This is one in a series about possible futures, which will be published in Booch News over the coming weeks. Episode 4 appeared last week. New episodes drop every Friday.

Overview

The fermentation revolution isn’t about returning to the past, but about recognizing that humanity’s oldest food may be its most sophisticated—algorithms encoded in bacteria, operating on time rather than electricity, generating complexity no factory can replicate. When the global cold chain collapsed during the Three-Week Blackout of 2047, humanity faced a choice: starve or remember. Ultra-processed food, dependent on continuous refrigeration and transcontinental supply networks, simply vanished. The Fermentation Renaissance emerged in its place, powered by open-source microbial libraries, neighborhood bioreactors, and a radical truth: food that improves with time proves more resilient than food that merely delays decay.

By 2100, fermented foods dominated through abundance rather than scarcity. Climate-adapted vertical farms fed decentralized fermentation cooperatives. Every neighborhood maintained a “terroir vault”—living microbial archives passed between generations as heirlooms. Corporations that once imposed homogeneity now compete to preserve microbial diversity. Fermentation became the foundation of both cuisine and community, transforming kitchens into laboratories of resilient nourishment. What was once a grandmother’s secret became humanity’s operating system.

The Three-Week Blackout of 2047

During the Three-Week Blackout, Charlotte Perez, a food systems engineer, watched her refrigerator’s contents spoil while her grandmother’s fermentation crocks remained viable. This event marked the first stage of what would become known as the Global Supply Chain Winter.

Charlotte witnessed the cascade firsthand: refrigerated warehouses failing, supply chains breaking, supermarkets emptying. Yet in immigrant and rural communities where fermentation had never ceased, people ate well.

The Cyberattack

It began at 3:47 am on Wednesday, May 15, 2047, a cyberattack struck critical infrastructure. By dawn, electrical grids across twelve states had failed. Emergency power systems, designed for hours rather than days, began failing by afternoon. Charlotte stood in her apartment, watching her refrigerator warm. Milk, meat, and vegetables—hundreds of dollars of food deteriorating.

She called her grandmother in panic. “Abuela, the power’s out. Everything’s going bad.” Carmen’s response was calm. “Come to my house, chiquita. Bring your neighbors. We have food.”

Charlotte arrived to find Carmen’s kitchen unchanged—nothing required electricity. Fermentation crocks lined every counter: sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, preserved vegetables, sourdough starter, and kombucha, all fermenting steadily. “You see?” Carmen gestured around. “When power fails, industrial food dies. But fermented food? It doesn’t care about electricity. It never did.”

Over the next three weeks, Carmen’s kitchen became a community hub. Charlotte watched her technically illiterate grandmother feed forty people using technology older than civilization. No power, no problem. The food improved with time rather than deteriorating.

Across the city, supermarkets became disaster zones. Rotting food, empty shelves, desperate crowds. Charlotte walked through one, calculating the waste: millions of pounds of produce, tons of meat and fish, all thrown away. By week three, when power returned, Charlotte had made a decision. She hauled her dead refrigerator to the curb and apprenticed herself to Mrs. Popescu, a Romanian woman teaching emergency fermentation workshops in abandoned parking lots.

“Why do you want to learn?” Mrs. Popescu asked.

“Because my engineering degree couldn’t feed anyone for three weeks,” Charlotte responded. “But your kimchi fed hundreds. I studied the wrong kind of engineering.”

Mrs. Popescu smiled. “Then we start from the beginning. First lesson: food that improves with time is more powerful than food that fights time.”

The Political Awakening

The Supply Chain Winter of 2047 sparked political uprisings that eventually changed food law. Industrial agriculture had criminalized decay, rendering fermentation legally suspect. The Spoilage Rights Movement fought for the “right to rot”—legal protection for controlled decomposition as food preparation. Street protesters ate aged cheeses and drank wild-fermented beer on courthouse steps, deliberately violating the law. The movement’s intellectual leader, a former food safety inspector turned rebel, argued that industrial foods’ war on bacteria created nutritional deserts and immunological fragility. His 2052 trial became a watershed moment, culminating in landmark legislation: a Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing every citizen’s right to ferment and decriminalizing microbial food production.

