Fermentation as Metaphor

Sandor Katz has devoted decades to understanding fermentation, writing, publishing, and teaching with a passion that is both infectious and practical. A James Beard Award-winner for The Art of Fermentation, and the author as well of the groundbreaking Wild Fermentation, Katz has a richly complex understanding of this ancient biological process.

In Fermentation as Metaphor, instead of reporting he meditates. “As a force for change,” he writes, “fermentation is relatively gentle. Bubbles are not flames.” But he also points out “food is never clean. Food is never pure. Food always involves ingesting other forms of life… Dividing food into clean versus dirty grossly oversimplifies a multifactorial continuum.” To his thoughtful meditations on fermentation as a path to insights on human activity and culture, he adds original art work of enhanced and colored images from electron microscopes that reveal complexity and activity at remarkably small scale.

This is a work for those who have been caught up and fascinated by the intricate entanglements of life at the smallest scale.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.