Ferment Radio

In this episode of Ferment Radio, we enter the world of Citizen Sandwich, a food and cultural heritage project that materialized during the past Audra Festival in Kaunas, Lithuania. Citizen sandwich was part experimental kitchen, part temporary canteen, part art project, part fermentation lab, and built around hyper-local ingredients, rescued food, and foraging.

This project was brought together by Jonas Palekas, a chef working across food research and community, and Sean Roy Parker, an artist exploring post-capital food practices.

Together with other food professionals, including yours truly, the project took place in a temporary kitchen at Kavinė Kultūra, Culture Café, right in the heart of Kaunas.

This is exactly the kind of projects Ferment Radio promotes, and likes to be in: somewhere between a kitchen, a conversation, and critical practice. Welcome to a brand new episode of Ferment Radio.

What are we actually? Are we more microbial than human? This episode brings together two artists whose practices orbit that question from very different angles: Nathalie Dubois, a bioartist and scientist whose work often centers on microbes, and Adam Zaretsky, a bioartist mixing ecology, biotechnology, non-human relations, body performance, and gastronomy. Nathalie explores how human personality intertwines with the microbiome, and Adam pushes the limits of biological matter and its preservation in museum archives. Even though they take different approaches, they often run into the same questions. Are microbes the puppet masters of humans, or do humans control microbes? Who depends on whom, and how much of that dependence do we even recognize? Their answers go into areas many people find unfamiliar, challenging assumptions about agency, ethics, and co-existence across species.

There’s a moment when it hits you. It happens after some time of gathering bits and pieces of knowledge, experiences, feelings, and observations. It might even come after asking yourself “what am I doing?” multiple times. But suddenly the pieces click and turn into a viewpoint that you want to share with others.

Some people find this clarity in the form of a book. One of them is Johnny Drain, who went from making yoghurt in his grandma’s kitchen as a kid to working with high-end restaurants. Johnny is also the author of Adventures in Fermentation, a book that captures his particular take on fermentation, let´s say, somewhere between flavour and sustainability.

If you’re wondering why we even need another book on fermentation, tune into Ferment Radio and listen to our latest episode!

More than a collection of fixed truths, science can be an ongoing narrative, one that continually reshapes how we understand bodies, identity, and life itself. In this episode, we explore how scientific ideas evolve, transform, and eventually become obsolete.

This shifting nature of knowledge is at the core of our conversation with artist Kirsty Hendry. Through texts and moving images, Hendry’s practice examines the body as a social and cultural construct, with a particular focus on the human microbiome, questioning where the boundaries of the self begin and end.

If you send a mixture of soybeans and koji mold to outer space, will it ferment as miso, even so far away from home?

How do you bring it back to Earth? How will it taste like? Can we still call it miso?

This is the second part of our conversation with Joshua Evans, from the Sustainable Food Innovation at the Danish Technical University’s Center for Biosustainability. We had previously talked about how miso was sent to space. In this episode, we will find out how it returned to Earth, and what fermenting in space means to earthly food systems.

Get ready for a techy and scifi’sh episode, where we learn more about designing an experiment that implies sending fermented food to outer space.

There’s a phenomenon experienced by people who have seen the Earth from outer space. It is known as the “Overview Effect”: a new level of compassion and understanding of how fragile and interconnected life is. What could bring us closer to the Overview Effect without leaving Earth? How can we embody what is hard to grasp, relate to, and integrate into a conscious interconnectedness beyond intellectual understanding? What if, instead of looking from far away, as in the Overview Effect, we looked into ourselves from a microscopic close-up? Could we get closer to a sense of expanded consciousness within the Earth’s ecosystem and beyond our simplified identities?These are the questions that led me to develop the project “Insideview”, an audio-visual ritual to compost human exceptionalism, performed in January 2025, at Helsinki’s SOLU space. Together with an amazing team that included Aga Bułacik, Vaim Sarv, and Ola Zielińska, we intertwined folk songs, ferments, words, and holographic projections of the human microbiome to set on a dreamy journey to re-imagine our relationship with the living world, both within and around us. Drawing inspiration from death doulas who use songs to create safe spaces for letting go, we hummed along to hospice human exceptionalism and confront our fears of insignificance.