Here’s how it played out.

The Philadelphia Fermentation Trials of 2052

On May 10, 2052, Dr. Josh Evans stood in federal court, accused of operating an “unlicensed biological hazard facility” in his basement, where he taught neighborhood children to make fermented foods. Prosecutors displayed jars of kimchi and sauerkraut, claiming they were evidence of dangerous activity. His crime: violating the Pasteurization Mandates, laws written in the 2030s when corporations persuaded legislators that unpasteurized food posed a public health threat. Josh’s twenty-three co-defendants included a grandmother arrested for sharing her century-old sourdough starter, a teenager who sold kombucha at a school fundraiser, and Bengali mothers maintaining traditional fermented rice batters.

The Legalities of Food Control

To understand how we reached this point, we must examine the legalities of food control. After 2025, as climate chaos disrupted supply chains, governments partnered with agricultural mega corporations to “stabilize” food systems. The Uniform Food Safety Acts seemed rational. They were aimed at preventing genuine contamination. But corporate lobbying weaponized them against any food production outside industrial control. By 2045, the law prohibited:

• Sharing unpasteurized fermented foods across state lines
• Operating fermentation equipment without licensed inspectors
• Teaching fermentation techniques without certified food handler permits
• Maintaining starter cultures not registered with the National Biological Database.

The laws didn’t ban fermentation outright—that would invite an obvious challenge. Instead, they buried it under compliance costs: insurance requirements, monthly inspections, and fees only corporations could afford. The result: fermentation survived only in underground networks, whispered recipes, and cultures hidden like contraband.

An Accidental Revolutionary

So how did Josh end up in court? It all began in late October 2046.

Dr. Evans was an accidental revolutionary—he never intended to lead a movement. A former FDA inspector, he spent fifteen years enforcing the very laws he would later break. His transformation began when investigating a nursing home outbreak that hospitalized thirty elderly residents with severe gastrointestinal illness. Such outbreaks had become routine since the 2030s, as agribusiness scaled up to massive growing operations. Officials blamed contaminated lettuce from a licensed mega-processor. But Josh noticed something peculiar: the few residents who escaped illness all regularly consumed homemade kimchi from a Korean resident, illegally shared among friends.

Josh arrived at Riverside Manor, located off University Avenue in Berkeley, with his inspection kit and tablet. Thirty residents were hospitalized, twelve in the ICU. The facility director hovered nervously as Josh examined the commercial kitchen.

The director insisted they were a “licensed processor,” and provided documentation. He told Josh, “We’re Grade-A certified. We follow every regulation precisely.”

Josh swabbed surfaces and collected samples from the walk-in refrigerator holding the contaminated lettuce. Everything appeared regulation-compliant. Yet something troubled him.

A nurse, Claire McFadden, pulled him aside. “Dr. Evans, something’s odd about this outbreak.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Not everyone got sick. Specifically, Mrs Chung and the six residents in her room are fine. Completely unaffected.”

Josh’s training engaged. “They ate the same meals?”

“Identical meals. Same salad, same serving times. But Mrs. Chung’s group? Nothing. Not even mild symptoms.”

Professional curiosity led Josh to Mrs. Chung’s room. She sat in a wheelchair, surrounded by glass jars filled with red-orange vegetables. The fermented smell was unmistakable.

“Mrs. Chung, I’m Dr. Evans from the FDA. I need to ask about your diet during the outbreak.”

She regarded him with the wariness of someone who has had past experiences with authority figures. “I eat facility food. Same as everyone,” she told him.

“But you also eat something else.” Josh gestured toward the jars. “Kimchi?”

Her expression shifted to calculated defensiveness. “A gift from my daughter. For personal consumption.”

“How many people do you share it with?”

A long pause followed. “Some friends. They like traditional food. Reminds them of when food tasted alive.”

Josh did the arithmetic: seven residents unaffected, seven residents eating Mrs. Chung’s kimchi. The correlation was impossible to ignore.

