Is Kombucha too ‘woke’?
Josh Evans leads a research group on Sustainable Food Innovation at the Danish Technical University’s Center for Biosustainability. His presentation on ‘novel ferments’ at the Stanford Fermented Food Conference detailed a project he led where astronauts on the International Space Station fermented miso.
However, I wanted to speak to him on a different topic.
In 2023, he’d co-authored a paper with Jamie Lorimer, titled Fermentation Fetishism and the Emergence of a Political Zymology. (Zymology is another word for fermentation.)
In it, they examine the surge in interest surrounding fermentation and the inherently progressive politics of many involved with the movement.
A fermentation renaissance is afoot. This revival has given rise to work in the environmental humanities that mobilizes DIY fermentation to ground a progressivist politics. We share in this enthusiasm, but articulate a concern that imputing an essential politics to fermentation is not possible, and risks turning it into a fetish. Drawing on a range of work on fermentation, some of which has raised similar concerns, we outline a political zymology (zymology being the science of fermentation), channeling the concerns of political ecology to facilitate a critical engagement with fermentation’s diversity and avoid its fetishization. We begin by defining fermentation, situating the fermentation zeitgeist in the ongoing microbial moment, and reviewing recent scholarly work on fermentation that proposes an essential fermentation politics. We then develop a framework for political zymology, articulating four dimensions for differentiating fermentations—ecology, microbiopolitics, political economy, and cultural politics—and, in doing so, de-fetishizing it. In conclusion, we offer a typology of modes of political zymology, grounding our hope that this framework will engage colleagues thinking with fermentation, and gesturing toward an additional, complementary mode of political zymology of collaboration across disciplines and professions.
Kombucha is front and center in this analysis.
What we would like to focus on here is the specific strand of work that finds in microbes a source of social and political ideals. In this salvatory vision of microbes and fermentation, compost and kombucha are touchstones for new forms of generally leftist politics among humans and between humans and other organisms.
Indeed, the progressive politics of fermentation extends far and wide. Evans and Lorimer quote Lauren Fournier, a Canadian artist, feminist, and author of the book Critical Booch:
I propose ten ways in which fermentation is a ripe conceptual framework for articulating transinclusive, anti-racist feminisms. These include the following: fermentation is political; fermentation is vitalism; fermentation is accessibility; fermentation is preservation and transformation; fermentation is inter-species symbiosis and coevolution; fermentation is survival and futurity; fermentation is care of the self and care of others; fermentation is harm reduction; fermentation is queer time; and fermentation is collaboration. Fermentation is a way to tap into the fizzy currents within transnational feminist practices.
Sandor Katz suggests, “As you watch your fermenting food bubble away as bacteria and yeast work their transformative magic, envision yourself as an agent for change, creating agitation and unrest, releasing bubbles of transformation in the social order.” (Wild Fermentation: A DIY Guide to Cultural Manipulation).
Industrial production
What Evans and Lorimer call ‘fermentation fetishists’ celebrate “craft and DIY models… often emerging within small-scale, embedded, and communal economic networks.” These folks challenge capitalist food systems and promote equitable distribution. However, fermentation is also used to produce commodities by corporations, often optimizing for consistent results at industrial scales. Fermentation has spread to the restaurant industry and large-scale commercial production. Appeals to “craft” are frequently used by these companies to “gloss over the hi-tech, industrial and capitalist nature of their food production.” Store-bought kombucha and kefir often differs from home-made.
Fermentation does not necessarily facilitate equitable political economies, and can often support inequitable and extractive ones.
Is kombucha too ‘woke’?
While acknowledging the enthusiasm for fermentation’s potential, Evans and Lorrimer see that this celebratory vision risks “turning it into a fetish,” obscuring the diverse and often contradictory ecological, microbiopolitical, political-economic, and cultural-political dimensions of fermentation. They argue that there needs to be a broader range of politics, from progressive to conservative.
In the current fermentation mania in the larger microbial moment, fermentation has been turned into a fetish for an essential leftist politics—a magical entity that can deliver us to a realm of progressive salvation. Yet fermentation does not and cannot have a singular categorical politics, for at least four specific reasons. A first is ecological: any fermentation involves many kinds of relation among different microbes, both co-operative and competitive to different degrees in shifting configurations. A second is microbiopolitical: fermentation is practiced in such different ways, with different modes through which humans govern microbes. A third is political-economic: fermentation is carried out under a variety of conditions of property and profit, of material and epistemic resources. A fourth is culturalpolitical: fermentation is entangled in a wide range of racialized and neocolonial activities, many of which are more conservative than progressive. Taken together, these dimensions of fermentation difference comprise a framework for political zymology, facilitating the ‘defetishization’ of fermentation. Specifying how these dimensions are related differently in different contexts, and showing how they are not always aligned or related in predictable ways, can bring us toward a critical study of fermentation attuned to its different forms, contexts, and consequences—toward a political zymology.
Interview
I asked Josh to comment on the impression that fermented foods in general, and kombucha specifically, are seen as ‘woke’.
It’s trying to analyze and make sense of how it seems that both in more popular fermentation discourse, and also in academic conversations around fermentation, my co-author and I, Jamie Lorimer, have noticed that over the past years, it seems that in both of these spaces, fermentation, in general, seems to have taken on a kind of metaphorical meaning. So it’s no longer only just about the kind of literal transformation of food and drink through microbes. It also has taken on this additional meaning of transformation, and generally with this sort of normative dimension.
We agreed that at the microbial level fermented cultures epitomize diversity, and that sociologically, cultural diversity is a touchstone for progressive politics. It’s associated with people who make sourdough bread, ferment their own kimchi, and might have a jar of sauerkraut bubbling away in the garage. They’re not consuming the store-bought stuff produced by the industrial corporations. But the mainstream is.
Marketing to the mainstream
In blunt terms, this challenges the kombucha industry to reach beyond the early, counter-cultural adopters. If the market is to grow, then consumers in Middle America (or Middle England, Middle France, and so on) should be engaged. Kombucha brands need to look outside the borough of Brooklyn and the streets of San Francisco for their marketing message. When will steakhouse diners offer ‘booch as well as bourbon? Will they market to people who watch Fox or GB News rather than MSNBC and read The Guardian? Perhaps less Hannah Ruhamah Crum and more Betty Crocker — no offense, Hannah 🙂
Booch News has long argued for a more inclusive presentation of products, beyond the yoga, vegan, and ‘woke’ early adopters. Instagram photos posted by kombucha brands still skew to the hipster. However, as this selection from 2018 shows, there is some generational and racial variety. We just need a lot, lot more.
Note: The images in this post were curated by Booch News via Midjourney and Instagram.
