The process of fermentation yields drinks, songs

I never thought much about fermentation until this summer­, when I lived with some fermentation fanatics. But I am realizing that it is everywhere, from the cheese samples at West Side to the beer at my local bodega.

As Sally Fallon, a dietician who asserts the importance of traditional diets, puns in her forward to the excellent book, “Wild Fermentation”: “The science and art of fermentation is, in fact, the basis of human culture—without culturing, there is no culture.”

Indeed, every culture in history has some sort of fermented food—ranging from the delicious (miso, wine, and kombucha) to the strange (African sorghum beer, which smells like vomit).
Though not often classified as such, the odes to fermentation are manifold—and there are few who enjoy a fermented beverage more than musicians.

Much like the cross-cultural nature of fermentation, musical paeans to its pleasures and pains cut across almost every genre and culture (except maybe Christian rock and other forms of religious music).

From Hank Williams, Jr.’s “There’s a Tear in My Beer” to the klezmer musician Abe Schwartz’s “A Glass of Wine,” fermentation takes up a solid amount of the American song book as well.

Between 1790 and 1830, Americans drank more than ever before or since. In his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Michael Pollan attributes this alcoholic genesis to the rise of grain production in the United States. Whiskey was the drink of choice.

Because of this grain glut, people started replacing their homemade rum with the cheaper and more plentiful whiskey. Alcohol consumption was also an important part of the American experience because of a lack of other kinds of beverages, the ease of supply, and the supposed health benefits of drinking—“spirits” were common cures for centuries.

These drunken decades were also one of the most fruitful times in United States cultural history, a time that brought the New Republic, Washington Irving, transcendentalism, and Appalachian folk songs.

Other forms of fermentation were equally important, including the raw milk the original cowboys drank while herding cattle. Unsoured milk is a relatively recent innovation. Until the advent of refrigerators, most people drank raw, sour milk, sometimes from animal stomachs. When encased in a stomach, the milk would turn into cheese as a result of the rennet—a key ingredient in cheese-making—that lines animals’ stomachs.

In cold Northeastern winters, this embrace of fermentation was crucial, from canned fruit to a multitude of relishes and pickles. Though there are fewer songs about pickles than whiskey, there is no doubt that canning was equally important, if not for culture, then for health.

Fallon claims that stored and fermented (particularly lacto-fermented, or fermented with dairy) foods are more nutritious than most of the unfermented, shipped, and non-local produce available to modern consumers, and people from cultures with a strong tradition of fermented foods are, on average, more healthy than modern Americans.

An oft-sung song of the 19th century, “Drunkard’s Special” (or “Cabbage Head”) expresses America’s love for whiskey better than most others. In the song, the drunken protagonist finds his wife cheating on him, and in stupor, believes his wife’s assertion that it is simply an old cabbage head with a mustache in her bed, and a dairy cow in her lover’s horse’s place.

The song is raunchy and bold, but begs the question: why could the man have not just made a nice lacto-fermented kimchi and solved his problems, lover and all?