michael Pollan and won a James Beard Award.

For his latest, Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys, Katz shares recipes and stories from the places fermenting has taken him: from corn beer in Colombia to pickled tea leaves in Burma and Australian turmeric paste. Katz talked with GQ about eating at Noma, the potential (and the limits) fermented foods have for health, and the hard-won pleasures of acquired tastes.

GQ: As I understand it, your interest in fermentation began when you moved to a commune in rural Tennessee. How did that turn into traveling the word?

Sandor Katz: Yes, my personal obsession with fermentation really started about the point when I moved down here at age 30. I grew up in New York City and the first season I was such a naive city kid. I'd never even thought about the idea that all the cabbage would be ready in about the same time; that all the radishes would be ready at about the same time. The first year that I was gardening the kind-of obvious reality presented itself: we had a really nice row of cabbage, and I decided that I'd better learn how to make sauerkraut. So I learned how from The Joy of Cooking. Then I just started playing around and trying different vegetables and making yogurt and starting a sourdough. And I got obsessed with fermentation, but my interest in fermentation really grew out of having this new rural context for my life, and the practical necessity to preserve things.

I taught my first sauerkraut-making workshop in 1998, and I recognized for the first time that a lot of people are paralyzed by fear in the realm of fermentation. That was the first time I encountered questions like: “How can I be sure I have good bacteria growing in my jar of shredded cabbage and not some dangerous bacteria that might make me sick or kill somebody?” I learned that a lot of people project a generalized anxiety about bacteria onto the idea of fermentation and that forced me to do some reading and investigations so I could give people good answers to questions like that. I decided to write all my fermentation recipes into a little booklet, and that was the first iteration of *Wild Fermentation—*a little self-published zine. And then what sort of began as a book tour in the Northeast and the Midwest just never stopped.

Then I started getting invited to other places. At this point my books are in, like, a dozen languages and I've taught in maybe two dozen countries, and whenever I've gone somewhere to teach, I'm not just teaching, I'm also eating and drinking. The organizers are often excited to show me things, and so a lot of my trips also turned into educational experiences for me.

Are there any places you’ve specifically had to seek out?

China. What I was most specifically interested in learning about was Chinese techniques for fermenting vegetables because the historical literature is very, very consistent on the idea that sauerkraut, or the entire idea of fermenting vegetables under salt water protection, comes from China, and that it was nomadic people of central Asia that bought the Chinese ideas westward into Europe. But while the Korean methods of fermenting vegetables are very widely known and there's a lot of information out there about Japanese methods, there's hardly any information in English available about Chinese methods.

You've written in the past about the American food system, and how alienated people have become from things like fermentation. Is that a process you see playing out elsewhere in the world? That these cultures are dying out or that people are eating less healthily?

Well, I mean, sure. The allure of convenience is universal. Everywhere in the world there is a trend towards greater centralization of the production of food. These trends largely began in the U.S. and may have been carried out to the most extreme in the U.S., but they're happening everywhere. In Japan and China, a lot of people talked to me about the fact that fewer and fewer people are doing these things at home, and more people are buying commercially produced versions of the food, and the know-how is held by a shrinking number of people. So even though in China certain kinds of home pickling are somewhat common, I couldn't help but notice that we were mostly meeting older people who talk about the fact that their kids were especially interested in learning how to do it.

That resonated for me because my maternal grandmother was an immigrant from Belarus. She wasn't necessarily fermenting at home, but she did all of this elaborate, very old-world cooking that my mother and her sisters had no interest in. They just looked at their mother being a full-time housewife, cooking things that took hours in the kitchen, and that wasn't the life they wanted. But I think what we're seeing largely right now in the U.S. is this reaction to that. In our parents and our grandparents’ generations, there was this unprecedented amount of processed convenience food available and in the supermarket, and for many of them that really represented liberation. But when you talk to people in their twenties to their fifties now, there’s a recognition that a lot of this mass-produced food is of pretty poor quality. And they're like: well, I'm actually interested in understanding what I'm eating. I want to know how it's produced and where it comes from. Fermentation is part of the answer.

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Does it feel funny to talk about something as elemental as fermentation as a trend?

It’s the awareness of fermentation or interest in fermentation that’s the trend. If you think of coffee, beer, wine, bread, cheese, cured meats, vinegar—have those things just suddenly become of interest? I don't think so.

There's a blurb on the new book from Rene Redzepi of Noma, a world-famous chef who's doing interesting things with fermentation. [“Sandor Katz is the O.G.”] Have you eaten at Noma?

Yeah.

What was that like for you, as someone who knows so much about fermentation?

iIt was really an amazing experience just to be eating this endless parade of very well-thought-through small courses. It’s incredibly labor intensive, and a lot of it was really delicious. And a lot of it was very, kind of—clever, or beautiful.