“Mrs. Chung, I’m not here to cause trouble. But I need to understand—do you believe the kimchi protected you?”

She laughed sharply. “Protected? Doctor, my grandmother made kimchi through Japanese occupation, the Korean War, decades of poverty. We never got sick from food. Then I come to America, eat your ‘safe’ processed food, and everyone around me ends up sick. You tell me what ‘protected’ means.”

Josh collected a kimchi sample—for analysis, he told himself, a matter of due diligence. But during the drive back to the lab, an unsettling question took shape: what if sterile food posed the danger, and living food provided the protection?

Back in his home office, he began researching, finding pattern after pattern. Communities that maintained fermentation traditions exhibited dramatically lower rates of immunological disorders, superior nutritional markers, and stronger disease resistance. Meanwhile, the sterile industrial food system—the one he’d devoted his career to protecting—correlated with epidemics of autoimmune conditions, allergies, and digestive dysfunction.

The deeper his investigation went, the clearer it became: the war on bacteria didn’t make food safer. It made humans weaker.

Home Work

Josh’s dining table became a research station. Medical journals, epidemiological studies, and microbiology papers covered every surface. In the corner, his first kimchi fermented in a repurposed pickle jar.

His wife, Rachel, brought him coffee at 10:00 pm, finding him still cross-referencing outbreak data with regional fermentation practices.

“Josh, you’ll burn out. You’ve been at this for four months.”

“Rachel, look at this.” He pulled up overlapping datasets. “Communities with high fermented food consumption—Korean, Eastern European, and Japanese immigrants—show 60% lower hospital visit rates for food borne illness. Despite eating ‘dangerous’ unpasteurized foods.”

“Correlation isn’t causation,” she said gently—words he’d spoken countless times.

“I know. That’s why I’ve controlled for everything else: income, education, healthcare access, environmental factors. The correlation holds. It actually strengthens.”

He switched to another dataset. “Autoimmune conditions, inflammatory diseases, allergic reactions—all inversely correlated with fermented food consumption. The more ‘unsafe’ bacteria people consume, the healthier they are.”

“What are you saying?” she asked.

Josh leaned back, weighing his words. “I’m saying I’ve spent fifteen years enforcing laws that make people sick. The FDA’s war on bacteria isn’t protecting public health—it’s destroying it.”

Rachel sat beside him. “That’s a significant claim. A career-ending claim.”

“I know.” He looked across at his fermenting kimchi. “That jar? Technically illegal to share. If I gave it to a neighbor, I could face prosecution. But Mrs. Chungs’s kimchi protected seven people from an outbreak that hospitalized thirty. How is that rational?”

The Underground Fermentation Railroad

Driven by his research, Josh connected with the resistance—a sprawling network of fermenters called the Underground Fermentation Railroad. The key figures included:

Mike Hardman, a British brewmaster who relocated to Milwaukee after his brewery fell victim to the Pasteurization Mandates. He now ran “microbial speakeasies” in abandoned warehouses. His wild-fermented beers, unpasteurized and alive, bore no resemblance to the sterile beverages in stores. He’d been raided seven times, arrested twice, yet kept reopening under new addresses.

They connected via video.

“Welcome to the resistance, mate,” Mike said, showing Josh his warehouse operation. “Been dodging health inspectors for three years. They shut me down. I reopen. Because this…” he held up a bottle of wild-fermented beer “…is what beer should taste like. Alive.”

Jo Webster, a mycologist maintaining illegal koji libraries in climate-controlled storage. She inherited strains from her grandmother’s miso shop, shuttered by health inspectors in 2042. Now she smuggled cultures across borders, a biological preservationist protecting humanity’s microbial heritage.

The Kombucha Kollective, a decentralized teenage network treating fermentation as hacktivist practice. They shared SCOBYs through dead drops, swapped recipes on darknet forums, and organized flash-fermentation events—pop-up workshops that dissolved before authorities arrived. Hundreds of teenagers appeared in public spaces, made fermented foods for two hours, then vanished before police arrival. Radically decentralized and impossible to shut down, their SCOBY-sharing network operated like biological BitTorrent. Their manifesto: “You can’t regulate microbes. They were here first.”

