“Every. Year.” She emphasizes. “They just …fall. And that’s it. Is there anything you know… to do with these?”

We’re standing in the rain, looking up only with our eyes so that our hoods stay on our heads. I pull one of the branches down — long, spindly, and firm with age. The plum tree’s “skin” is mostly lichen, covered in what looks like petrified lace. Salla tells me how the fruit falls before it ripens so the neighborhood just watches the slow rot.

I pick off an unripened plum, with clear, solid pectin oozing out from its side. (Clearly, some insect has seen the plum’s value.) They are dark like castelvetrano olives, but tougher, and about the same size.

“Of course we can do something with these,” I announce, less because I feel assured in the steps ahead and more because of an undying faith in must try otherwise. Salla looks at me, as if I’m about to expound on some recipe off the top of my head. I blink away a few raindrops as I recall an experiment from when a chef in Montreal asked me about preserving unripe mirabelle plums like Japanese umeboshi.



Umeboshi: a compound word of ume (plum) and hoshi (to hang or lay out to dry). Japan has several of these dry preserved plants, like hoshi-gaki (persimmons) and hoshi-imo (potatoes), which don’t rely on starter cultures (like bread or yogurt) to jumpstart the preservation process¹. Instead, the humid and temperate weather of Japan makes food preservation a necessity because everything rots in this weather. One either waits for the dryness of winter (for persimmons, potatoes) or relies on the intense UV rays of post-monsoon August (for plums). As one of my collaborators shared with me, actively fermenting something prevents it from rotting.

Umeboshi is a summer pickling adventure. Just when the green plums show their first signs of fuzz, they’re picked and placed under an immense weight (usually rocks) along with a high salt concentration (about 15-20% by weight, which, compared to 3-4% salt in seawater, makes your eyes bulge). When combined, the salt-and-weights draw out the liquid that barely exists in these hard plums (truly, the opposite of juicy), and this liquid eventually turns into what we call “plum vinegar.” The plums then ferment in their own juices, they are combined with herbs, and they are hung out to dry. The result is a super-puckery pickle that served as the original antimicrobial agent inside bento lunch boxes. (How? The lactic acid bacteria of umeboshi would outcompete any opportunistic microbes by crowding them out.)

I am no umeboshi expert, but Salla and I agree that the tree is worth a test batch. “This year will be the experimental year, so that we know what to do next year.” Deal. Back home, I apply a similar logic to these plums: measuring the salt, calculating the weights, and neurotically checking if their juices have leached out — if at all. A mere 36 hours later, the plums are covered in their own juices, which, weeks later, I can attest, smell intensely floral.

Must. Try. Otherwise. This is the mantra of self-sufficiency in capitalist environments of the modern era. As fermentation revivalist Sandor Katz notes, fermenting something in a jar is not an inherently radical act, but to ferment as a way to reclaim the means of food production,² especially in an extractivist food system, is.

This reminder is particularly sobering when most today’s ferments come from shops and restaurants instead of trees. The current hype around fermentation makes ferments cruelly out of reach: one needs to be either a Michelin-star entity or an affluent gadget-bro to have the tools, space, capital for both, and time to see ferments through their journey. What happens as a result? Fermentation’s plebeian history (as the original means of food preservation, before refrigerators, carried on through the labors of nonnas/aunties, hippies, and level-5 homesteaders) has now become an exclusive club of the haves. Here’s the cruel bit: the people who have access to today’s fermentation resources are the people who,  arguably, need it least; and the profits that they garner, financially and otherwise, remain concentrated in the high society from which they come.



Sure, fermentation allows us to explore the delicious potential of local ingredients. And in this sense, my umeboshi experiment is no different than the rhetoric of the so-called new Nordic cuisine. But I can’t help but wonder: who is fermentation for? A stroll (scroll?) through today’s fermentation landscape will say that fermentation is for people who already have the wherewithal to practice it, people who use it as a sign of moral one-upmanship, or people who subscribe to self-optimization. In this sense, fermentation’s original motives (as a way of preparing for an uncertain future, as a way of making the most of harvest and abundance when one can, as a way of co-existing with unknowable creatures) have all been supplanted with an empty promise.

