The alchemy of fermentation has developed with exquisite diversity in every culture around the world. The word alchemy itself comes from the Arabic, meaning black earth, suggesting that fermentation is actually a further cultivation of the food beyond what it draws from the garden soil.

It was undoubtedly Neolithic woman who first discovered and developed pickling. Just as she had grasped how she could select and domesticate wild plants, so one summer afternoon, interrupted during a leisurely lunch of einkorn (ancestral wheat) pilaf, she set aside her partially chewed grain. Toward evening, returning to her einkorn, she discovered a new, sweetly souring food. With a sudden aha! she understood that she could control and orchestrate that fermentation, if she chose.

Or perhaps it was early one morning as she lovingly chewed a mouthful of rice for the baby she was weaning and she paused for a moment to savor the sweet sweet liquid her own saliva had created. From then on she knew the power of saliva as the archetypal fermenting agent.

All traditional cultures recognize the potent transforming energy in saliva-fermented food. Zuni warriors ate corn chewed by virgin maidens in preparation for going into the wilderness on vision quests, and Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest prepare an unusual dish by chewing local seaweeds.

Young children with severe fistulas blocking their intestines were not able to assimilate formula fed to them through feeding tubes. As a last resort, doctors tried giving them brown rice pre-chewed by their mothers. The children made dramatic recoveries.

On reflection and in hindsight, let's attempt to grasp the principles of this magical culturing. Looking at the nitty-gritty of eating-and of cooking as a prelude to eating-we see that most of our food comes predominantly from the vegetable world (unless you're a steak-eating Westerner). That vegetable world is green, unable to circumambulate, and cold-blooded, hence (relative to the animal world) yin.

Eating-along with its parallel activity, cooking-attempts to transmute that yin world into animal life: red-blooded, highly mobile and warm-blooded, hence (again relatively) yang. Cooking and eating then are both processes of yangization.

Both cooking and eating transmute the yin world of chlorophyll, with its central molecule of magnesium, to the yang world of hemoglobin, with its central molecule of iron. Each process uses four very similar yangizing forces. The first is time, since it's been here since the beginning: the longer you eat, hold in your mouth or cook something, the more animalized (yang) it becomes. Second comes pressure (time upon time creates pressure), as in chewing and grinding food between molars and as in placing a lid-light as bamboo or heavy as cast iron and weighted with a stone-on a cooking pot.

Third comes fire (continual pressure eventually ignites). The fire of eating is the oxygen-burning of our breathing, absolutely necessary to turn food into bright red, oxygenated blood, which gives us the criterion for true cooking fire. Obviously, electricity and microwave do not qualify as true burning fire. (See last issue's "Warming Up Inside Out" for further elaboration on this subject.)

Last, enter the young upstart: salt. A burning fire leaves ashes or, you could say, salts. The salt of our eating is saliva (same etymological root). And we've come full circle to saliva as the archetypal fermenting agent!

You may be wondering why I've gone off on this tangent of yin/yang and eating/cooking. Listen: what I'm saying is each season of the year has a distinct intrinsic energy. Summer's inherent energy is one of fermenting, turning and souring. In summer, things naturally pickle themselves.

Pickling is, quite simply, fireless cooking. We may describe pickling as a way of controlling and refining summer's inherent fire energy by bringing into play the three other forces we cook with: time, pressure and salt, in varying proportions and sequences. With a bit of ingenuity, you really don't need to read any further.

You may be asking, though, why we would want to pickle. Oh, there are so many reasons! Pickling makes foods more delicious, gives them new dimensions, raises their nutritive value, increases their ease of assimilation, transforms simple foods into healing remedies and literally synthesizes vitamins (especially B and C) that were not there before. Culturing microorganisms also synthesize antioxidants, thus preserving vitamins sensitive to oxidation-A and C.

Fermentation predigests grains, beans and milk, making these kinds of foods more easily accepted by infants, elderly and weakened people. Starch levels in raw rice are 78%; at the end of 48 hours of fermentation, they drop to 15%. Whole grains, fermented six days at 75 degrees F increase their levels of usable amino acids, especially lysine, up to 1100%!

Pickling creates truly new foods. Compare the bland and difficult to digest soybean with miso's rich aroma, wheat porridge with true sourdough bread or the sulfurous cabbage with sparkling sauerkraut. Culturing, fermenting, pickling creates a wonderful diversity of textures, tastes, you might even say sensations. The word fermentation itself hints at the lively sensations fermented foods and beverages offer us. It comes from the Latin fervere, meaning to boil, and describes well the sensation created by the carbon dioxide bubbles pickled foods produce as they work.

Pickling promotes the growth of intestinal flora. Antibiotics, junk food, stress, electronic pollution, radiation from TV screens and computer monitors all leave our digestive systems weak, often completely sterile. Fermented foods are like external digestive systems boosting our own atrophied ones, inviting saliva and cultivating friendly bacteria in our intestines. Furthermore, lactic acid bacteria actually incapacitate harmful ones. For example, the Indonesian fermented soybean cake tempeh has a strong action against botulism and staphylococcus-causing bacteria.