They contacted Josh through encrypted channels, treating him as an elder statesman. “You were inside the system, Doc. You know how they think. Help us fight them.”

Josh spoke with Paige Bourne, a 28-year-old key figure in the Kollective, brought her technical savvy to the movement. She designed distributed bioreactors—simple systems buildable from hardware store materials. Her open-source plans spread globally within weeks.

“You’re making it too easy to break the law,” a lawyer friend warned her.

“Exactly,” Paige responded. “When enough people break unjust laws, enforcement becomes impossible.”

By 2050, the underground network encompassed thousands of fermenters across North America. Corporate food executives watched their market share decline. Change was inevitable.

Josh’s transformation accelerated. He stopped enforcing certain regulations, issued warnings instead of violations, and documented evidence that fermentation communities were healthier. His supervisors noticed. Reassignment to desk duty came in April 2047. A month later, the Three-Week Blackout hit. He resigned from the FDA and condensed his fifteen years of research into a one-page manifesto.

The Manifesto: “The Right to Rot”

Josh’s manifesto became an online document that went viral: The Fermentation Declaration. It crystallized the movement’s arguments into five elements:

1. Historical Precedent: Humans have fermented food for 10,000 years. Industrial pasteurization barely existed 150 years ago. Who’s really conducting a dangerous experiment?

2. Biological Rights: If humans possess rights to clean air and water, they retain rights to beneficial microbes. Our gut microbiomes collapse under sterile food regimes, which is essentially environmental destruction occurring inside our bodies.

3. Food Sovereignty: Centralized food production creates vulnerability. Fermentation enables resilient, distributed food security. Criminalizing it means criminalizing survival.

4. Microbial Democracy: Microbes don’t recognize borders, patents, or corporate ownership. They belong to everyone and no one. Laws treating them as controlled substances are absurd and unenforceable.

5. The Honest Broker Principle: Fermentation reveals ingredient truth. Industrial food hides inferior quality behind processing. Banning fermentation protects corporate deception.

The fifth section proved most controversial. Josh wrote: “You can’t ferment garbage. Bad ingredients produce bad fermentation. Industrial food processes hide poor quality behind additives and processing. Fermentation exposes quality. That’s why corporations fear it—it reveals their fraud.”

He released the document simultaneously across multiple platforms—encrypted channels, underground forums, and mainstream social media. The response was immediate and overwhelming. Within twenty-four hours, the Declaration had been shared four million times. Within a week, it appeared in 37 languages. Fermentation communities worldwide rallied around it.

Rachel found Josh reading responses on his laptop, tears streaming down his face.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Josh wiped away his tears. “Nothing’s wrong,” he replied. “Listen to this—it’s from a grandmother in Seoul: ‘I have been making kimchi for sixty years. My children moved to America and told me it was illegal to share it. Your words made me understand: the law is wrong, not my kimchi. Thank you for defending our heritage.'”

He scrolled through hundreds of similar messages. “I thought I was writing theory. But people are treating this as permission to reclaim something stolen from them.”

Rachel hugged him. “That’s revolution, Josh. You started a revolution.”

“We did it together. We started a revolution. Now we have to finish it.”

The movement escalated from theory to direct action and civil disobedience.

The Great Sauerkraut Sit-In of July 4, 2050

Ninety thousand activists gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC, each carrying a jar of homemade fermented vegetables. They sat, ate, and invited arrest. Police faced an impossible dilemma: they couldn’t arrest everyone, and images of handcuffed grandmothers eating sauerkraut and crackers created public relations disasters. The protest lasted six days. Networks of supporters smuggled fresh ferments each night. The air carried the scent of possibility and properly fermented cabbage.

Josh took the stage and surveyed the crowd. He spoke into the microphone.

“We are here today—July 4, Independence Day—to declare independence from food tyranny. We are eating fermented vegetables in direct violation of federal law. We demand justice.”