But for me food like that is like a fantasy—to have a hundred people cooking for me all day just to make this parade of unexpected flavors. Nobody's going there to get nourishment—people are going there to get entertainment. The experience they're selling is the creative manipulation of the food. And certainly fermentation is an integral part of the ways in which they are manipulating the food. And I appreciate that: they did all kinds of clever and interesting things, and they're providing a lot of inspiration for people in terms of what can be done. And I appreciate that they're sharing so much of what they're learning.

But I just like to point out that fermentation is not exclusively the domain of the highest echelon of restaurants. It's exciting that these restaurants are so interested in the kinds of flavors that fermentation can render, but in most places historically fermentation has been a practice of practical necessity—how do we preserve the food resources that we have so that they can feed us through the period of relative scarcity? How can we really get the nutrients out of this food?

Soybeans are really interesting because they're considered the plant food with the most concentrated protein, but our human digestive systems are not capable of extracting the protein from a soybean. If you ate a big bowl of soybeans that had simply been soaked and cooked, you would have terrible gas and indigestion and you would not get a significant amount of protein out of them. So thousands of years ago, the Asian cultures that pioneered soy agriculture developed ways to make the soybeans more digestible that mostly involved fermentation, where fermentation breaks down the proteins into amino acids. I mean, that's what we now understand through scientific analysis, but 2000 years ago people just recognized that, oh, well, the soybeans don't give us indigestion if we do these things to them.

You've described fermentation as something that was healing to you at points in your life.

I've got into a little bit of trouble having said that because I wrote on the back of Wild Fermentation that fermented foods have been an important part of my healing. I've been living with H.I.V. for more than 30 years now. And I have read numerous articles about myself that say that I'm the man who cured AIDS with fermented foods. It's not like that. I wish that could be my story—that would be an exciting story. But I went through a period after I was interested in fermented foods, after I was eating fermented foods regularly, where I got really sick. I ended up getting on antiretroviral drugs in 1999 and I've been on them ever since.

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So I can't say that fermented fruits have cured AIDS. But what I can say is that most of the people I've met who were on the kinds of drugs that I'm on experienced chronic digestive problems as a result of the drugs, which I have never experienced. My health feels pretty robust. It's not like an either/or. Nutrition matters no matter what, and I have a sense—that is anecdotal, subjective, and personal—that fermented foods and beverages have been part of my overall robust health 30-plus years into HIV.

I do think that any individual person's assessment of what factors have mattered in their health is purely anecdotal. So I have certainly talked to people who say, oh, fermented foods cured my cancer. I will tell you I take that with a grain of salt. It's not that I don't believe there are anti-carcinogenic compounds in fermented foods. It's just: how does any individual know what factor it was that caused their cancer to go away?

Reading the book, there’s an image of you as someone who's almost radically open-minded towards these different traditions. [There’s a memorable section about an indigenous Alaskan fish preparation called “stinkheads”; the premise of the Food Network’s Bizarre Foods gets called “completely offensive.”] So I was almost shocked to find out that you couldn’t stand olives for a long time.

I know. Isn't that funny? It's true. I probably was like 40 years old before I started all this, but now I love them! It’s so funny.

What clicked for you?

So many of the flavors of fermentation are not obvious—we're not born loving them. Many of them are in the realm of what we would describe as acquired tastes. I kept on tasting some of the cheeses that as a kid seemed gross to me because I saw some of the adults in my life get super excited about them and that gave me a reason to try it again. That's what got me to try coffee again. That's what got me to try beer again.

I didn't love natto [a slimy Japanese fermented soybean preparation] either the first time I tried it—it took a few tries. At first I didn’t even want to try it, but a few people I really liked and respected encouraged me to give natto another go. Now I love natto, but as I wrote about in the book I've been making a little natto-based condiment—it's called “Special Sauce.” I have yet to encounter anybody who doesn't like the Special Sauce, including people who are extremely squeamish about food. And that was sort of like me with ground-up olives, when it’s just to enhance the flavor. It was just about being presented with a whole olive—when I was forced to reckon with it.

But when I went to [traditional food festival] Terra Madre in 2008 there was a table of these people from Lebanon and they had these oil-cured olives and they were so good. I bought a pack of olives from them to bring home, and then I started looking around for more oil-cured olives, and then I started trying other olives and realized: I like olives!

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

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Chris Cohen is GQ's Deputy Site Editor. He joined the magazine in 2020, after working as an editor at Saveur, Lucky Peach, and Outside magazine. Chris edits features and runs the Wellness section—and runs marathons, enjoys cooking, and generally tries to practice what he preaches health-wise even when away from... Read moreDeputy Site EditorXInstagramRelated Stories for GQFoodHealthTravelBooks