Nick Van der Kolk (3:57)

It's like a coffee liqueur, not quite as syrupy.

Sander Katz (4:08)

In the summer of 91, I had a couple of, like, weird, fleeting health things happen. I got this prostate infection which was treatable with antibiotics, but, you know, until the antibiotics kicked in, like, I basically couldn't pee except in a hot bathtub. So that was, like, inconveniencing. Then I had this weird experience where, like, I woke up in the middle of the night one night and all of my joints just hurt. And then in the morning when I woke up, it was gone. I went to my doctor about it, and I don't know why this made him think he should give me an HIV test, but he talked me into doing an HIV test. I'd never really behaved in very risky ways that made me particularly worried about it. I definitely had my sexual coming of age in the context of safer sex guidelines and had generally adhered to them. So I wasn't that worried about it for myself. You had to get the results in person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in his office was, like, right near Washington Square, just off of Fifth Avenue. It was like August 1991, which is, you know, long before there were any effective treatments. My doctor told me that it had come back positive. I mean, I just remember, like, sitting in Washington Square park just feeling in shock after I. After I got. I mean, it was not that. It was not the result I expected. Expected. I remember for a year just feeling like something big has to change in my life. Like, I couldn't exactly picture what it was. I didn't know if it was, like, changing my career or leaving my job, but I just had this feeling like something big has to change. My roommates in New York at the time talked me into coming with them to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. That was right when I was just trying to envision, like, what's the big change in my life. Obviously, I can't know what it's like to feel pregnant, but I felt pregnant with change. I felt like something huge has to shift in my life, and I can't quite picture what it is. In New Orleans, I met some people who were from this queer community in Tennessee, and they told me hilarious stories about the goats and just life on the mountain. And I was very enchanted and intrigued. It just blew my mind that something like this could exist in a remote rural area of Tennessee or in a rural area anywhere. I just thought that queer life was in cities. I just was like, I gotta check this place out. My first impression was not of the community, but it was just like of the beautiful, lush forest carpeted with wildflowers as it is at that time of year. This beautiful forest, the lushness of it all. I mean, really, by the time I was here for, like a week, I knew I wasn't going back to New York. I became increasingly obsessed with these foods, with learning more about this. And, yeah, I started getting a reputation. I got this nickname, sanderkraut. This other friend of mine would always be like, oh, what kind of food are you rotting now? What are we doing on New Year's Eve?

Nick Van der Kolk (8:02)

Will be hiding somewhere.

Sander Katz (8:03)

