Deviant Cookbook

Abstract

Fermentation is emergence you can eat. Microbial communities transform simple substrates into flavors, textures, and preservation properties that no individual organism could produce, through processes that cannot be shortcutted or fully predicted. Every fermentation tradition encodes knowledge about these processes not as biochemistry but as practice, passed between people through instruction, correction, and shared meals. This project collects fermentation practices across multiple cultural traditions through conversation with practitioners and experts, assembling them into a cookbook that is also an investigation into how emergent processes carry cultural knowledge.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins argues that fermentation, rot, and intoxication are united by their capacity for unpredictable transformation, and that this material "deviance" has been weaponized against minoritized communities through the hygienic ordering of the modern state. The Pasteurian turn didn't just discover germs; it reorganized who was allowed to manage the boundary between life and decay. Fermentation traditions that survived this ordering carry within them a refusal: an insistence on working with microbial life rather than against it, on trusting processes that smell wrong, look wrong, and behave unpredictably by the standards of industrial food production.

Mel Chen's concept of animacy illuminates what is at stake in this trust. Chen traces how the boundary between animate and inanimate is politically constructed, with consequences that fall along lines of race, sexuality, and disability. Fermentation sits at this boundary: matter that is neither dead nor alive in any simple sense, but teeming with agency that Western epistemology struggles to categorize. Jane Bennett calls this vibrant matter. Tompkins calls it deviant. The practitioners who maintain these traditions simply call it food.

The cookbook form is deliberate. Recipes are instructions that must be performed, whose results depend on conditions the author cannot control. A recipe for miso or tepache or sauerkraut is a set of rules for generating emergence.

Inspirations