Some of the more known fermented foods are yogurt and sauerkraut, but kimchi and kombucha are becoming quickly part of the North American foodscape. They are known as ”live foods” or “probiotics”. What do these terms mean, and why should they be part of our diet?
Fermentation is a way of preserving foods that prolong edibility and in many cases enhance nutritional value and flavor. If you imagine a fresh food which doesn’t stay fresh very long, especially in warmer climates, you can imagine how this got started. The natural microbes in the environment started to consume the nutrients in the food item and add their own byproducts to the mix. A hungry human gave it a try and instead of saying “oh yuck, spoiled”, they said, “ oh my, how interesting!” (and they didn’t die). This is probably how many fermentation experiments ensued, giving us delicious umami-laden terroir-specific foods and beverages (yogurt, kefir, pickled and lacto-fermented vegetables, bread, beer, wine, cider, cheese, etc.
Not only are they delicious, fermented foods (if not sterilized during subsequent processing) give us a good dose of living microbes (hence “live foods”) that we need in our intestines to survive. Probiotic is a pop culture term that combines Pro, Latin: for/towards and Biotic, Latin: bios/life, to create a modern moniker meaning food that is alive. We get a certain palette of microbes from our mothers as we are born, and ingest the rest as we eat and drink our way through life. Our microscopic symbiotic residents create vitamin K (a clotting factor) some B vitamins, as well as pre-digesting some of our food to make it more absorbable. They are known collectively as microbiota, and their combined genetic makeup is now known as our microbiome.
Let’s face it, left to itself, everything rots. Fermentation is simply creating a foody environment where we enhance the probability of the microbes we want overcrowding the ones we don’t. And then we wait and let nature take it’s course - it'’s the ultimate in slow food. The worst that can happen is we make some compost (your nose will certainly tell you if things go sideways). The best outcome? We make our own delicious signature ferment that enhances our diet, cooking, intestinal health, our immune system, brain chemistry and perhaps even susceptibility to disease. The Human Microbiome is currently a surging area of medical research. Stay tuned for more encouragement to ferment, and meanwhile, bon appetit!