It was really just when people were getting themselves worked up into a tizzy about Y2K. Who knows what's gonna happen with these computers? A lot of people really believed that everything was gonna fall apart due to a mass computer failure. Part of that was people who were wanting to warehouse food in our community. There were people who, like, wanted to take whatever money we had and just buy bulk dry goods that we could, like, surv if everything fell apart. Todd and his family are preparing for the downside of Y2K should it come to pass. You know, there's people out there that I've talked to that said there's nothing going to happen. What are you basing that on? Nobody knows? No. I never took seriously the idea that everything was going to crash. My challenge to them was, if you really believe this, isn't this the time to start building skills, developing the ability to grow food so that we can grow enough food to feed ourselves, rather than stockpiling foods that'll end up being food for rodents and insects. Sauerkraut, miso, amazake, sourdough bread, injera, Ethiopian honey, wine vinegar, yogurt, buttermilk, sour cream cheese, tempeh, brine, pickles, capers, kimchi, chocolate, tara and kefir and related dairy. For man's. Have you ever seen kefir, like, on a store bought? So by kefir, what I mean is this, like, this little mass, you know, these little. These little globules. They are the agents of kefir, the kefir grains that go from one batch to the next, and then this little rubbery blob gets bigger. And what is kefir? Kefir is a fermented milk originally from Central Asia. What really distinguishes it from yogurt is how it's made. Rather than just using a little bit of the mature kefir to start the new kefir, there are these rubbery blobs which turn out to be incredibly biodiverse there's 30, 30 some distinct organisms that have been identified within kefir grains. You plop them in milk and the organisms from them grow into the milk, but the milk also nourishes the grains themselves and they get bigger and you end up with more of them. It's easy, it's delicious. It's microbially diverse. Probiotics. It's pretty cool. Can we try some? Yeah. Now, what I will tell you about these is I was teaching in Atlanta last weekend and I ran into this woman who had been in a class of mine like 15 years ago, and she's had like kefir grains from all that time. And so she returned to me these kefir grains. She said she wasn't really sure about them. And I mean, I think that they're fine, but they have the slight off flavor. Okay. So if you want to try it. That's very grassy. Yeah, I mean, I think that. I think it's generally good. It's got this. It's just got this like one particular. I don't even. I don't have a word to describe it, but it's this one particular flavor note that feels a little bit off to me. I'm not, you know, I'm certainly not worried about safety or I wouldn't be sharing it with you. How can I be sure that I have good bacteria growing in this jar and not some dangerous bacteria that might make me sick or might even kill somebody? I mean, I had never really had that anxiety. I just never really thought about it before. Just the fact that it was such a well established, timeless classic food. Just the fact that it was in the Joy of Cooking, Just the fact that I had, by this point, done it dozens of times and always had consistently good results was enough for me. But having that question kind of forced me to do a little bit of reading in the technical literature and delving into that, figuring out why it is that it's a safe food and you don't have to worry about pathogenic bacteria. In terms of the safety of sauerkraut, the best answer I have for people is if their batch of sauerkraut starts to make people sick, that's an unprecedented event. And they're gonna get a ton of attention. Because there's no documented case history anywhere in the world of illness or food poisoning from fermented vegetables, why would they think that theirs would be the first? The process is very elegantly self protecting. Once you get the vegetables submerged every single time, lactic acid bacteria, which are present on all plants growing out of soil on planet earth are what will proliferate under that condition. We read every year of food poisoning outbreaks in raw vegetables. One year it was spinach, one year it was lettuce, one year it was tomatoes. I mean, clearly there's the possibility of incidental contamination of vegetables with pathogenic bacteria. Usually the story is a factory farm uphill, manure washes down over a field of vegetables, and then people eat those vegetables raw and some people get sick and maybe a person very frail health or an infant dies from that. But let's say you were to take vegetables that had been exposed to some sort of contamination like that and make sauerkraut from them. You chop them up, you salt them, you squeeze them a little bit, you get them juicy, you get them submerged under their own juices. Within a couple of days, you have a wild proliferation of lactic acid bacteria. The indigenous bacteria there is always going to dominate over some incidental pathogens. And then as they acidify the environment, they'll knock out the E. Coli, the salmonella, the other pathogenic bacteria. It's just a very convenient, elegant fact for us that none of the known pathogens that people worry about can survive in acidic environments. Once the lactic acid bacteria start to generate lactic acid, they'll kill any pathogens that happen to be present. This is why nobody gets sick from eating fermented vegetables. The process itself is self protecting. More and more I just challenge people about the idea of good bacteria and bad bacteria. I don't think bacteria necessarily fall into one of those two categories of good or bad. And there are some really interesting stories of bacteria that were assumed to be bad bacteria and have largely been eradicated from the American population that on second thought, maybe actually have some valuable roles.

Nick Van der Kolk (15:15)

Such as?

Sander Katz (15:16)

The most famous example of this is something called Helicobacter and it was associated with ulcers and it was believed that it was the cause of ulcers. There have been various medications that have been widespread that target this bacteria, and it's largely absent now. It's greatly diminished in American populations now as researchers have been struggling to understand some of the causes of the sudden rise in obesity in American populations. One of the theories is that helicobacter has something to do with helping our bodies balance between energy storage and energy usage. Eliminating it from our bodies maybe has something to do with with this rise in obesity along with changes in our diet. From our vantage point now, a lot of the understandings people had 100 years ago seem very, very crude. And I have no doubt that 100 years from now, people will look at what our understandings were now and think that they were very, very crude. The art of fermentation came out 2012. Yeah.

Nick Van der Kolk (16:30)

Okay.

Sander Katz (16:31)