The crowd responded by opening their jars and eating. Ninety thousand people simultaneously violating the Pasteurization Mandates. Police officers watched helplessly—they couldn’t arrest everyone, and arresting grandmothers for eating sauerkraut would be politically catastrophic.

Mike Hardman circulated through the crowd with bottles of illegal beer. “Free drinks for civil disobedience! Who wants wild-fermented ale?”

The Kombucha Kollective organized supply lines—networks of supporters smuggling fresh ferments into the protest each night. By day three, participants were sharing cultures, teaching techniques, and building community around their illegal foods.

Mrs. Chung, now 86, sat near the reflecting pool with elderly Korean women, calmly eating kimchi and teaching younger activists proper fermentation technique.

“You see these young people?” she told a reporter. “They learn what we never forgot. Food is alive. We are alive. Dead food cannot sustain living people.”

By day six, the protest had become a festival. Musicians performed. Children played. Families picnicked while federal buildings loomed overhead, the authorities stood by, paralyzed.

Senator Maria Gonzalez, watching from her office, called an emergency meeting with colleagues.

“We have 90,000 Americans openly breaking federal law, and we can’t stop them. This isn’t disappearing. We need to address the underlying issues.”

On day seven, Josh learned that congressional hearings on the Pasteurization Mandates would be scheduled. The sit-in had forced the conversation into legitimate political channels.

As protesters celebrated, Josh stood with Rachel, looking out over the crowd.

“Did you ever imagine this?” she asked.

“Never,” he replied. “I imagined teaching a few kids in my basement. This…” He gestured at the crowd. “This is 10,000 years of human culture refusing to die quietly.”

The DC event captured federal authorities’ attention. State and local changes were simultaneously underway.

Fermentation Sanctuary Cities

Portland, San Francisco, and Chicago became fermentation sanctuary cities and declared they would not enforce Pasteurization Mandates within their limits. They established municipal fermentation cooperatives, offering legal protection for residents learning traditional techniques. Federal authorities threatened to withhold funding. The cities countered by publishing public health data—hospital visits for food borne illness actually decreased as fermentation spread.

Unlike earlier progressive movements, this movement wasn’t confined to coastal elites.

The County Fair Fermentation Alliance

Rural America launched resistance through county fairs—the heartland’s traditional gathering spaces. From July through September, fermentation appeared prominently at fair displays: mason jars of sauerkraut from Kansas, fermented apple juice from Vermont orchards, naturally fermented hot sauces from Texas ranches, preserved vegetables from Midwestern gardens. Fair organizers deliberately placed fermentation in competition categories that had existed for generations, claiming this simply “preserved traditional agricultural knowledge.”

When FDA inspectors arrived to shut down fermentation competitions, they encountered something unexpected: unified rural communities defending their heritage. Hundreds of small-town residents—farmers, church ladies, 4-H club members—testified that fermentation wasn’t a commercial activity but essential food preservation passed down through generations.

The strategy was decentralized and difficult to stop: each county fair board made its own decisions. Prosecutors couldn’t arrest entire town governments. Confiscating jars at agricultural competitions created public relations disasters. The image of masked federal agents removing hand-fermented vegetables from county fair displays—often bearing Scandinavian, German, and rural American cultural significance—became politically toxic.

Church potlucks became fermentation celebrations. The movement didn’t generate the headlines of urban protests, but it was far more decentralized and harder to suppress. You couldn’t arrest cultural practices embedded in rural communities that had been around for a century.

Federal authorities faced impossible choices: prosecute thousands of small-town farmers and fair organizers, or quietly retreat. The rural fermentation movement succeeded through patient, institutionalized resistance rooted in legitimate agricultural heritage. By 2050, enforcement had become politically impossible and practically infeasible.

The number one hit on country stations across the heartland was Dakota Rose McAllister’s County Fair Fermenting that celebrated the victory:

The Feds swooped down from D.C. with their badges and demands
Said our pickles were illegal across these rural lands.
But the farmers kept fermenting like their fathers did before
And the fair judge kept a-judging to even out the score.

Church ladies brought their sauerkraut to Sunday potluck meals,
4-H kids shared kombucha, taking pride in what was real.
The Feds tried confiscatin’ jars with Grandma’s name in ink,
News cameras showed their folly, it made the whole world think.

