Fermented Landscapes: Lively Processes of Socio-environmental Transformation

Ferment is a word that can mean different things—beer or sauerkraut, or social disturbance, often of a more dynamic, productive kind. As it turns out, it can also mean chocolate, coffee, and biotechnology, objects that require fermentation but are not thought to be fermented products. Fermentation is an actual physical process that creates things, as well as a metaphor for process itself. Ferment as a category has always been present in the study of food. Lévi-Strauss, who describes food as “good to think with,” placed fermentation into the category “rotten,” viewing it as one way (along with the raw and the cooked) that cultures portrayed themselves.¹ Douglas, however, saw rotten as dangerous, as “matter out of place.”² Myles sees fermentation as a dangerous but dynamic kind of mixing of categories—such as nature/culture and rural/urban—that “results from the ‘fermentation’ of place, namely the active, sometimes volatile changes catalyzed by...