The food stuff I've experimented with

1) beer – ginger beer, happy beer – lemon, balm, st. john’s wort, lavender, root beer – ginger, licorice, burdock
2) mead – wild yeast mead, raspberry lavender mead, rosemary mead
3) cider – the hard kind, not the soft kind
4) cheese – fresh cheese with herbs, mozzarella, cheddar (kinda green, but tasty)
5) yogurt
6) lactofermentation – pickles with cukes and zucchini, kimchi, sauerkraut with cabbage, zucchini, beets
7) sourdough – with wild yeast, eventually got fuzz on top and smelled beery. kinda weird, but kinda cool.
8) bread- lots of it
9) really fucking good dinners, breakfasts, and some pretty good lunches
10) community garden plot – neglected it, became beautifully “weedy” (a.k.a. full of native flora and fauna native to a northeastern riparian zone which was really quite awesome and humbling. Nature took over in the best way possible and the butterflies and birds fucking loved it).
11) work share at local CSA farm
12) vinegar and oil preserving – boiled veggies in vinegar briefly then put them in herbed oil. tasted like bad salad dressing. worth more experimentation.


Some of the foods I’ve played with stand out. They have really intriguing histories, are fun to make, and provide truly nourishing sustenance. I’ll talk about some of those foods in detail in this zine. All the foods I’ll talk about include some sort of fermenting process – which is a totally fucking cool process.
A little note about all the foods I will talk about. If you have read some of those large car manual-like books about how to do some of these food skills at home and you were really confused, freaked out, or overwhelmed, well first of all you are not alone. I wish the process of making food were written about in a more fun, simplified, accessible manner. This shit ain’t rocket science. If ancient man can figure out how to lacto-ferment, homebrew, make cheese, and bake bread than I think anyone else can too. In this booklet I will write about how I make these things, but it’s not how you have to make them. I have read some “how to do it” type books and I can tell you I am terrible at following directions. It’s totally ok if you are too. The more directions, the more I suck at it. The books I have really enjoyed are a little more open and flexible, offering suggestions more than directions. I hope you read my sections about how I make food in that kind of light – as suggestions and ideas more than as a litany of directives. You can do your thing. I got my thing. However, if you’d like to share your thing with me, please do!

If you are new to this stuff you may be concerned about food safety. I can tell you that all the foods I write about in this zine are a little different that the average, sterilized foods that do indeed “go bad.” Most often, sterilized foods “go very, very bad” (like, botulism bad) because there is no other microbial force to fight a foreign, harmful body. Botulism is a fear in canning because canning creates a totally sterilized environment where there are no natural predators to botulism. In the arts of fermenting (hell yeah, it’s an art), there are tons of microbial forces. These microbes help fight off things that would pose any threat to your health. If anything were to go “off” it would be really obvious – it would smell bad, look bad, and taste clearly off (unlike botulism and e. coli which are invisible). I have never had a problem with fermenting, and I know lots of fermenters that have also never had a problem. As long as you use equipment that is clean (doesn’t have to be sterilized, soap and water will do) and clean hands then you should be fine.