Ferment Radio

The kitchen is a space that many people might not think is worth sharing. It’s a place known for messy preparations, and not exactly perfect results. In this episode, cultural producer, educator, and independent researcher Andrew Gryf Paterson “spills his guts” and talks about his hybrid practices, which include bioart experiments, food cultures, and his everyday life. They all come together in his own kitchen, at home in Helsinki. It’s Kitchen Lab is an arena for collaboration between humans, time, and bacteria. 

Fermented meat is seen by many as something closer to a dead body than to a pickle. This kind of fermentation practices have often been subjectively represented as something dangerous, cruel, or unecological. But, is it really so? Tune into the 14th episode of Ferment Radio and join us in a conversation with Aviaja Hauptmann, a microbiologist and Greenlandic Inuit who researches microbiomes of fermented foods native to Greenland. Together, we discuss the dietary and social prejudices around traditional Inuit meat consumption and its preservation. 

Microbes might be small, but they play a big role in the work of Zayaan Khan, an ecological artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Tune into Ferment Radio and find out more about  Zayaan’s life story through her ever changing relationship with food: from a childhood obsession with sweets to fermenting wild rosemary to produce hair conditioner, and more. As usual, the conversation is not just about food or microbes, but about life, consumption, and the systems behind them.

This is a perfect episode to listen to when you’re baking your own bread. You’ll find answers to questions you always wanted to ask about your sourdough starter, but there was no one to ask. Did my sourdough go bad? How often should I feed it? Here, we also talk about how old sourdough starters are; who actually owns them, and why sourdough cultures are like cities. Tune in and join our conversation with Karl de Smedt, the sourdough librarian from Puratos Sourdough Library in Belgium.

Ferment Radio bid farewell to 2020 with an exciting episode about transformations inspired by micro worlds. Join us in a conversation with Eva Bakkeslett, an artist exploring social change through gentle actions and subtle mind-shifts. In this episode, Eva tells us about the time and conditions needed to create change, and shares captivating stories about culture starters and the mysterious beauty of northern Norway in December. Tune into Ferment Radio!

Different ideas about food and eating can actually change our understanding of society, and have a strong influence on how we live our lives. 

Fermentation questions purity: it needs bacteria to grow, and in our society, bacteria are seen as something unclean. Can fermentation, which goes against separation, control, and boundary-making, help create a healthier society? 

Our guest Stephanie Maroney –a scholar of feminist food studies– has a great deal to say about how science uses colonial practices in order to find solutions to western problems. Particularly with the extraction of “ancestral microbes” from Hadza people, an indigenous ethnic group in north-central Tanzania.

Neuroscience, molecular biology, feminist science and technology studies, feminist theory, postcolonial studies, and reproductive justice movements. This all comes together in the work of feminist scientist Deboleena Roy. In the 9th episode of Ferment Radio, we will ponder about change inspired by microscopic organisms. From that perspective, evolution seems to be more of a collaboration than competition; taxonomic classifications of organisms are less hierarchical and more rhizomatic; and humans are not the center of the world, as it is commonly thought. You can learn more about this in Deboleena’s book "Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab".

What happens when we put together fermenting and feminism? 

In this conversation with Lauren Fournier –a writer, curator, video artist, and filmmaker based in Toronto– we reflect on the different meanings of these powerful words. 

Our conversation is built around Lauren’s article “Fermenting Feminism as Methodology and Metaphor”.

Fermentation is preservation, transformation, and collaboration. That is, Fermentation is political.

This episode starts a new series on Ferment Radio that will focus entirely on feminist issues and fermentation. It’s our sisterhood act of solidarity with the ongoing protests in Poland against a law that prohibits abortion. 

Fermentation keeps things from going bad! Let’s face it, microbes and humans will always be connected. But, can we actually apply this fermentation paradigm to society? In the 7th episode of Ferment Radio, we continue our conversation with Maya Hey. Together, we reflect on the impossibility of controlling something that is inseparable from us, fermentation as a feminist practice, and the cultural appropriation of food recipes.

Tune into fermentradio.com for another exciting episode!

The 6th episode of Ferment Radio is the first part of a conversation with Maya Hey, a scholar and PhD candidate at Concordia University researching fermentation and feminist theory. From chemistry labs to culinary kitchens, organic farms, and food markets, her work is a constant search to answer questions around embodied knowledge, collective ethics, and interspecies thriving. 

In our conversation, we discuss the bigger picture of fermentation; fermentation as a selfless practice, and the impossibility of understanding the microbial part of ourselves.