The Preservation of Pickling

packed, brined, covered, ready to go hide

I've been interested in food preservation since I started gardening a few years ago. As we all know, food has a way of spoiling in the fridge, on the counter, in our cupboards, and basically everywhere we leave fresh food. I hate it when I go back to something and see that it's gone bad. Imagine the horror when that happens with something you've put your blood, sweat, and tears into growing. Yikes. Even in the modern age with refrigeration and freezers, people are looking back at old-world preservation methods to keep edible the things that nature wants to take back. Enter the pickle.

We've turned both pickle and bacteria into dirty words. To many, pickles are those nasty sour things we hold when ordering a burger and bacteria are germs that make us sick and are always out to get us. That's the paranoia of the modern world. We're over-obsessed with sanitation to the point that all bacteria have become evil. The reality is that there are literally millions of different types of bacteria and while some can make us sick and even kill us, there are many "good" bacteria. From the ones that live in our gut to the ones that fix nitrogen for leguminous plants (which we use for food). So what does bacteria have to do with pickling?

You probably recognize that most commercially made pickles are in some kind of vinegar solution. Yes, this is a pickle but there is a whole other kind of pickle out there that goes back thousands of years and that is the lacto-fermented pickle. It's pretty simple. You start with some fresh veggies, put them in a container, weight them down with a plate or pack them tightly so they can't float, and pour a salt water solution over them. Then you wait. As long as all parts of the food are submerged in the brine and not exposed to air, the food will not spoil. This is an anaerobic environment, which is crucial to preserve the food and give it its unique pickle flavor. It ferments because of the bacterial already on the food.

There is a genus of bacteria called lactobacillus and they are everywhere. They are our buddies and the hard workers that make fermented pickles. Fermentation is what happens when a biological system needs to derive ATP without oxygen.

Quick bio lesson for anyone that doesn't remember. ATP is basically the energy we mean when we use the word "energy". We eat for "energy", but what that really means is that our bodies break down all of our food into molecules it can use to go through a process (called cellular respiration) that makes ATP. Humans make the most amount of ATP when we have oxygen. It's why we breathe. When you're jogging and you're panting for air and you just can't keep up with the oxygen demand, you have to still make ATP to keep those legs going but because you don't have enough oxygen, you go through the fermentation process. Yes, you ferment! Many of us think of alcohol when we think fermentation but in our and lactobacillus's case, the byproduct is lactic acid (yeast make alcohol in an oxygen free environment). I'm sure you've heard that your muscles build up lactic acid when you work out and fermentation is the reason this happens.

Why DIY?

We live with a lot of creature comforts in the modern world. Manufacturing and technology has made it easier for us to get our hands on commodity goods and long gone are the days where you'd have to get up at the crack of dawn to work on a farm and you can keep food fresher without the need for preservation skills. With industry taking care of the basics for living, we could focus on feats like mapping the human genome, developing vaccines, and even travel to space.

So with so much less for us to do ourselves, why would anyone want to DIY (do it yourself)? For me, it's a way to preserve the rich human culture we are becoming more removed from. Farming, pickling, sewing, beer making, etc are done somewhere else and we don't usually see the process. In fact, for us city dwellers, our only ties to manufacturing are in the consumption of those goods. But how is anything made? I'm not even talking about how are computers made or anything really high tech. I'm just looking at the basic stuff that gets us living from one day to the next and that was a regular part of our ancestors lives. I find it unnerving that we don't know how to do the bare minimum for ourselves. So that's where my DIY attitude comes from.

Now is the part where I tell you that I am not an expert in anything and anything I write about here will be an account of what I've done at my amateur level. There are real pros out there that know their homesteading like the back of their hand. Of course, I am still tied to society and need it on a daily basis to get me through life. I'm not naive about my dependence on industry but I think that carving out a little bit of a DIY life gives me a better appreciation and understanding of the work and magic that goes into doing the things that we take for granted. Maybe if everyone had to grow their own food for a season we'd lick our plates clean instead of tossing out food because we've afforded being picky eaters.

So I hope I can interest you in some of the projects I'm going to write about. I'm very excited to get started on this blog since I've been trying to learn about everything and want to share with others. I'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.