by Mary Roach
The commune had a shifting cast of about fifteen members, some of whom had lived there for decades. It billed itself as a radical faerie sanctuary, though the term was notoriously slippery—the faerie movement, begun in the late seventies by gay rights activists, embraced everyone from transvestites to pagans and anarchists, their common interest being a focus on nature and spirituality. Street kids from San Francisco, nudists from Nashville, a Mexican minister coming out of the closet: all found their way, somehow, to central Tennessee. Most were gay men, though anyone was welcome, and the great majority had never lived on the land before. "Sissies in the wood," one writer called it, after tussling over camping arrangements with a drag queen in four-inch heels.
New arrivals stayed in the cabin "downtown," which had been fitfully expanded to encompass a library, living room, dining room, and kitchen, with four bedrooms upstairs. Farther down the path were a swaybacked red barn, a communal shower, a pair of enormous onion-domed cisterns, and a four-seater outhouse. The charge for room and board was on a sliding scale starting at seventy-five dollars a month, with a tacit agreement, laxly enforced, to pitch in—milking goats, mending fences, or just greeting new arrivals. Those who stayed eventually built houses along the ridges or bought adjacent land and started homesteads and communes of their own. In the spring, at the annual May Day celebration, their numbers grew to several hundred. "The gayborhood just keeps on growing," Weeder, Hickory Knoll's oldest member, told me one evening as we were sitting on the front porch of the cabin. "We're a pretty good voting bloc."
Inside, half a dozen men were preparing dinner. Food is the great marker of the day at Hickory Knoll—the singular goal toward which most labor and creativity tend. On my visit the kitchen seemed to be staffed by at least three cooks at all times, cutting biscuits, baking vegan meat loaf, washing kale; one of them, a gangly Oklahoman named Lady Now, worked in the nude. "Real estate determines culture," Katz likes to say, and the maxim is doubly true among underground food movements. Urban squatters gravitate toward freeganism and dumpster diving, homesteaders toward raw milk and roadkill. At Hickory Knoll the slow pace, lush gardens, and communal isolation are natural incubators for fermented food, though Katz didn't realize it right away. "It took a while for the New York City to wear off," Weeder told me. "Overanalyzing everything. Where am I going to go tonight? There really is nowhere to go."
That first year, a visitor named Crazy Owl brought some miso as barter for his stay, inspiring Katz to make some of his own. Miso, like many Asian staples, is usually made of fermented soybeans. The beans are hard to stomach alone, no matter how long they're cooked. But once inoculated with koji—the spores of the Aspergillus oryzae mold—they become silken and delicious. The enzymes in the mold predigest the beans, turning starches into sugars, breaking proteins into amino acids, unlocking nutrients from leaden compounds. A lowly bean becomes one of the world's great foods.
Katz experimented with more and more fermented dishes after that. He made tempeh, natto, kombucha, and kefir. He recruited friends to chew corn for chicha—an Andean beer brewed with the enzymes in human saliva. At the Vanderbilt library in Nashville, he worked his way through the Hand-book of Indigenous Fermented Foods (1983), by the Cornell microbiologist Keith Steinkraus. When he'd gathered a few dozen recipes, Katz printed a pamphlet and sold some copies to a bookstore in Maine and a permaculture magazine in North Carolina. The pamphlet led to a contract from a publisher, Chelsea Green, and the release of Wild Fermentation, in 2003. The book was only a modest success at first, but it sold more copies each year—some 70,000 in all. Soon Katz was crisscrossing the country in his car, shredding cabbage in the aisles of Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, preaching the glories of sauerkraut.
"Fermented foods aren't culinary novelties," he told me one morning. "They aren't cupcakes. They're a major survival food." We were standing in his test kitchen in the basement of a farmhouse a few miles down the road from Hickory Knoll. Katz had rented the space two years earlier, when his classes and cooking projects outgrew the commune's kitchen, and outfitted it with secondhand equipment: a triple sink, a six-burner stove, a freezer, and two refrigerators, one of them retrofitted as a tempeh incubator. Along one wall a friend had painted a psychedelic mural showing a man conversing with a bacterium. Along another, Katz had pinned a canticle to wild fermentation, written by a Benedictine nun in New York. A haunch of venison hung in back, curing for prosciutto, surrounded by mismatched jars of sourdough, goat kefir, sweet potato fly, and other ferments, all bubbling and straining at their lids. "It's like having pets," Katz said.