It’s a tempting thought: if only we could ferment our way out of climate crisis, ferment our way to ultimate gut health, ferment our way to dismantling late-stage capitalism, all through Weck jars. This kind of thinking captures peak 2000s, 2010s hype around so-called alternative food systems with guerilla gardening, backyard beekeeping, and gleaning maps (as in, maps for fruit trees in public spaces that people could harvest). In North America, fermenting was characterized by hope and sole acts of subverting a system that, ideally, would gather momentum with enough charm, visual allure (#insta), and deliciousness. (I am completely complicit in this, dear reader.) But mantras like “Make it yourself! Here’s how!” were replaced with “Now available at Whole Foods for $9.99!” a decade later. Western Europe also saw a surge in urban fermenting at that time, mostly to reconnect people with histories of place. But this happened at the same time that the West doubled-down on its gaze elsewhere (like East Asia and South Asia) to innovate new flavors (for ferments like koji and tempeh), often with sustainability undertones. The result was this: across Europe, new businesses and projects used zero-kilometer narratives to promote global/local ties (such as chickpea miso, lentil ‘soy’ sauce) that merged novelty and authenticity as a self-evident thing to strive for. Of course, these attempts reinforced the fiercely individualist mandate of “just buy smarter/cleaner/greener/more.” So two decades of trying to capitalize on ferments has also kept fermentation out of reach. It has shifted the focus away from fermenting — as in, the household practice — towards consuming fermented products.

That’s what we thought then. Or at least, that’s the more recent history that fermentation occupies. And, maybe because a global pandemic showed us just how precariously such a system operates (I dealt with flour rations, did you?) our political attention has been turning towards what we’ve been taking for granted: invisible structures.

Fermented foods available en masse these days (think probiotic yogurts) are objects within a well-oiled machine of marketing gimmicks and extractive politics. They are not the same as having the skills, know-how, and gumption to do otherwise — let alone the time and resources, both human and natural, that, we can only hope, will help us survive this sixth mass extinction.


We may no longer be aiming for reclaiming the means of food production per se, but fermentation can open up other worlds. At the very least, it asks me to think outside the box. Ume, the small Japanese plums, cannot be eaten fresh, even if they were left to ripen on the tree. But fermenting them — into pickles, into wines, into vinegars — opens up new forms of eating otherwise. (Something similar happens with elderberries in the Nordics: too much cyanide keeps us from eating raw elderberries but fermenting them can lead to making ‘capers’ out of unripe fruit or wines out of ripe berries.)

Crucially, this resourcefulness can’t be some cool-kid badge of entrepreneurial conquest, or the whole exclusionary wave comes back in full force. Resourcefulness, open-mindedness, making-do… all of these come with the radical politics  of questioning invisible structures that are inherent to food. In other words, without questioning the racist, classist, ableist, and colonial ways that fermentation gets promoted and acted upon, one risks reinforcing the very ills that  fermentation tries to quash.

Perhaps the more radical thing about fermentation today is to redirect our attention from the market conglomerates and see what else already exists in terms of resources and time. The abandoned plum trees are but a small example of this type of hidden abundance (which is not to be confused with extracting from elsewhere or claiming someone else’s abundance as somehow yours; that’s called stealing). The radical act of valuing ingredients as they are, and to celebrate that value amidst the people for whom it matters… that’s how fermentation could intervene today. It is to understand the need to act now.


Recall that fermentation’s original ethos was one of must do. Fermentation enabled people to preserve foods at ambient temperatures or to make the most of a harvest, because that temporary abundance needed to sustain you for months and months of dearth afterwards.

Fermentation has been — and for some, still is — a survival act characterized by unpredictability and precarity. Fermentation has also been — and needs to be — adept enough to make the most of whatever nature doles out.

I hope this works. For me. For Salla. For all of us. For all the plum trees that would’ve been abandoned. For all the other forageables. For what’s ahead. For fermentation helps me say: I hope I make it. I hope we make it. Past winter. Past this epoch. Past the currently unknown. At least at the home-scale, fermentation is what we do now in preparation for an unknowable future. We can learn from this.

We can do otherwise, if we expand the question of who ferments and who else can ferment. We can reclaim the means of production and minimize our reliance on broken systems, if we  identify what keeps certain practices out of reach. We can also practice radical politics through fermentation, by asking: Who benefits? Who’s missing from the conversation? What can abandonment and neglect tell us about our social structures? And what are the
structural changes needed to try otherwise?

Because, if fermentation is anything, it is a story of adapting and course-correcting based on the premise that we can never know, in full, what the future holds. It is to reach for plums, in all their pucker, and to try again.

——————

FOOTNOTES:

1        I’m anticipating the culture police: I am aware that hoshigaki and hoshi-imo are not fermented per se. That said, they end up with a helluva lot more yeasts on their outsides when their sugars become exposed due to dehydration, so we could say that fermentation didn’t transform the persimmons/potatoes but their processing and subsequent re-colonization by microbes prevented other microbes from spoiling them. I use these to complement umeboshi as examples of actively doing something to prevent rot.

2         See: Sandor Ellix Katz, Wild Fermentation, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016