Let our Ferments Foment us: A radical manifesto

Notionally; socially; ecological: ferments distil and incite; are radical and rebellious. They engender multispecies thinking; and inspire interspecies collaboration. ‘Ferment’ is rooted in the Latin fervere: ‘to boil.’ This can be seen physically, in the bubbles which our ferments release; just as it can be understood notionally. A ferment is a manifestation of change; of creating new forms from existing ones. As such, fermentation is a potent metaphor for how we might manifest ourselves. 

To ferment is to foment: ‘to instigate, or stir up.’ Fomentation breaks from social order, and is thus radical in its critical non-normativity. The term comes from the Latin fomentum: a poultice or lotion, suggesting a curative element to the normative unrest it causes. Therefore to foment—much like to ferment—engenders the creation of new things: physically, in the processing of foods; and notionally, in the instigation of new thinking. In this Journal post, we posit fermentation as activism, and hope to suggest how its practice can bring about radical change.

The philosopher Donna Harraway suggests that humans are defined by our relationships with our more-than-human kin. In her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble, she posits we recoin the human-centric term ‘Anthropocene’ to ‘Chthulucene;’ an epithet drawing from chthonic: ‘relating to, or inhabiting the underworld.’ Haraway’s Chthulucene semantically redesignates our notions by suggesting the world results from sympoiesis: collaborative creation; as opposed to the human-centric autopoiesis: self-creation—terms borrowed from the scholar Beth Dempster.

Haraway’s thinking aligns with the philosopher Anna Tsing’s, whose 2015 book Mushroom at the End of the World examines the world from the perspectives of interspecies mingling and multispecies dependencies. The ‘mushroom’ in question is the matsutake: a fungi which thrives in the aftermath of destruction. Tsing’s matsutake is a potent metaphor from which her subtitle derives On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins: which suggests how we might thrive in spite of the destruction we have wrought. 

Engendering mutlispecies perspectives is something that goes against prevailing human narratives. Not only within the contexts of human-centrism; but also in our perceptions of cleanliness. Diseases have plagued humanity for millennia, and, aside from a general practice of cleanliness to aid good health, were little understood. This changed with the identification of microbes. Diseases now had a culprit, an enemy against the human war of sterility continues to be waged. 

Perhaps the most famous name in this war is Pasteur: a scientist whose groundbreaking discoveries changed the course of human history. His Pasteruian legacy has helped save countless human lives, and spelled our current collective bias against microbial life. Yet, as with most prejudices, our relationship with microbes is far from binary. In this battle all bacteria are maligned, be they beneficial or detrimental to human health. This is, in itself, detrimental to our health, when we consider that in our bodies, bacteria outnumber human cells 10:1.

Matsutake mushrooms

Anthropologist Heather Paxson challenges Pasteurianism with her ‘microbiopolitics,’ a thinking which recognises that our microbial kin are as likely to keep us healthy as they are to cause us illness. Derived from philosopher Michel Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’—the categorisation of humans by rational management of the conditions of life for a population—microbiopolitics negates human-centrism in preference of multispeciesism. As such, Paxson suggests raw, artisanal cheese-makers as activists in a fully homogenised, Pasteurian world.

Paxson’s microbiopolitics resonates with gastronomic ethnographer Kelly Donati’s notions of multispecies gastronomy, which recentres the culinary narrative from human to more-than-human. In her 2014 The Convivial Table, Donati infers that the food we prepare and consume is in fact the result of sympoiesis, and that, by practising metabolic intimacy, we might better appreciate the gastronomic ecologies which feed us. 

Our food, in its essentiality, is a powerful symbol to help us appreciate the inherent role that more-than-human species play in our survival. Estimates suggest that a third of the food consumed globally has, in some form, undergone fermentation. As such, it is a vital multispecies collaboration upon which we depend. This is what philosopher Timothy Morton has likened to a mesh: a network in which we, and all other species, are enmeshed; each interconnected and interdependent.

Fermentation clarifies our entanglement in this multispecies mesh. When we consume fermented foods, we become implicated within this web of species. Fermentation goes beyond what we grow in our crocks. It is mutable; always shifting; ever present. A container is merely a convergence point of this multi-stranded network. As a situated practice, fermentation inhibits simplification and reduction. As a wild process, it resists the commodification of capitalist extraction and uniformity. 

Haraway writes: “nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.” We are all finite in our existence, but our existence is far from finite. Our relationships make us, both intra- and inter-species. So let us manifest. Let us build from the waste we have created, and generate new forms. Let our ferments foment us; may we thrive in their fervour.