The kitchen had the same aroma as Katz's car, only a few orders of magnitude funkier: the smell of life before cold storage. "We are living in the historical bubble of refrigeration," Katz said, pulling a jar of bright pink and orange sauerkraut off the shelf. "Most of these food movements aren't revolutionary so much as conservative. They want to bring back the way food has been."
Fermentation, like cooking with fire, is one of the initial conditions of civilization. The alcohol and acids it produces can preserve fruits and grains for months and even years, making sedentary society possible. The first ferments happened by accident—honey water turned to mead, grapes to vinegar—but people soon learned to re-create them. By 5400 B.C. the ancient Iranians were making wine. By 1800 B.C. the Sumerians were worshiping Ninkasi, the goddess of beer. By the first century B.C., the Chinese were making a precursor to soy sauce.
Katz calls fermentation the path of least resistance. "It's what happens when you do nothing," he says. Or, rather, if you do one or two simple things. A head of cabbage left on a counter will never turn to sauerkraut, no matter how long it sits there. Yeasts, molds, and a host of bacteria will attack it, digesting the leaves till all that's left is a puddle of black slime. To ferment, most food has to be protected from the air. It can be sealed in a barrel, stuffed in a casing, soaked in brine, or submerged in its own juices—anything, as long as oxygen doesn't touch it. The sauerkraut Katz was holding had been made ten days earlier. I'd watched him shred the cabbage—one head of red and one of green—sprinkle it with two tablespoons of salt to draw out the water, and throw in a few grated carrots. He'd scrunched everything together with his hands, to help release the juice, and packed it in a jar until the liquid rose to the top. "I would suggest not sealing it too tightly," he said, as he clamped down the lid. "Some jars will explode."
Three waves of bacteria had colonized the kraut since then, each one changing the chemical environment just enough to attract and fall victim to the next—like yuppie remodelers priced out of their own neighborhood. Sugars had been converted to acids, carbon dioxide, and alcohol. Some new nutrients had been created: B vitamins, for instance, and isothiocyanates, which laboratory studies have found to inhibit lung, liver, breast, and other cancers. Other nutrients were preserved, notably vitamin C. When Captain Cook circled the globe between 1772 and 1775, he took along 30,000 pounds of sauerkraut, and none of his crew died of scurvy.
I tried a forkful from Katz's jar, along with a slab of his black-rice tempeh. The kraut was crunchy and tart—milder than any I'd had from a store and much fresher tasting. "You could eat it after two weeks, you could eat it after two months, and if you lived in a cold environment and had a root cellar you could eat it after two years," Katz said. The longer it fermented the stronger it would get. His six-month-old kraut, made with radishes and Asian greens, was meaty, pungent, and as tender as pasta—the enzymes in it had broken down the pectin in its cell walls. Some people like it that way, he said. "When this Austrian woman tasted my six-week-old sauerkraut, she said, 'That's okay—for coleslaw.'"
While we were eating, the front door banged open and a young man walked in carrying some baskets of fresh-picked strawberries. He had long blond hair and hands stained red with juice. His name was Jimmy, he said. He lived at Hickory Knoll but was doing some farming up the road. "We originally grew herbs and flowers and planted them in patterns," he said. "But people were like,
'What are those patterns you're makin'? They don't look Christian to me.'" The locals were usually pretty tolerant, Katz said. In eighteen years, the worst incidents that he could recall were a few slashed tires and some teenagers yelling "Faggots!" from the road and shooting shotguns in the air. Rural Tennessee is a "don't ask, don't tell" sort of place, where privacy is the one inalienable right. But Jimmy's fancy crop might have counted as a public display. He laughed and handed me a berry, still warm from the sun. "They're not only organic," he said. "They're grown with gay love."
The fruit was sugar-sweet and extravagantly fragrant—a distillation of spring. But the sauerkraut was the more trustworthy food. An unwashed fruit or vegetable may host as many as a million bacteria per gram, Fred Breidt, a microbiologist with the United States Department of Agriculture and a professor of food science at North Carolina State University, told me. "We've all seen the cases," Katz said. "The runoff from agriculture gets onto a vegetable, or there's fecal matter from someone who handled it. Healthy people will get diarrhea; an elderly person or a baby might get killed. That's a possibility with raw food." If the same produce were fermented, its native bacteria would drive off the pathogens, and the acids and alcohol they produce would prevent any further infection. Breidt has yet to find a single documented case of someone getting sick from contaminated sauerkraut. "It's the safest food there is," Katz said.