From Kansas field to Texas dust, Vermont to Michigan snow
We showed real food for real folk was the way to go.
The bureaucrats discovered what the heartland always knew
You can’t arrest tradition when it runs this deep and true.

Come Twenty-Fifty they retreated as fermentation spread,
The corporate resistance was likewise stony dead.
So here’s to rural folk who stood for what was true,
Not laws that stop us eating what the good Lord grew.

Fermenting all the time
Fermenting all the time
We’ll join with one another
Fermenting all the time.

The Corporate Counter-Offensive

Industrial food companies fought back. They funded poorly designed, easily debunked studies claiming fermented foods caused health risks. They purchased advertising campaigns featuring “concerned parents” worried about “unregulated bacteria” near schools. They lobbied for stricter enforcement. But their tactics backfired. The public increasingly saw through the manufactured fear. A leaked memo from a major food corporation’s legal team revealed the actual concern: fermentation threatened profit margins. If people could make nutrient-dense food in their kitchens for pennies, they would stop buying forty-dollar supplement regimens and processed “health” foods.

Given the movement’s scale of demand, corporate interests and the reactionary establishment would not accept change without resistance. They issued indictments in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania against key leaders, with Josh first among them.

Thus, we arrive at what became known in fermentation history as The Philadelphia Trial.

The Philadelphia Trial

Setting: Federal courthouse, Philadelphia. May 10-30, 2052.

Participants:

• Dr. Josh Evans (defendant)
• Twenty-three co-defendants (grandmothers, teenagers, community members)
• Prosecutor Margaret Watson
• Defense attorney David O’Brian
• Expert witnesses (microbiologists, historians, nutritionists)
• Jury (twelve ordinary citizens)

Josh’s trial became a platform for revolutionary science. He brought expert witnesses demonstrating how sterile diets correlate with disease. They presented the “Fermentation Paradox”: communities with the highest consumption of fermented foods showed the lowest food poisoning rates, despite consuming “dangerous” unpasteurized foods.

The packed courtroom overflowed with media. Josh sat with co-defendants—a cross-section of America united by illegal fermentation: Mrs. Chung’s sourdough-sharing friend, a teenager who sold kombucha at a school fundraiser, Bengali mothers maintaining traditional rice batters.

Prosecutor Watson presented her case with clinical efficiency. She displayed jars of kimchi under courtroom lights, their red glow ominous , unsettling, un-American. She addressed the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen, these defendants operated an unlicensed biological hazard facility. They distributed unregulated bacterial cultures to minors. They violated federal law designed to protect public health. The law is clear. Their guilt is clear.”

She called a food safety inspector to examine Josh’s fermentation jars.

On cross, defense attorney O’Brian asked, “Can you, by visual inspection alone, determine whether these cultures are safe or dangerous?”

The inspector hesitated. “Not definitively without laboratory analysis.”

“Yet visual inspection is the basis for your seizure warrant?”

“It’s standard procedure—” blustered the inspector.

“Answer the question,” O’Brian insisted. “Yes or no. Can you visually distinguish beneficial fermentation from harmful spoilage?”

“Not in all cases, no.”

The prosecution’s microbiologist fared worse. Under questioning, she admitted that the bacteria in Josh’s kimchi were identical to strains in expensive probiotic supplements legally sold in stores.

“So,” O’Brian asked, “these bacteria are dangerous criminals when found in homemade sauerkraut, but beneficial supplements when sold by corporations for a hundred dollars a bottle? What’s the difference?”

“The difference is licensing, regulation, quality control—”

O’Brian turned and faced the room. “The difference is profit margin. No further questions.”

Josh took the stand, transformed from defendant to teacher. He presented his research, which included the nursing home outbreak data and the correlation between fermented food consumption and health outcomes.

“I enforced these laws for fifteen years,” he testified. “I believed I was protecting people. Then I discovered I was protecting corporate profits while destroying public health. The evidence is overwhelming: communities maintaining fermentation traditions are healthier. Our war on bacteria hasn’t made food safer—it’s made humans weaker.”

