An attendee at the Stanford Fermented Food Conference I wanted to meet was Aga Pokrywka the host of Ferment Radio, a fascinating and informative podcast series that began back in 2020 and has posted almost 50 episodes. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s a podcast with a noble mission:

Ferment Radio is a podcast series that takes you deep into the fascinating world of microbes. Through fermentation and transformation, we develop new recipes for living on a broken planet. Together with people from the most diverse backgrounds, including science, gastronomy, and arts, we reflect, discuss, and bubble along with microbes in order to give legacy to plural perspectives. By letting our thoughts and beliefs ferment in the brine of shared discourse, we look for transformative paths to multispecies justice and well-being.

Like fermentation itself, a slow process that can turn the invisible into visible, the dialogues on Ferment Radio help us re-imagine societal transformations and rebuild relationships between species, people, disciplines and other notions we live by.

Aga has hosted a wide range of guests. A random sample includes:

• Episode #49: Stanford Conference presenter Joshua Evans who leads the research group on Sustainable Food Innovation at the Danish Technical University’s Center for Biosustainability. Joshua was part of the team responsible for sending miso into outer space.
• Episode #38: Paulina Gretkierewicz, a forager, a fermenter, and a witch. She transforms seasons and landscapes around Copenhagen, Denmark into edible and drinkable experiences. She calls this “Applied Poetry”, which is also the name of her business, focused on handpicked, fermented, and oxidized teas.
• Episode #22: César Enrique Giraldo Herrera, author of Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings. He proposes that there is a much closer relationship between shamanic practices and microbiology than we could think. His work lays the foundations of an ethnomicrobiology.
• Episode #20: Fungi music with Tosca Teránof of the duo Nanotopia. She takes biodata from non-human organisms as mushroom’s mycelium and translates it into music.
• Episode #14: Stanford Conference presenter Aviaja Hauptmann, a microbiologist and Greenlandic Inuit who researches microbiomes of the fermented foods native to Greenland. She discusses the dietary and social prejudices around traditional Inuit meat consumption and its preservation. 
• Episode #1: Tara Whitsitt, a nomadic artist and educator whose passion for growing food and teaching fermentation inspired the grassroots educational project “Fermentation on Wheels”. Tara has been driving across the USA for over seven years, sharing starter cultures, the history and science of fermentation.

David Zilber is the acclaimed author of The Noma Guide to Fermentation and Stanford Conference host. He was Aga’s guest on Episode #36, June 2023.

There are not that many people in the world who can say they have extensive hands-on experience working in different areas of that vast system. @david_zilber is definitely one of them. From a butcher shop in Toronto to the Fermentation Lab of the acclaimed restaurant @nomacph, and to the labs of @chr.hansen, a giant bioscience company in Hørsholm, Denmark, David Zilber has garnered multiple and fascinating perspectives on food and the system around it. Ferment Radio had the pleasure to talk with David in his own lab, where we reflected more about this incredible journey and his ever-evolving views on the food system that we are all part of.

I’ve added a three-minute extract from that episode to give you a taste of Fermentation Radio.

Tune into the Booch News podcast for my conversation with Aga at the Fermented Food Conference and the Zilber episode sample,

The post Profile: Ferment Radio, with Aga Pokrywka appeared first on 'Booch News.