Teaching Embodied Fermentation Knowledges: Against Purity/ Towards Entanglement

This paper looks at both theoretical and practical research on embodied knowledges and fermented foods. The paper consists of two chapters. In the first chapter, I discuss the history of human-microbial socioecological relations from 7000 BCE to the present. My second chapter describes my experience of teaching two fermentation workshops. I include a discussion of the participants’ description of their experiences with integrating embodied knowledges, as well as a consideration of how their perceptions of bacteria changed over the course of the workshop. I also look at the class and gendered politics of fermentation workshops in this chapter. In both chapters, I follow Alexis Shotwell's argument against purity politics which “shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic” (9). I argue instead for complicated companion species relationships in order reimagine bacteria as pleasurable kin rather than microbial antagonists.