Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, host of this show, an executive editor of Emergence Magazine,

located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people in present-day, Marin County.

Each week, we feature interviews, stories, poetry, and author-narrated essays, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

The simple act of making or eating food opens an opportunity for connection with so many aspects of the

food web and the broader living world.

But many of our current food systems limit the ways we can access land and the process of

cultivation.

How can we repair our connection with what we eat, reclaim the relationships food embeds

us in? How can we rejoin the biological web that we are part of?

This week, we reshare my conversation with fermentation expert

and acclaimed author Sandor Katz.

Unpacking his book, Fermentation as metaphor,

he guides us through the lessons taught by microorganisms as they change form.

Exploring how our fear of the other, the unseen, and the unknowable, has divorced us from the wonder of fermentation.

Sander uplifts its promise of transformation amid breakdown.

And he shares how engaging with microbial communities through the making and eating of food,

breads, fungi, pickles, yoghers,

can bring us into intimate moments of connection

with the tiny but vital unseen forces

that hold our world together.

You describe yourself as a fermentation revivalist.

...