When humans go to space, whether they like it or not, microbes tag along. And if microbes can live in microgravity—probably more comfortably than humans—then perhaps fermented food too.

There have already been a few experiments to send fermented foods into orbit—like kimchi and wine. But there’s a difference between eating food that was fermented on Earth, and fermenting it in space. This is where people like Joshua Evans come in. Joshua leads the research group on Sustainable Food Innovation at the Danish Technical University’s Center for Biosustainability. Together with Maggie Coblentz and their team, Joshua was responsible for sending miso into outer space. That’s right, we’re talking about the traditional Japanese seasoning made with fermented soybeans and koji mold.

On this episode of Ferment Radio, we’ll walk you through all the steps needed to ferment in space. Why would anyone want to ferment miso in outer space in the first place?

Did you know your body is never truly sterile—even before you’re born? From semen and placenta to umbilical cord blood, your microbial journey begins early on. And it doesn’t stop there. The type of birth, nurturing, and how you explore the world as a child play a crucial role in shaping your unique microbiome. The introduction of solid foods, interactions with your environment, and social contact add even more layers of complexity. By adulthood, your gut microbiome reaches its peak flexibility and resilience—but its foundations are built much earlier in life.

As a young child, you explore the world with your hands, mouth, and curiosity—interacting constantly with an invisible universe of microbes. However, science has only recently started to seriously explore the deep and complex relationships between children and microbes.

One pioneering initiative is the Microbial Childhood Collaboratory—an international, interdisciplinary research group exploring the concept of the biosocial child: not merely as an individual, but as an ecological being, deeply entangled in microbial and biospheric communities that sustain life. One of their projects, Microbial Childhood: Restor(y)ing Daycare Ecologies, emerges from research and experimentation around the design of a microbial-friendly daycare in Tampere, Finland.

The Collaboratory brings together community artists, environmental ecologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and early childhood education researchers—including Dr Jan Varpanen, Dr Mira Grönroos, Erika Aalto, Eva Bubla and Zsuzsa Millei, Professor of Early Childhood Education at Tampere University, who joins us in this episode.

In this episode of the World in a Pickle, we delve into the world of pulque—a fermented drink made of agave sap, or “aguamiel”, which has been consumed in Mexico for centuries, and is now threatened by urbanization, climate change, and crime.Our guests, César Iván Linares, an ethnobiologist specialized in traditional fermented beverages, and Juan Escalona Meléndez, a chef and scientist behind projects like Coyota, share their work with ESPUMA—an initiative dedicated to keeping pulque alive.Through a fusion of biology, agroecology, and creativity, ESPUMA builds a resilient ecosystem around fermentation. They harvest urban agaves in and around Mexico City and cultivate new plants on a micro-farm. They also work closely with pulqueros, the people who make and sell pulque, and tlachiqueros, who harvest the agave sap, to preserve their precious knowledge and create a strong community around this beverage. But what makes ESPUMA truly special is how they blend science with pulque-making. Instead of bringing pulque into the lab, they bring microscopes to pulque farms.

Welcome to “To exist you have to resist”, the fourth episode of The World in a Pickle, Ferment Radio’s mini-series focused on understanding geopolitical complexities through fermented foods.

The Guarani-Kaiowá are the people of Mato Grosso do Sul, a Central-West region of Brazil. It translates as “Thick Forest of the South", and as the name suggests, nature has protected the Guarani-Kaiowá and their culture from colonization. Particularly, the ancient tradition of chicha making—a sacred white corn drink that can also be fermented. The Guarani-Kaiowá believe that if they stop making chicha, the world will end. Today, this thick forest has been turned into a vast monoculture of soy plantations, and the Guarani-Kaiowá have nowhere to go and continue their ancestral cultural practices. Perhaps the end of the world is closer than ever.

Join us on a fermentation journey with Paula Neubauer, a Brazilian award-winning chef and educator, as we explore the complexity of sacred fermented chicha and the fascinating people who make it. 

Welcome to “The End of Many Worlds”, the third episode of The World in a Pickle, Ferment Radio’s mini-series focused on understanding geopolitical complexities through fermented foods.