Funky Love
The F word – Funky Flavourful #foreverlove
Growing mould on rice and being at its fickle beck and call may not be the first thing that comes to mind for most people when they think of love. Love, however, requires us to fall for the unknown. It triggers butterflies in our bellies, alights all our senses, demands full attention and offers utopia. The language of love differs for all. Oft unspoken words transformed into gestures of care. Coaxing growth by providing an environment of individual sustenance. Deeply involved and alert to every hint of change, a profoundly sensorial pleasure, often capricious and sometimes unrequited.
To become a fermentarian is to throw yourself head first into love. The love of funk. It is a world of multisensorial throat-tingling culinary angst—a world of everlasting love. Your senses will become heightened to extremes you never knew existed. The nuance of aroma, taste, flavour, and texture will confiscate every waking moment and remembered dream. Whispering sweet everything’s to jars and crocks of carefully manipulated concoctions, reminiscent of laboratory experiments blended with ancient survival and revival. Beauty is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.
To love is to nurture. Ferments are demanding lovers. To ferment requires a type of nurturing and dedication that elicits a transformative action involving our very own microbial flora and fauna. The sometimes-desperate giving of ourselves with the hope of a smidgeon of reciprocity that insists you get down and dirty. There’s jeopardy, joy, and jealousy in equal measurements. No batch of breathing bubbling bouche is ever quite the same. Akin to meeting a new lover, perhaps. First encounters are intoxicating, intriguing, gentle, fun, and amorous. Like all great loves, there is also the potential for underlying toxicity, friction, volatile explosions and downright hostility. It’s all happening in our jars of funk. What do we get in return? A symbiosis that gifts us a unique code to detonate the flavour bomb that we have been searching for all our lives but just didn’t know it.
To fall in love with fermenting is to hope. It is to engage with your immediate surroundings, listen and walk with the seasons, and appreciate and understand global cultures and traditional practices. To gain the most profound regard for our food's origin and simultaneously embrace modern technology's potential. It is the ultimate self-love, feeding from the inside, encouraging and cheering our unseeable lovers with positive, life-affirming messages. It’s a promise. A Promise that requires understanding, a gentle hand, reflective practice and a philosophy rooted in the moment. The security of indescribable joy.
Although fermenters tend mostly diligently to their microbial mates, the knowledge is always there that they don’t need you. They will do perfectly well in your absence; indeed, they often fare better without your constant fuss, despite your desperation to please them and provide them with a microbial utopia. Like that hard-to-read aloof potential beau, you overcompensate, sometimes deliberately ignoring them in the hope they will call you first. This said the world of fermentation is an act of symbiotic care; it offers a place of connection past, present and future. Jeremy Umansky asked the question, “Why are we here?” his response “We are here to eat” My response? “We are here because our funky friends allow us to be here”. The F word is the word of love.