Fire's nature is one of flux. Eating fermented foods allows us to make balance with this unpredictable fire nature and to adapt more smoothly to change-of-season extremes, those times of erratic temperatures and sudden winds that come invariably as one season evolves into the next, times when people seem to catch colds easily. Pickling sees our food and us more gently through change of seasons or on journeys where we ourselves are changing climates.

Pickling preserves food during the months when a green garden is unnatural. Food preserved without the use of fire adds another dimension to winter eating: alive, crisp, enzyme-rich, still-fragrant vegetables. Pickling is a simple, incredibly energy-efficient means to preserve food. Compare pickling to freezing, which requires pots, stoves, fuel, plastic bags, expensive and bulky freezer units, plus a constant source of electricity (which is in turn dependent on hydro or nuclear plants, expensive wiring and upkeep), or to canning, which again requires pots, stoves, fuel, abundant water for hot water bathing, and glass canning jars (read: factories, assembly lines, trucking, retail stores). Unlike freezing and canning, pickling is delightfully low-tech, requiring very little external paraphernalia.

With the coming of processed foods, fast food and TV dinners, our cultural heritage-with its nutritional and gastronomic wealth and its thousands of years of science, art, techniques and tradition-is now endangered. There are clear parallels in contemporary agriculture and culture, whose diversity is also seriously threatened.

In agriculture, we are moving inexorably away from diversity, with its inherent safeguards (if a blight hits one variety of corn, say, another may have a resistant gene that would make it invulnerable), to monoculture in the U.S. and abroad, where single crops monopolize acres and acres, and where even the few varieties being grown out are hybrids for which farmers must buy seed each year from huge transnational petrochemical companies.

Culturally we see a similar pattern where the homogenizing influence of imperialism and ubiquitous mass media have led to cultural genocide throughout the world.

Supper that night began with water glasses of vodka, with pickles and homemade black bread...And at two-thirty in the morning we had the following meal: glasses of vodka, and pickles again, and fried fish which had been caught in the village pond...
--John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal.

Before suggesting steps you can take to bring pickling, culturing and fermentation into your life, let me take you on one more tangent that will paint an even more colorful and compelling picture of this delightful culturing process.

Looking at the natural progression of plant life, we see that the ultimate stage (I'm tempted to say goal) of a plant is to flower and bear seed in the image of its true self. In the flowering process, the plant etherealizes itself into sugars, blossom colors, fragrance, honey, essential oils and therapeutic substances. Most plants have showy flowers to attract their insect pollinators; grains, being wind-pollinated, need no flowery show to attract insects for the survival of their species. Indeed, who's seen wheat's subtle flowers, or barley's?

Recalling that flowers are that part of the plant that bears sweet fragrance, look at the Chinese character for fermentation and pickling:

Pickles fill out the fragrant flowering of grains and, indeed, of all uncultured foods. Fermentation is precisely a flowering and ripening process that elevates food to a stage beyond that manifest in its natural growth.

All cultures have their traditional ethnic forms of fermentation. Grain and vegetable eating cultures use salt-based pickles: miso, umeboshi, kim chi, sauerkraut, soy sauce. Meat-eating cultures devise sugar-wine and vinegar-based pickles and marinades to break down the toxins of animal food. Among nomadic people, yogurt provides a similar form of lactobacilli.

When and where do you begin to culture your own food? Naturally, as with everything else, there is an ideal time in the moon and sun cycles to begin each kind of pickle.

Whenever you have a surplus of fresh vegetables, make a simple, quick pickle by sprinkling salt over finely sliced carrots, turnips, onions, radishes and greens and then pressing them for several hours in a bowl under a heavy weight. Or submerge cucumbers, carrots, cauliflower flowerettes, kelp, onions, melon rinds and peppers in a brine. Allow seven days for full lactic acid fermentation to mellow their tastes.

Sourdough bread rises best when allowed to develop overnight under the drawing power of the moon. Cucumbers prefer the last quarter of the moon to be brined. For crisp, firm and long-lasting sauerkraut, pick the cabbage from the field just before the first frost strikes and store it in the cellar until the next new moon. Then shred, layer with salt, press under droptop and heavy weight. It will be ready in about six weeks and good for a year or more.

Long-time forms of fermentation like miso and bran pickling are best begun in autumn, shortly before the full moon, and ideally after a cold spell, yet before the winter solstice, which alters rather radically the vegetable's energy. But don't hang on the stars. Simply soaking your grains and beans overnight initiates fermentation. (Save the grain-soaking water but discard the bean one.) Above all, let your own prototypic fermenting agent, saliva, culture each mouthful. Hunger is the best pickle, wrote Ben Franklin.

Thorough chewing draws out sweet saliva, focuses memory, wipes out past and future, leaving only the infinitely present time. Chewing stimulates that part of the brain just behind the temples that is related to deep memory. (Hold your palms over your temples while chewing. You'll feel it.) Long chewing brews an infinitely varied, perfectly refined, here-and-now pickle that is sufficient to the day and all yours. When eating is chewing, saliva-not food-becomes its essence and its reason.