Sauerkraut is Katz's gateway drug. He lures in novices with its simplicity and safety, then encourages them to experiment with livelier cultures, more offbeat practices. The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved moves from anodyne topics such as seed saving and urban gardening to dirt eating, feral foraging, cannabis cookery, and the raw-milk underground. Unlike many food activists, Katz has a clear respect for peer-reviewed science, and he prefaces each discussion with the appropriate caveats. Yet his message is clear: "Our food system desperately demands subversion," he writes. "The more we sterilize our food to eliminate all theoretical risk, the more we diminish its nutritional quality."
On the first day of our road trip, not long after our lunch with the opportunivores, Katz and I paid a visit to a man he called one of the kingpins of underground food in North Carolina. Garth, as I'll call him, was a pale, reedy figure in his fifties with wide, spectral eyes. His linen shirt and suspenders hung slackly on his frame, and his sunken cheeks gave him the look of a hardscrabble farmer from a century ago. "I was sick for seventeen years," he told us. "Black circles under my eyes, weighed less than a hundred pounds. It didn't seem like I'd get very far." Doctors said that he had severe chemical sensitivities and a host of ailments—osteoporosis, emphysema, edema, poor circulation—but they seemed incapable of curing him. He tried veganism for a while, but only got weaker. "It's just not a good diet for skinny people," he said. So he went to the opposite extreme.
Inside his bright country kitchen, Garth carefully poured us each a glass of unpasteurized goat milk, as if proffering a magic elixir. The milk was pure white and as thick as cream. It had a long, flowery bloom and a faint tanginess. Raw milk doesn't spoil like pasteurized milk. Its native bacteria, left to multiply at room temperature, sour it into something like yogurt or buttermilk, only much richer in cultures. It was the mainstay of Garth's diet, along with raw butter, cream, and daily portions of raw liver, fish, chicken, or beef. He was still anything but robust, but he had enough energy to work long hours in the garden for the first time in years. "It enabled me to function," he said.
Raw milk brings the bacterial debate down to brass tacks. Drinking it could be good for you. Then again it could kill you. Just where the line between risk and benefit lies is a matter of fierce dispute—not to mention arrests, lawsuits, property seizures, and protest marches. In May, for instance, raw-milk activists, hoping to draw attention to a recent crackdown by Massachusetts agricultural authorities, milked a Jersey cow on Boston Common and staged a drink-in.
Retail sales of raw milk are illegal in most states, including North Carolina, but people drink it anyway. Some dairy owners label the milk for pet consumption only (though at two to five times the cost of pasteurized, it's too rich for most cats). Others sell it at farm stands or through herd-share programs. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the raw-milk cooperative meets every month in the aisles of a gourmet deli. The milk is trucked in from Pennsylvania—a violation of federal law, which prohibits the interstate transport of raw milk—but no one seems to mind. Garth buys milk from a local farmer and sells it out of his house. "It's illegal," he told me. "But it gets to the point where living is illegal."
The nutritional evidence both for and against raw milk is somewhat sketchy; much of it dates from before World War II, when raw milk was still legal. The Food and Drug Administration, in a fact sheet titled "The Dangers of Raw Milk," insists that pasteurization "DOES NOT reduce milk's nutritional value." The temperature of the process, well below the boiling point, is meant to kill pathogens and leave nutrients intact. Yet raw-milk advocacy groups, such as the Weston A. Price Foundation, in Washington, DC, point to a number of studies that suggest the opposite. An array of vitamins, enzymes, and other nutrients are destroyed, diminished, or denatured by heat, they say. Lactase, for instance, is an enzyme that breaks down lactose into simpler sugars that the body can better digest. Raw milk often contains lactobacilli and bifidobacteria that produce lactase, but neither the bacteria nor the enzyme can survive pasteurization. In one survey of raw-milk drinkers in Michigan and Illinois, 82 percent of those who had been diagnosed as lactose intolerant could drink raw milk without digestive problems. (A more extreme view, held by yet another dietary faction, is that people shouldn't be drinking milk at all—that it's a food specifically designed for newborns of other species, and as such is inimical to humans.)