The prosecution attempted to discredit him. “Dr. Evans, you’re not a medical doctor. You’re not a nutritionist. Why should this jury trust your interpretation over federal health authorities?”

“Because I was a federal health authority. And I was wrong. The FDA is wrong. The science is wrong. Ten thousand years of human fermentation history prove it.”

Mrs. Chung testified about the nursing home outbreak, her voice steady despite her age. “I am 86 years old. I have eaten fermented foods every day of my life. I have never been sick from them. But I watched thirty people hospitalized by ‘safe’ processed lettuce from a licensed facility. You tell me which food is dangerous.”

The defense’s closing argument was delivered by O’Brian with quiet intensity:

“The prosecution asks you to convict these defendants for violating laws that protect corporate monopolies while harming public health. They ask you to criminalize food practices that sustained humanity for millennia. They ask you to believe that beneficial bacteria are dangerous when shared freely but miraculous when sold expensively.”

“I ask you to use common sense. These defendants fed their communities safely. They taught traditional skills. They broke laws that deserved breaking. Find them not guilty, and send a message: food sovereignty is not a crime.”

The Verdict and Its Aftermath

When the verdict was read on Thursday, May 30, 2052, cable news carried the live feed.

The jury returned after fourteen hours of deliberation. The courtroom fell silent as the forewoman stood.

“In the case of the United States versus Joshua Evans and twenty-three co-defendants, on all charges, we find the defendants… not guilty.”

The courtroom erupted. Josh embraced his co-defendants, many crying. Mrs. Chung sat calmly, as if the outcome was never in question.

The real impact came afterward. Three jurors held an impromptu press conference on the courthouse steps with a statement that changed everything.

Juror #7, a middle-aged accountant, spoke first: “We didn’t merely acquit these defendants. We rejected the entire legal framework. The Pasteurization Mandates criminalize traditional food practices that are safer and healthier than industrial alternatives. As citizens, we refuse to enforce unjust laws.”

Juror #3, a young teacher, added: “I’ve started fermenting at home. During deliberations, we discussed the evidence, which was overwhelming: fermented foods are beneficial. These laws protect corporations, not people. We won’t be complicit.”

Juror #10, an elderly veteran, concluded: “I fought for freedom. That includes the freedom to feed my family traditional foods without government interference. These defendants are patriots, not criminals.”

The media coverage triggered a cascade. Within weeks:

• Twelve states passed the Fermentation Freedom Acts, decriminalizing home fermentation
• The National Academy of Sciences released a report validating fermentation’s safety and nutritional benefits.
• Insurance companies began offering discounts to households practicing fermentation, citing better health outcomes and lower costs.
• Culinary schools added fermentation to core curricula.
• Major universities established fermentation research programs.

Josh watched the transformation from his basement. Reporters asked how it felt to win.

“We didn’t win yet,” he cautioned. “We won the trial. Now we need constitutional protection so this can never happen again.”

The Twenty-Eighth Amendment

The movement toward a Constitutional Amendment began immediately.

In March 2053, Josh appeared before the Congressional Hearing on the Fermentation Rights Amendment, addressing members of Congress, the media, and the American public watching on television. He was there to help secure Congressional passage of the 28th Amendment, guaranteeing the right to ferment.

As he sat looking at the assembled politicians, unsure of the reception his arguments would get, yet sure in his heart of the justness of his cause, he knew this was his time and this was the place. He glanced down at his notes, waited for the Committee chairman to call the meeting to order, and began.

“Members of Congress, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. Three weeks ago, I received a letter from an 82-year-old grandmother in Iowa. She asked me a simple question: ‘Dr. Evans, why is the sauerkraut my mother taught me to make—the same recipe that fed our family through the Depression, through two world wars, through every crisis we faced—why is that now a federal crime?'”

For fifteen years, I was the person who would have arrested that grandmother. I worked for the FDA as a food safety inspector. I enforced these laws, believing I was protecting Americans. I was wrong.

