The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (6 page)

Katz had never been particularly promiscuous. He'd had his first gay sexual experience at the age of twenty-one, crossing the country on a Green Tortoise bus, and had returned to New York just as its bathhouse days were waning. He'd never taken intravenous drugs and had avoided the riskiest sexual activities. The previous HIV tests he'd taken had come back inconclusive—perhaps, he reasoned, because of a malarial infection that he'd picked up in West Africa. "I have no idea how it happened," he told me. "I remember walking out of the doctor's office in such a daze. I was just utterly shell-shocked."

The virus wasn't necessarily a death sentence, though an effective treatment was years away. But it did transform Katz's political ambitions. "They just dematerialized," he told me. For all his iconoclasm, he had always dreamed of being a United States senator. Now he focused on curing himself. He cut back his hours and moved from his parents' apartment to the East Village. So many of his friends had died while on AZT and other experimental drugs that he decided to search for alternatives. He had already taken up yoga and switched to a macrobiotic diet. Now he began to consult with herbalists, drink nettle tea, and wander around Central Park gathering medicinal plants. "I got skinny, skinny, skinny," he says. "My friends thought I was wasting away."

New York's relentless energy had always helped drive his ambitions, but now he found that it wore him out. About a year after his diagnosis, Katz went to visit some friends in New Orleans who had rented a crash pad for Mardi Gras. Among the characters there, he met a man from a place near Nashville called Hickory Knoll (I've changed the name at Katz's request). Founded in the early seventies by a group of back-to-the-landers, Hickory Knoll was something of a legend in the gay community: a queer sanctuary in the heart of the Bible Belt. "I was a typical New Yorker," Katz says. "I considered the idea of living in Tennessee absurd." Still, he was intrigued. Hickory Knoll had no television or hot running water—just goats, vegetable gardens, and gay men. Maybe it was just what he needed.

 

Hickory Knoll lies just up the road from a Bible camp, in an airy forest of tulip poplar and dogwood, maple, mountain laurel, pawpaw, and persimmon. The camp and the commune share a hilltop, a telephone cable, and, if nothing else, a belief in spiritual renewal: "Want a new life?" a sign in front of a local church asked as I drove past. "God accepts trade-ins." When Katz first arrived, in the spring of 1992, the paulownia trees were in bloom, scattering the ground with lavender petals. As he walked down the gravel path, the forest canopy opened up and a cabin of hand-hewn chestnut logs, built in the 1830s, appeared in the sunlight below. "It was a beautiful arrival," he says.

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.