To the FDA, the real problem with milk isn't indigestion but contamination. Poor hygiene and industrial production are a toxic combination. One sick cow, one slovenly worker, can contaminate the milk of a dozen dairies. In 1938 a quarter of all disease outbreaks from contaminated food came from milk, which had been known to carry typhoid, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and a host of other diseases. More recently, between 1998 and 2008, raw milk was responsible for eighty-five disease outbreaks in more than twenty states, including more than sixteen hundred illnesses, nearly two hundred hospitalizations, and two deaths. "Raw milk is inherently dangerous," the FDA concludes. "It should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose."
Thanks in large part to pasteurization, dairy products now account for less than 5 percent of the food-borne disease outbreaks in America every year. Smoked seafood is six times more likely than pasteurized milk to contain listeria; hot dogs are sixty-five times more likely, and deli meats seventy-seven times more likely. "Every now and then, I meet people in the raw-milk movement who say, 'We have to end pasteurization now!'" Katz told me. "We can't end pasteurization. It would be the biggest disaster in the world. There would be a lot of dead children around."
Still, he says, eating food will always entail a modicum of risk. In an average year, there are 76 million cases of food poisoning in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Raw milk may be more susceptible to contamination than most foods (though it's still ten times less likely to contain listeria than deli meat is). But just because it can't be produced industrially doesn't mean it can't be produced safely, in smaller quantities. Wisconsin has some 13,000 dairies, about half of which, local experts estimate, are owned by farmers who drink their own raw milk. Yet relatively few people have been known to get sick from it. "If this were such a terrible cause and effect, we would be in the newspaper constantly," Scott Rankin, the chairman of the food-science department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a member of the state's raw-milk working group, told me. "Clearly there is an argument to be made in the realm of, yeah, this is a tiny risk."
The country's largest raw-milk dairy is Organic Pastures, in Fresno, California. Its products are sold in 375 stores and serve 50,000 people a week. "Nobody's d
ying," the founder and CEO, Mark McAfee, told me. In ten years, only two of McAfee's customers have reported serious food poisoning, he says, and none of the bacteria in those cases could be traced to his dairy. Raw milk is rigorously tested in California and has to meet strict limits for bacterial count. The state's standards hark back to the early days of pasteurization, when many doctors considered raw milk far more nutritious than pasteurized, and separate regulations insured its cleanliness. Dealing with live cultures, Katz and McAfee argue, forces dairies to do what all of agriculture should be doing anyway: downsize, localize, clean up production. "We need to go back a hundred and fifty years," McAfee told me. "Going back is what's going to help us go forward."
A century and a half is an eternity in public-health terms, but to followers of the so-called primal diet it's not nearly long enough. Humans have grown suicidally dainty, many of them say, and even a diet enriched by fermented foods and raw milk is too cultivated by half. Our ancestors were rough beasts: hunters, gatherers, scavengers, and carrion eaters, built to digest any rude meal they could find. Fruits and vegetables were a rarity, grains nonexistent. The human gut was a wild kingdom in those days, continually colonized and purged by parasites, viruses, and other microorganisms picked up from raw meat and from foraging. What didn't kill us, as they say, made us stronger.
A few miles north of downtown Asheville, in a small white farmhouse surrounded by trees, two of Katz's acquaintances were doing their best to emulate early man. Steve Torma ate mostly raw meat and raw dairy. His partner, Alan Muskat, liked to supplement his diet with whatever he could find in the woods: acorns, puffballs, cicadas and carpenter ants, sumac leaves, and gypsy-moth caterpillars. Muskat was an experienced mushroom hunter who had provisioned a number of restaurants in Asheville, and much of what he served us was surprisingly good. The ants, collected from his woodpile in the winter when they were too sluggish to get away, had a snappy texture and bright, tart flavor—like organic Pop Rocks. (They were full of formic acid, which gets its name from the Latin word for ant.) He brought us a little dish of toasted acorns, cups of honey-sweetened sumac tea, and goblets of a musky black broth made from decomposed inky-cap mushrooms. I felt, for a moment, as if I'd stumbled upon a child's tea party in the woods.