How's the war on microbes been since then? What's the state? Well, I mean, so I guess I would separate out a little bit the war on microbes from interest in fermented foods. Interest in fermented foods is huge and growing. Yeah, the war on microbes, I mean, it's a huge pet peeve of mine. Like a couple months ago I bought garbage bags and they were scented and had like, you know, an antibacterial chemical added to them. I feel like more and more products are ending up with antibacterial chemicals. I actually just heard a story the other day that Tennessee is ranked highest in rate of antibiotic prescriptions in the whole United States. I certainly don't mean to be like against the use of antibiotic drugs, but it seems like there's broad consensus that they're over prescribed. So I don't think the war on bacteria is letting up at all really. But, you know, one manifestation of growing awareness of the importance of bacteria in our bodies is that there's more and more interest in fermented foods and beverages. What I would consider to be the most profound benefit of fermentation would be the bacteria themselves selves contrary to the indoctrination that many of us have received throughout our lives. That bacteria are so dangerous and bacteria need to be avoided at all cost. And we have this arsenal of chemical compounds that we can use to destroy bacteria when we encounter them. It turns out bacteria are the matrix for all life and are totally essential to our functionality and well being. Without denying the idea that there do exist bacteria that can make us sick. In fact, they're very rare. Each of us is host to a mind boggling number of bacteria. Each of us is host to something like a trillion bacteria. There's many more times bacteria inside of each of us than there are human beings on the planet. These bacteria exist in extraordinary diversity and they give us a lot of our functionality. In the case of our human bodies, we're dependent on bacteria for our ability to digest food and extract nutrients from the food that we eat. Bacteria in our intestines actually synthesize certain essential nutrients on our behalf. What we call our immune system is mostly the work of bacteria. And it's through bacterial exposure that our immune systems really learn to function. There's more and More researchers who are trying to figure out why we're seeing this dramatic rise in childhood allergies and asthma, who are coming to the conclusion that it is lack of bacterial exposure, that we're like over protecting our children, not giving them adequate opportunities to play in the dirt and touch animals and put things in their mouths and all the ways that children get exposed to a wide range of bacteria and this is underdeveloping their immune system. So they're developing these autoimmune disorders such as allergies and asthma. Beyond our immune system, almost every system in our bodies is related to regulated by gut bacteria. The most dramatic recent finding is mental health. Our brain chemistry, our serotonin and other chemical compounds that determine how we think and how we feel are regulated in ways that we don't completely understand by bacteria in the gut. And so there's all this new therapeutic research looking at how improving gut biodiversity can actually help our mental health. The bacteria in our bodies is critically important, and we're not alone in this regard. The roots of plants produce what are called exudates, carbohydrate rich substances that their roots send out to attract bacteria to them, that enable them to access nutrients that they need from the soil. Every kind of organism is working with bacteria, bacteria as part of its functionality. If you look at things from an evolutionary perspective, there's broad consensus among evolutionary biologists at this point that all life is descended from bacteria. The flip side of this that doesn't get talked about as much is that no multicellular form of life has ever lived without bacteria.

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Sander Katz (22:25)

So this is some radish kraut, you know, in my stomach cellar. I have a vessel with 160 L of it or something in a 200 L vessel, so, you know, about 40 liters down. If you want to have a little taste of it, feel free to. That's crunch. Not as salty as I was expecting. I mean, you don't need a lot of salt. Like, I mean, you know, one of the things I'm always trying to communicate to people is this does not have to be super salty. It's all context. How long do you want to preserve it? What's the temperature you're going to preserve it at? You can make this without any salt at all, really. Without any salt, it's never going to have a crunchy texture. It'll get mushy pretty quickly. What makes vegetables crunchy are pectins. And there are enzymes in all vegetables that digest pectins, so the salt slows them down. So if you don't use any salt, your vegetables will just never be as crispy, and then they'll also have more of a tendency to get soft and mushy quickly. A lot of the traditions use heavy, heavy salting because they're survival traditions and. And so, like, okay, if, you know, if you have a mass of cabbages and they're the last fresh vegetables that you're likely to see for six months, you have an incentive, you know, if you have access to cheap salt, to add a lot of salt, because salt is a preservative. But if you're either preserving it for a more moderate length of time or have a cool place to store it, you can get away with much, much less salt. Every fermentation process involves some kind of environmental manipulation, whether it's like keeping the yogurt above body temperature for those yogurt organisms to grow. When I say a do it yourself guide to cultural manipulation, it's a play on this word culture, but it's also pretty straightforward that manipulating environments is really what fermentation is all about.

Nick Van der Kolk (24:40)

About is that sort of a powerful feeling to, like, be able to orchestrate in that way.

Sander Katz (24:45)

Like, does. I mean, a powerful feeling? I mean, I think that it's very satisfying feeling being able to consistently have a predictable desired outcome in the transformation of food. It's very satisfying. I think it's empowering. I mean, I don't really particularly feel like I'm on a power trip about it.

Nick Van der Kolk (25:09)

Yeah, I do. I do. Like, for me, I mean, this says more about me than anything else, but I feel like, because it's like these organisms that are involved in it too, like there is something really weirdly godlike about it that you're just manipulating this environment.

Sander Katz (25:24)

So, sure, I mean, I can see that, but I mean, I also can see it the other way.

Nick Van der Kolk (25:28)

What's the other way?

Sander Katz (25:29)

Well, here. Here I am putting all this energy into preparing food and environments, you know, for bacteria and yeast. They've totally got me under their thumb. I'm constantly feeding them different kinds of foods that I could just eat myself, but instead I'm feeding them with it. So I'm providing food and a hospitable environment for them to be able to proliferate wildly. So all I'm saying is, who's controlling whom? Three and a half billion years ago, something began to appear that would change the planet forever. The first cells came to life. Today, descendants of this early life still flourish. We call them bacteria and they've evolved to a live in every habitat on Earth.

