If you have two hammers, how many nails do you see?
I’m in Boston. I had planned to give up fermented foods during this trip and see what happened. Too hard, it turned out. Sitting in a diner, I wondered: where can I get kombucha? The diner sold a bunch of bottled drinks: juice and soft drinks. Foods that taste exactly the same each time, which I call ditto foods and which I believe caused the obesity epidemic. (Because their taste — actually, their smell — is so uniform, a very strong smell-calorie association can build up, making them very tasty and very fattening. Ditto foods are the laser beams of food.) I realized these drinks were exactly the opposite of what I wanted. Fermented foods, because they involve growing bacteria, are inherently more variable than other foods. It is hard to keep constant from batch to batch everything that affects bacterial growth.
Funny thing: the growth in childhood asthma and allergies, now called an epidemic, started at roughly the same time as the obesity epidemic — around 1980. Around 1980, people started to eat a lot more fast food, snack food, and microwaved food (from packages). All ditto foods. All bacteria-free. In home cooking, I think fewer precautions are taken to wipe out all bacteria. You eat what you’ve made soon after cooking, whereas factory food might be eaten weeks or months after production. So factory food has preservatives — and I think the result is overkill, just like antibiotics.
Looking at the food I could buy in Boston was like looking at a post-apocalyptic landscape. Dead food everywhere. Supermarkets, diners, fancy restaurants. Dead food is uniform food; food manufacturers had bludgeoned their products into uniformity. At a Cordon Bleu cooking school, judging from promotional literature, not a word is said about fermented food. In advanced-thinking Cambridge, which you might think would support fermented foods, I found only two stores that sold kefir and only three that sold kombucha. Many people complain about what they call “processed food” but the actual problem is food not processed enough (by bacteria). A better complaint would be about dead food.
I suspect fermented foods are avoided by commercial food makers not only because they are more variable than other food and contain scary bacteria, but also because they are more expensive to make: They require more space and time. The stuff must sit somewhere, taking up space, for days or even weeks, while it ferments. At home, it’s easy: You make it and put it somewhere, and go away and do something else. In a factory devoted to making food, there is nothing else to do and no free space. The monoculture problem.
You’ll like this article: https://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_body_politic/ (mentioned just now on /.:
https://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/15/0252219).
David
From the NYT article you posted earlier:
The public health community has been sounding the alarm for years about the overuse of antibiotics and the emergence of “superbugsâ€
Maybe this epidemic is more due to dead food than overuse of antibiotics.
In answer to the earlier question of what fermented foods I’ve added to my diet;
I have about 8oz of Brown Cow yogurt w/ breakfast, 8oz Kombachu w/ lunch, and 6oz of Kiefer w/ dinner. Occasionally I’ll have red wine w/ dinner instead. I also use raw aged cheese pretty liberally on my scrambled eggs and when I have a salad.
I was having sauerkraut with sausage, but got sick of its flavor. I’m starting to get a craving for it again though so I plan to try out the Bubbies brand next time I go shopping. I haven’t tried natto or other soy products because I’m leery of possible hormonal disruption by the estrogens. I imagine there’s a ceiling on the immune benefit anyway, which would be a real good experiment for someone to study. Test at what level of bacterial ingestion the infection rate of subjects exposed to a cold virus levels off.
Do you happen to remember which stores sold kombucha and kefir?
@ Caleb,
Sounds like a similar inclusion of fermented food to my own. I drink wine or occasionally beer with dinner just about every evening, a glass of Kefir every evening after dinner, Stony Field plain yogurt every morning, and raw-milk cheese with every lunch. This morning I bought my first bottle of Kombucha (from GT). The bottle says “Don’t Shake!” and I notice there is sediment (bacteria I presume) that has settled at the bottom of the bottle. Is it important to NOT drink the sediment or is it harmless, or better yet the effective part of the microbes?
“Dead Food=Always the Same”
Yes, no pathogenic bacteria that will kill you!
Ethan, I got kombucha and kefir at Harvest and Whole Food markets.
You might enjoy this quote from Tracy Kidder’s biography of Paul Farmer:
“…Farmer’s childhood was good preparation for a traveling life. Like all his siblings, he emerged from the Bayou’s waters with what he called “a very compliant GI system.”
Farmer is a doctor who works in Haiti (and now elsewhere) and a specialist in infectious disease. He credits his good stomach with plentiful childhood exposure to bacteria in food and water. This association is more respected now, but even a few years ago when he made it would have been considered something of a myth. Of course, he is no ignoramus…
Seth,
I tried Kombucha and found it to be extremely close in taste to apple cider that one can buy in France. Cider is fermented and not as expensive as Kombucha. FYI.
Igor.
Dead food is a great line. I find myself getting more and more active yogurt (vs. the bland cultured puddings that masquerade as yogurt).
sheep’s milk yoghurt might be considered more efficacious than cow’s milk yoghurt, no matter how live or active, since sheep have yet to be manipulated into producing milk throughout the year, unlike cows.
I think you would enjoy Sweden. Pickled and fermented fish is readily available at every grocery store, though it seems young people are consuming it less. But wow…the diversity of fermented milk. I had trouble figuring out all the different kinds when I came here. Russian-style kefir is just the tip of the iceberg. I think you’d like lÃ¥ngfil, which comes from the far north of Sweden and has a ropy stretchy slimy weird consistency.
https://www3.arla.se/Default____17791.aspx?SelectedMenuItem=17375
Seems like everyone does the probiotic thing here. There is even some sort of fermented oatmeal drink called Proviva developed in Finland with L299 strain.