Our Collective Fermented Lives
On writing history where people aren't at the center
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Our Collective Fermented Lives
Last month, I went to a one week writing residency at Wildacres Retreat. Normally, when I'm at a residency I am relatively social: At least in the sense that I leave my cabin to join everyone for dinner.
This time, I had dinner the first night and literally never saw my fellow residents again (I did feel like I was being rude but, it is a residency, and what I realized is sometimes you just need to nest). I kept thinking "oh I really like them, I can't wait to go enjoy a meal together" then mealtime would come and go and I'd either not notice or be so engrossed in enjoying my own time that I couldn't be bothered.
It's very rare that we're given space to just hide from the world like that, and since my return I've been thinking about how to incorporate the feeling of that residency into my everyday work. Because, really, every day of my work (or most of them) has the potential to hold the kind of joy and productivity and all the other good things I find in a residency.
What I've discovered is that it's not really about hiding from everyone (though I do schedule in 1-2 days a week where I literally refuse to meet with or talk to other humans), but more about ceasing to hide from the natural world.
Even those of us who are very connected to nature still tend to center ourselves and other humans: But the truth is we are part of a much larger, global environment that encompasses far more than just us. We all know this, of course, but we don't often let ourselves feel into it. As people existing in the world, or as writers.
How does it feel to take our own history out of center frame and situate it within larger natural history? As food historians, how do we balance the very human nature of our own endeavors with the truth that those endeavors are shaped by non-human things?
They're questions I don't necessarily have answers to, but I do find that writing about fermentation gives me a unique way to think about where we're focusing our attention, because while human-directed fermentation is indeed human-centered, fermentation as process is not. In other words, people are situated in this history alongside other nonhuman beings: And the experiences of both are critical to the story.
Personal, impersonal histories
I thought about how I conducted research for Our Fermented Lives versus other works I've created, and one difference is that shift in emphasis: My historical work into libraries (my dissertation, plus my work on WWI-era censorship) is anchored into the stories of individual people. There's an intimacy in uncovering and piecing together bits of these librarians' lives and connecting them to a larger story (like the history of their workplace during a world war). Even for research that I finished over a decade ago, I still remember those folks and their stories intimately (this is also the case, of course, for my food history work pre-Our Fermented Lives).
The same is true of my work in archives: Many of the people whose records I cared for, from farming account books to war diaries to photo albums, still live in my head and probably always will.
That's part of the magic of archiving: Making those memories not only accurate in their representation, but also durable and memorable. When I create(d) a finding aid, it's as much about pulling together threads of commonality between different records, to help the researcher down the path they're looking to walk, as it is simply describing what items are there. But I digress...
Unlike my other historical work, with Our Fermented Lives, I found myself thinking, "man, I need to think of more compelling human narratives to pull from the book for marketing," and found that the human stories (which are in there) just didn't feel as memorable to me once everything was said and done.
I think what is compelling about this work, and this kind of work, is that it isn't just a narrative about individual humans. It's a narrative about collective humanity and collective microbes: While my other projects felt tightly directed towards a single focal point, and thus very deep and intimate, this book feels intimate in a holistic way: As though by understanding this one thread of culinary history I'm able to see and feel that depth of connection spread out across every person, from every culture, ever.
For me, it's a very different way to experience the feeling of history: Both reading it and creating it.
But after hours of wondering why the individual human stories weren't ones I can really remember as intimately as I can from my other historical research, this is what I came to.
Because the history of fermentation isn't about some flash in the pan moment where one person magically invented fermentation or made it marketable or whatever else. The power of its history is as a collective history: One we each play a critical role in shaping with our choices.
But because it's collective, it allows us to see ourselves in that history: My choices will not create or destroy our entire world, BUT they do move the needle in the direction I want.
And I can actually influence big, world-changing things with my daily habits: Something fermentation is a good example of (think of how many traditions we have, or don't have, simply because people decided they did or didn't want to keep doing them). Whether with fermentation or otherwise, that right there is some big magic.
Fellow historians and food writers (and everyone), I'm really curious how you would think about decentering humans within narratives? Is it possible? Does that idea resonate with you? How might it look?
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