How to Turn a Bagel Into a Fish
Through the alchemy of friendship and a car, bagels became cured salmon, a bottle of whiskey, a box of matzoh, a batch of warm cookies. It felt like a treasure hunt to drive to our friends’ houses, wave to them from windows or across the sidewalk, see their smiles and their clothes (or bathrobes), and through our snaking path, trace the connections that make up Brooklyn to us. I’ve begun to harbor dreams of setting up a more-official unofficial food exchange. I picture us all in the future, free of COVID-19 but also free of consumerist needs, drinking each other’s moonshine with homemade kimchi and cheese, growing mushrooms in our bathrooms and tomatoes on our fire escapes, dropping out, opting out of the disastrous economy.
And then my vision resharpens on reality. Trading food might let us eat decadently, but it doesn’t pay our rent or health insurance or utility bills, it won’t help us fly to visit family, or afford childcare, or take care of us when we’re old. It doesn’t really change anything.
***
The news about Bernie leaving the race came as a terrible blow. It hit me like the Trump election — less of a surprise than a sudden clarity about what country we’re living in. It reignited the deep sense of dread that I have on my worst days, that people are fundamentally bad, scared, selfish, and that we have that latent monster inside all of us. I want so badly to find the good in all this, to believe that in this disaster is the chrysalis of political change. I haven’t been able to see it though. The crisis is not affecting demographic classes evenly. When it came for NYC — a city that has been pushing the poor out of it ceaselessly for decades — the rich simply left. Across the country, people are shutting themselves in their homes, for the public good of course, and shutting themselves out of the news, for their personal good. Can anything change if we don’t know what’s happening to each other?
I had a RAINN shift immediately after hearing the Bernie news. RAINN has been difficult during the crisis because — isolated in their homes without the safety net of schools and neighborhood friends — some people enact their freedom terribly. That day, I told a visitor what I tell nearly everybody, “I believe things will get better for you.” The visitor answered, “But what if it doesn’t?”
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Fermentation is a neat craft because it maintains the appearance of control, with all the dehydrators and temperature controllers and pH meters that you can buy, but truly has less to do with you. You’re not so much cooking for yourself as for microorganisms, who — like proud street cats — might show up and settle in if you set up a very comfortable environment for them. I’m only at the beginning of understanding the range of possibilities and it will be a long time until I can taste some of my ferments, but it’s already fun. It’s more like having plants or a Tamagotchi than what I think of as making food. And the quick things I’ve made, like kimchi and kvass, are wonderful to eat and drink and make me feel powerful.
Fermentation is great for making shareable foods. They package and keep well, and each one is unique to the terroir of your kitchen. I attended an online gathering of the NYC Ferments Meetup, and I was gratified by the (haha) culture of the group. They were mostly older people, obsessive but not at all stuck-up, and very welcoming to me. I can’t wait to meet them in real life, and taste the things they’re working on.
***
I don’t have any particular insight into how to survive, aside from having done it for almost 33 years. I know that we’ve never had more than the appearance of control over our lives, and none at all over each other. I can’t make anybody vote or volunteer or live the way I want them to. At most, I can aid in creating environments conducive to care and connection. I can’t know if things will get better or who exactly they will get better for, but I’m pretty sure it’s necessary to keep imagining something better.
At 7pm, I’m usually in the middle of cooking, but I put everything down to to open the window and clap next to it. What does it mean, who is it for? I don’t know if any healthcare workers can hear us. But there are tinges of joy in the shouts of my neighbors. Every day it feels like a celebration, despite not having anything to celebrate. Maybe what we’re learning from this is that we can do something together: if we can clap together, then we can builder bigger movements together. Maybe all we’re learning is that we can survive this, and it will not make us monsters.
What I’m reading
Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz
Social change is another form of fermentation. Ideas ferment, as they spread and mutate and inspire movements for change…In the realm of social change, fire is the revolutionary moment of upheaval; romantic and longed for, or dreaded and guarded against, depending upon your perspective. Fire spreads, destroying whatever lies in its path, and its path is unpredictable. Fermentation is not so dramatic. It bubbles rather than burns, and its transformative mode is gentle and slow. Steady, too. Fermentation is a force that cannot be stopped. It recycles life, renews hope, and goes on and on.
I have to admit that while I’ve been paging through the comprehensive, gorgeously-photographed Noma Guide to Fermentation, which is teaching me useful stuff, I’ve found myself resonating more strongly with this used green-and-pink paperback that I picked up randomly last year at a store in Chinatown. Sandor Katz lived through 1990s NYC with HIV/AIDS, which was an epidemic of greater destruction than COVID-19, but among a more limited and overlooked population. He did manage to drop out of mainstream society, going to live in an off-the-grid community in rural Tennessee but also became something of a fermentation-activist icon (I am not the first to resonate with his work).
While teaching you how to ferment everything from miso to wine in short unvarnished recipes, Wild Fermentation is equally about living with precarity and death, and activism in the face of it. To Katz, fermenting at home is a way of taking food back from the commodity chain and a practice of self-empowerment. It’s also a ritual of observing decay and imagining death, which helps him to embrace life. Thankfully he’s still around, and if you want, you can watch him speak at 12pm EST today as part of the Florida Ferment Fest.