Quotes from Sandor Ellix Katz

Our perfection lies in our imperfection.

Moving toward a more harmonious way of life and greater resilience requires our active participation. This means finding ways to become more aware of and connected to the other forms of life that are around us and that constitute our food -- plants and animals, as well as bacteria and fungi -- and to the resources, such as water, fuel, materials, tools, and transportation, upon which we depend. It means taking responsibility for our shit, both literally and figuratively.

Captain James Cook was famously credited with conquering scurvy (vitamin C deficiency) by bringing barrels of sauerkraut with him to sea and feeding it to his crews daily.

The problem with killing 99.9 percent of bacteria is that most of them protect us from the few that can make us sick.

Getting the vegetables submerged is the most critical factor for success in vegetable fermentation.

Culture begins with cultivating the land, planting seeds, bringing intentionality to cycles that we act to perpetuate.

Recent study of beetle digestive tracts has found more than 650 distinct yeasts, at least 200 of which were previously unidentified

KRAUT PRAYER Eli Brown, Oakland, California Myriad beings beneath my sight, thank you for your transformations. May you nourish me as I nourish you. May you thrive in me as I thrive on the earth. In all the worlds may nourishment follow hunger as the echo follows the call.

Are the acidifying bacteria in milk or the yeasts in grape juice our servants, or are we doing their bidding by creating the specialized environments in which they can proliferate so wildly? We must stop thinking in such hierarchical terms and recognize that we, like all creation, are participants in infinite interrelated biological feedback loops, simultaneously unfolding a vast multiplicity of interdependent evolutionary narratives.

As a result of the War on Bacteria, our bacterial context is rapidly shifting. One bacterium formerly ubiquitous in humans, Helicobacter pylori, which resides in the stomach, is now found in fewer than 10 percent of American children and may be headed toward extinction.62 H. pylori has been associated with humans for at least 60,000 years, and there is evidence that closely related bacteria have lived in the stomachs of mammals since their emergence 150 million years ago.

Life's truths cannot always be reduced to 12-point Times Roman.

In our cultural collective imagination, the food safety threat that looms largest is botulism, the rare but often deadly neurological disease caused by botulinum, "the most poisonous substance known to humans,"2 a toxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. Early

Given the War on Bacteria so culturally prominent in our time, the well-being of our microbial ecology requires regular replenishment and diversification now more than ever.