Fermentation, the human acquired practice of transforming food through the collaboration with microorganisms such as yeasts and bacteria, is a wide and interdisciplinary matter, concerning vastly different disciplines: from microbiology to anthropology, from chemistry to philosophy. Simply put, fermentation demonstrates the infinite connections existing within our reality and its consideration can be fruitful both from a practical and metaphorical standpoint. Fermentation holds the possibility to go even beyond the constraints of the human being, highlighting the dynamics of trans-species relationships and their implications in our understanding of existence, of life and death. This work will be dedicated to the exploration of the practice of fermentation as a means to making-with microbes, in an effort to reframe our existence and reimagine mortality, through the understanding of all life as an endless collaborative continuum of beings. The evidence of this reality can be experienced and understood precisely in the unfolding of human-microbial relationships.
Therefore, the first section of this work will be dedicated to the practical example of making-with microbial life through the fostering of a sourdough starter culture, supported by Sandor Ellix Katz’s metaphorical considerations of fermentation and understanding of reality as an intertwined set of relationships, defined as a microbial matrix. Soon, the author’s situated experience of co-constructing a relationship with a starter culture will be narrated and analyzed, addressing matters of trust, materiality and grief. The choice of a sourdough starter will be considered in the understanding of this particular fermentation’s characteristics and within the framework of the connections between fermented foods, death and grief as explored by Julia Skinner. Finally, considering the fundamental importance of human-microbial relationships in this work, the role and dynamics elapsing between the human and the ferment in question – the author and the sourdough starter culture – will be analyzed, focusing on matters of care and mutuality.
Heading into the second part of the work, the traditional western subject-object duality of knowledge will be put into question in order to explore matters of collaborative and collective existence from a situated standpoint, recognizing humans as part of the endless microbial matrix that constitutes the reality we co-inhabit. Knowledge practices embedded in materiality, namely queering and relationality, will be considered as examples of relevant methodologies, fit to access such reality from the perspective of existence within, with and beyond the microbial matrix. There, the issue of purity will be taken to the forefront and questioned both from a biological and from an ethical perspective, through the contributions of Lynn Margulis’s symbiogenesis theory and Alexis Shotwell’s ethical and political outlook on the matter. Subsequently, human-microbial relationships will be explored specifically through the examples of fermented foods as vehicles for reality-making and sense- making. The consideration of Maya Hey’s theorizations on human-microbial communication will highlight the positioning of human beings as collaborators and co-makers of being and of knowledge and underline the epistemological value of fermentation. Finally, the fundamental matter of culture will be taken into account in its polysemy related to fermentation. On one hand the perspectives from anthropologists Philippe Descola and Tim Ingold will offer understandings on the separation between nature and culture and on the possibility to question and overcome such separation, similarly proposed by Donna Haraway. These considerations will be brought back to the practice of fermentation, where culture also means the proliferation of communities of micro-organisms, including the possibility of degeneration into growths that as humans we may consider related to death. Throughout this section, microbial relationships and fermentation will be recognized, from various stand points, as situated and bodily opportunities to mediate our relationship with mortality and access survival.
With the acknowledgement of these considerations the final section of this work will begin with the framing of imagination as a generative force, as proposed by Ingold, which will be fundamental in the consideration of death, mortality and grief. Thereafter, the consideration of life as communal and collaborative will be taken into serious account through the practices of fermentation, supported as activism by Katz and expressed by Monja Simon in the example of sauerkraut making. The microbial reality of life as collaborative and communal will be explored through the example of fungi proposed by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez and deepened through the arguments proposed by Anna Tsing, that will center and question the matters of individuality and self-containment.
From perspectives on life, we will turn to perspectives of death, seamlessly in the understanding of continuous existence. Individuality and self-containment in death and the related discussions on disgust, offered by Aurel Kolnai, will be considered critically again through the contributions on fungal existence by Ostendorf-Rodríguez and on collaborative survival Tsing proposes.
Finally, fermentation will be recognized as a process of making-with, which allows for a mediation with death and a possibility for grief to be expressed and processed. The experiences of fermentation and death, lived and shared by experts whose works will have been fundamental in this discussion, will demonstrate the relevance of making-with microbes as a way of dealing with grief and reimagining mortality.