Sandor Katz and the Possibilities of a Queer Fermentive Praxis

Abstract

Fermentation, when embedded in queer politics, offers a conceptual and material challenge to the ideology of purism that structures dominant understandings of health in the North American context. Through a close reading of Sandor Katz’s book Wild Fermentation and the author’s experiences at a 2014 summer residency at Katz’s Foundation for Fermentation Fervor, this article contributes to food studies scholarship exploring the transformative potential of fermentation. In his teaching and writing, Katz challenges the ideology of purism through a queer fermentive praxis that advocates for improvisation, microbial inspiration, and interdependent nourishment. This praxis demonstrates an imperfect, do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos of fermentation that empowers folks to experiment with found and foraged materials. Katz’s theorization of fermentation as social change heralds the queer shape-shifting of microorganisms as inspiration for human action. And, in the context of the queer rural community where he makes his home, Katz’s fermentive praxis cultivates interdependent, inter-species nourishment. This queer fermentive praxis activates the political potential of fermentation by refusing the dominant view of human beings as individuals engaged in purity projects of control and subordination. Instead, it imagines humans as co-constituted, deeply dependent subjects who are responsible to, and in service of creating conditions for flourishing of all kinds of life.

Governance of the gut

“…Microbiome dietary advice misses a powerful opportunity to advance ecological models of nutrition and health that are not centered on control and management (Hayes-Conroy, 2014). Instead of engaging the gut microbiota as a way to extend the web of relations between digestion, nourishment, health, and environment (Maroney, 2018b), microbiome diet books intensify the self-making work of dietary advice. The kind of self discursively produced by microbiome dietary advice-even when figured as a super-organism-is emblematic of the larger North American cultural values that shape dietary advice generally, such as individualism, self-control, and responsibility for one's own health.…”

Positioning Human Microbiome DTC Tests On the Search for Health, Data and Alternatives Amid the Financialisation of Life

“…The co-organiser brings out her copy of Sandor Katz's The Art of Fermentation, playfully referring to it as 'the Manifesto' as she hands us the weighty volume to pass around. Katz's books on fermentation are a touchstone of those North American counter-cultures that place food at the centre of their activism (Maroney 2018). I later order it, as well as several more of his books, from my local independent bookstore, avoiding Amazon and, by doing so, hoping to make at least one purchase outside of the algorithms from a store that actually contributes to my neighbourhood and city.…”