Zymurgy - What?

A Kind Word on a Hard Day

A small tender mercy — and a few honest thoughts on why I love fermented foods.

It had been a hard day. One of those days that is all cooking and cleaning and laundry and getting everybody what they needed, start to finish.

And somewhere in the middle of it, I started thinking about everything I "wasn't." I thought about how I love to dance, and how I really ought to be teaching it — but couldn't see how to commit right now. I thought about everything I've learned about herbs and essential oils, and how I hadn't been able to hold my classes. It is astonishing how quickly the whole world goes gray once you start staring at the negative.

And then — because He knows us, and He is kind — that wonderful Heavenly Father of ours led me to a website, where at the very bottom of an article I found one small line: a shout-out, thanking Steffanie England for teaching such an interesting class.

That was all it took. Thank you, Kellene. I needed to read that today.

Because He knows us, and He is kind.

"The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit."

— Psalm 34:18

The friend who wrote that article is Kellene Bishop, and the piece was her warm, funny take on something I'd taught in one of my classes: fermented foods. If you'd like to read her original — it's called "Zymurgy — What?" — it's well worth a visit to her blog. I won't reprint it here, but I do want to share, in my own words, why this humble old practice has my whole heart.

So what on earth is "zymurgy"?

It's a wonderful word — it simply means the science of fermentation. And fermentation itself is one of the oldest kitchen skills we have: letting friendly microbes gently transform food. Long before anyone owned a refrigerator, our great-great-grandmothers all over the world were doing it — sauerkraut and pickles, yogurt and kefir, sourdough, miso, kimchi. They did it to keep food from spoiling through a long winter. What we understand now is that they were also doing something quietly wonderful for their health.

Why I love it

When we ferment food, we fill it with living, beneficial bacteria — the good kind, the kind a body actually wants. In a world scrubbed down with anti-bacterial everything, I find that a little bit poetic. Those good bacteria help feed and balance the gut, and a happy gut is a big part of how we truly absorb the nutrients in the food we eat. Fermenting grains and beans even helps unlock minerals that would otherwise stay bound up and unavailable to us.

I don't ever want to overpromise. Fermented foods are a nourishing, humble part of a real-food life — not a cure for anything. But they are one of my very favorite small, ancestral habits, and the science keeps catching up to what traditional cooks knew by instinct. (A Stanford study a few years back found that people who ate more fermented foods had more diverse gut bacteria and lower markers of inflammation. Our grandmothers would have just smiled.)

If you'd like to go deeper

Much of what first drew me down this path was the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, the 1930s dentist who traveled the world documenting how people's health — their teeth, their facial development, their overall vitality — shifted dramatically as traditional foods gave way to modern, processed ones. If you'd like to explore it for yourself, these are the resources I'd hand you:

Dr. Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions

The Pottenger Cat Study

The Weston A. Price Foundation — westonaprice.org

And honestly? Start small. Pick one fermented food and give it an honest try this week. That is exactly how a gradual, joyful change begins — one humble jar at a time.

With much love,

Steffanie

Shared from my own real-food kitchen and my own experience — this isn't medical advice, and it hasn't been evaluated by the FDA. Fermented foods are a lovely companion to a nourishing life and good medical care, never a replacement for it.