Sandor Ellix Katz > Quotes

“Our perfection lies in our imperfection.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz

“Moving toward a more harmonious way of life and greater resilience requires our active participation. This means finding ways to become more aware of and connected to the other forms of life that are around us and that constitute our food -- plants and animals, as well as bacteria and fungi -- and to the resources, such as water, fuel, materials, tools, and transportation, upon which we depend. It means taking responsibility for our shit, both literally and figuratively.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An in-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“Resistence takes place on many planes. Occasionally it can be dramatic and public, but most of the decisions we are faced with are mundane and private. What to eat is a choice that we make several times a day, if we are lucky. The cumulative choices we make about food have profound implications. Food offers us many opportunities to resist the culture of mass marketing and commodification. Though consumer action can take many creative and powerful forms, we do not have to be reduced to the role of consumers selecting from seductive convenience items. We can merge appetite with activism and choose to involve ourselves in food as cocreators. (Page 27)”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods

“The problem with killing 99.9 percent of bacteria is that most of them protect us from the few that can make us sick.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“Getting the vegetables submerged is the most critical factor for success in vegetable fermentation.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“This is a miracle of coevolution—the bacteria that coexist with us in our bodies enable us to exist. Microbiologist Michael Wilson notes that “each exposed surface of a human being is colonized by microbes exquisitely adapted to that particular environment.”21 Yet the dynamics of these microbial populations, and how they interact with our bodies, are still largely unknown. A 2008 comparative genomics analysis of lactic acid bacteria acknowledges that research is “just now beginning to scratch the surface of the complex relationship between humans and their microbiota.”22 Bacteria are such effective coevolutionary partners because they are highly adaptable and mutable. “Bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus,” explains bacterial geneticist James Shapiro, who reports “multiple widespread bacterial systems for mobilizing and engineering DNA molecules.”23 In contrast with our eukaryotic cells, with fixed genetic material, prokaryotic bacteria have free-floating genes, which they frequently exchange. For this reason, some microbiologists consider it inappropriate to view bacteria as distinct species. “There are no species in prokaryotes,” state Sorin Sonea and Léo G. Mathieu.24 “Bacteria are much more of a continuum,” explains Lynn Margulis. “They just pick up genes, they throw away genes, and they are very flexible about that.”25 Mathieu and Sonea describe a bacterial “genetic free market,” in which “each bacterium can be compared to a two-way broadcasting station, using genes as information molecules.” Genes “are carried by a bacterium only when needed . . . as a human may carry sophisticated tools.”26”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“Culture begins with cultivating the land, planting seeds, bringing intentionality to cycles that we act to perpetuate.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An in-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“When traditional cultures are outlawed, that is the homogenization of culture. It’s an old story, which could be told by any Native American, or by my grandparents, who fled pogroms and saw the Eastern European Yiddishkeit they were born into disperse and disappear in a single generation. By the time I headed home to the land of obscenely stocked supermarket shelves, I had come to the conclusion that no matter what I said or did, my presence in Africa served only to glamorize the capitalist world order, adding to the seductive allure that if you abandon your traditional culture, educate your kids in colonial languages at missionary schools, and grow cacao beans for export, maybe someday you’ll accumulate the kind of excess wealth to travel to the other side of the globe, just for fun and stimulation.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture FoodsReclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture

“Life’s truths cannot always be reduced to 12-point Times Roman.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“Captain James Cook was famously credited with conquering scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) by bringing barrels of sauerkraut with him to sea and feeding it to his crews daily.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“In our cultural collective imagination, the food safety threat that looms largest is botulism, the rare but often deadly neurological disease caused by botulinum, “the most poisonous substance known to humans,”2 a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Early”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“Given the War on Bacteria so culturally prominent in our time, the well-being of our microbial ecology requires regular replenishment and diversification now more than ever.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“As a result of the War on Bacteria, our bacterial context is rapidly shifting. One bacterium formerly ubiquitous in humans, Helicobacter pylori, which resides in the stomach, is now found in fewer than 10 percent of American children and may be headed toward extinction.62 H. pylori has been associated with humans for at least 60,000 years, and there is evidence that closely related bacteria have lived in the stomachs of mammals since their emergence 150 million years ago.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“Scientists were earnestly trying to elucidate the spontaneous generation of mice as late as the seventeenth century, when Jean Baptista van Helmont reported that “if one presses a dirty shirt into the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat, the ferment from the dirty shirt does not modify the smell of the grain but gives rise to the transmutation of the wheat into mice after about twenty-one days.”11 He also had a recipe for creating scorpions by carving a hole into a brick, filling it with dried basil, and placing it in the full sun.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture FoodsReclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture

“Recent study of beetle digestive tracts has found more than 650 distinct yeasts, at least 200 of which were previously unidentified,”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“KRAUT PRAYER Eli Brown, Oakland, California Myriad beings beneath my sight, thank you for your transformations. May you nourish me as I nourish you. May you thrive in me as I thrive on the earth. In all the worlds may nourishment follow hunger as the echo follows the call.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“ Basic Rice Beer”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“2. Users of bells and whistles such as grapes and milk in their starter vs. flour-and-water minimalists. (Lest you reflexively award moral victory to the purists, note that the grapes side includes such heavy hitters as Nancy Silverton and the man Anthony Bourdain describes as “[God’s] personal bread baker.”) 3. Protective vs. permissive starter parents. (“The California gold rush prospectors made sourdough from whatever they had at hand. River water and whole grain flour. Maybe some old coffee. Hell, throw in some grapes. They fed it whatever they had, however often they could. None of this coddling the sourdough, giving it regular feedings, just the right amount of pablum. You ruin a good sour that way. Turns out to be weak and citified. Doesn’t have the gumption to properly raise a little pancake much less a loaf of bread. Nope.”) .”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“the array of conditions for which probiotic therapy has been found to have some documented and quantifiable measure of success is quite staggering. Probiotics have been most definitively linked to treating and preventing diseases of the digestive tract, such as diarrhea (including that caused by antibiotics, rotavirus, and HIV34), inflammatory bowel disease35, irritable bowel syndrome36, constipation37, and even colon cancer.38 They have shown efficacy in treating vaginal infections.39 Probiotics have been found to reduce incidence and duration of common colds40 and upper respiratory symptoms41 and to reduce absences from work.42 They have been shown to improve outcomes and prevent infections”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

“Are the acidifying bacteria in milk or the yeasts in grape juice our servants, or are we doing their bidding by creating the specialized environments in which they can proliferate so wildly? We must stop thinking in such hierarchical terms and recognize that we, like all creation, are participants in infinite interrelated biological feedback loops, simultaneously unfolding a vast multiplicity of interdependent evolutionary narratives.”
― Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World