Sander Katz (26:39)

Here is a colony of powerful lactobacilli which have survived long, severe ordeals.

Sander Katz (26:48)

The flavor of lactic acid from sour pickles from sauerkraut.

Sander Katz (26:53)

There are many kinds of kinds of lactobacilli which are beneficial to human beings.

Sander Katz (26:58)

I was very enchanted and intrigued. I was very enchanted and intrigued.

Sander Katz (27:03)

This is a totally unexpected phenomenon.

Sander Katz (27:06)

Of course, bacteria have adapted to less extreme environments as well. Beautiful lush forest carpeted with wildflowers. This beautiful forest, such a beautiful fauna. There's the lushness of it all.

Sander Katz (27:22)

Death speedily overtakes the harmful bacteria under the action of the metabolite of Lactobacilli.

Sander Katz (27:30)

Sandra Kraut what kind of fruit are you rotting now? Lysander Kraut what kind of food are you rotting now? This is soy sauce. Soybeans that I grew up fungus on. Koji aspergillus soy. Koji aspergillus soy Stir me often daily. Question mark. In the time that a baby could be produced, soy sauce is still going. Radish Kraut Crunch Wines and meads. Blueberry wine. A super Mac Mead. Blueberry wine Saber crab Turmeric ginger, black pepper mead. Turmeric ginger black pepper mead. Koji pickled cow tongue Coffee mead.

Nick Van der Kolk (28:25)

Coffee mead.

Sander Katz (28:26)

Yep. The most profound benefit, the bacteria themselves. They reside in and on almost everything. Bacteria are the matrix for all life. I am putting all this energy into preparing food for bacteria and yeast.

Sander Katz (28:48)

And the cells keep living peacefully.

Sander Katz (28:52)

They've totally got me under their thumb. All I'm saying is, who's controlling who?

Nick Van der Kolk (29:22)

That's it for love and radio. Sander Katz's most recent book is called Fermentation journeys. I've also put links to citations of some of the scientific claims he made in his interviews review. It's up on our website loveandradio.org this episode was produced with Phil Demihowski and featured musical contributions from Sign Libra, Mary Latimore, M. Sage Moss, Cover Technology, Oe the Double O Ray, Jimmy Behan, Pierre Rousseau, Quixosis Glitch, Bird and Alex Hency. I have a playlist up on our website and the Sanderkrout remix at the end of the episode was composed by Martin Austwick. Love and Radio is a labor of love and radio and made possible thanks to our supporters on Patreon. Thank you with extra special thanks to Ally Mothra Perry, Casey Pamela Anderson, Chakrit Footaidon, Sudajan Bam Bam Dan Palmino, Jacqueline Potato League, Jason V for Vendetta, Joe Palmer, Mark Dunksason, Nick Grylz, Sam Huffman Huffman Sandro Nick actually has to read this Schroeder and Chris, who thinks he's too fancy to tell me how to pronounce his last name. If you want to join the group of wonderful human beings who make Love and Radio happen, you can help keep the show going by becoming a member yourself. @loveandradio.org Member I'm Nicholas Sardine. Punch Punch Vander Kolk. Thanks for listening. It.

Sander Katz (33:22)

It.

Sander Katz (35:04)

It and the other factor that really diminishes biodiversity in the gut is, you know, the fact of our modern diets that most of us eat so little fiber. Prebiotics are oligosaccharides and other kinds of high fiber foods that are hard for us to digest and therefore feed bacteria all the way along the length of our digestive systems. The classic example of a prebiotic is a compound called inulin. The food that has high levels of inulin that I know of is Jerusalem artichokes, which are these like, you know, little knobby tubers that are like a North American indigenous food, but they're also a little bit notorious. People feel like they make them gassy. Well, guess what? Like prebiotic foods, foods that are hard to digest and feed the bacteria along the entire length of our digestive systems, including the large intestine. Bacteria in the large intestine are being well nourished and producing some carbon dioxide. We are going to experience that as gas. So I just like to sort of offer people the perspective that gas is not intrinsically a pathogenic phenomenon. It is actually a normal sign of healthy digestion. And I'm not saying that sort of like uncomfortable gas is normal, but some gas production is normal and healthy and just part of our functioning. And if we want our gut microbiota to be healthy, we have to feed it the kinds of foods that are going to result in us having a little bit of gas. It.