Today, we face a choice that will define the next century of American food security. Will we criminalize 10,000 years of human wisdom, or will we protect it?”

I believe in the five fundamental principles that demand Constitutional protection that have become known as the “Right to Rot” Manifesto.

But first, you need to understand how we got here—and why what we’re doing now is dangerous.

Seven years ago, I met average Americans who showed me that my FDA mandate and the laws I was tasked with enforcing were not serving this country. I met Mrs. Segovia Chung. An 86-year-old woman in a retirement home in Berkeley, facing prosecution for sharing kimchi that saved seven lives. I met Bob Blass, a teenager in Kentucky, arrested for selling kombucha at a school fundraiser. I met six Bengali mothers in Detroit, who were maintaining century-old rice batter traditions—now felons.

These people all broke the law. Last year, I was brought before the courts for breaking the law, together with 23 other co-defendants. Thankfully, we were acquitted. Yet over 2,000 Americans were arrested for fermentation-related ‘crimes’ in 2051. Thousands more are living in fear, hiding their traditional practices.

Let’s understand. The Pasteurization Mandates weren’t written to protect people like me, like you, average Americans. They were written to protect profit margins. Seven corporations control 87% of processed food production. These are the same corporations that wrote the regulations we’re told are ‘for our safety’. They can sell you $100 probiotic pills, but your grandmother can’t share her sauerkraut.

The bitter irony is that we mandated the system that makes us sick, while criminalizing the food that makes us healthy. Yet, the food system we criminalized is the only one resilient enough to survive what’s coming, as the reality of global warming threatens supply chains and energy-intensive refrigeration, as we learned first-hand in the Three-Week Blackout and Supply Chain Winter of ’47 that followed.

Some of you are thinking: ‘But surely there’s a compromise. Surely we can regulate fermentation safely.’ Let me tell you why that won’t work—and what will.

The solution we have introduced is contained in the five principles of what I call ‘The Right to Rot.’ The Fermentation Declaration rests on these five principles. Each one addresses a fundamental human right. Each one demands Constitutional protection. Together, they offer a path forward. I have published these, and they are entered into the record.

I stand before you today to formally propose this Amendment:

“The right of the people to ferment foods, maintain microbial cultures, and share beneficial bacteria shall not be infringed. Traditional fermentation practices constitute protected cultural heritage and essential food sovereignty.”

This constitutional protection is necessary. Legislation can be reversed. Regulations can be rewritten. Constitutional rights are permanent. This protection ensures no future Congress can criminalize survival skills. This joins the Bill of Rights as a fundamental freedom.

Now, some of you are thinking: ‘This sounds good, but will it work?’ Let me tell you what America will look like after the 28th Amendment passes.

Within one year, ten million households will begin fermenting. Every elementary school will teach fermentation alongside reading and math. Community fermentation cooperatives will operate in every neighborhood.

Imagine: A grandmother in Iowa teaches her granddaughter to make sauerkraut—legally, proudly, without fear. A teenager in Milwaukee sells kombucha at a school fundraiser—and receives praise, not arrest. Bengali mothers maintain their rice batter traditions—and are celebrated as cultural preservationists, not prosecuted as criminals.

Over the following five years, the benefits will be even greater. Hospital visits for food borne illness are expected to decrease by 40%. Autoimmune conditions will begin declining for the first time in 50 years. Children who grow up eating living food tend to have stronger immune systems.

Long term, the resilience dividend means that when the next blackout comes—and it will come—millions of households will be prepared. When supply chains break—and they will break—communities will feed themselves. When the climate crisis intensifies—and it will intensify—we will survive.

Economically, healthcare costs will fall by $50 billion annually. Food waste will be reduced by eliminating a third of current spoilage. There will be over 200,000 new, well paying jobs for hard-working Americans as fermentation educators, cooperative workers, and culture librarians.

Globally, America will lead the world in food sovereignty. Other nations follow our Constitutional model. Fermentation rights will become universal human rights.

Now, let’s consider for a moment what America will be like if this Amendment fails to pass. Prosecutions will accelerate. The 2,000 arrests in 2051 will become 10,000 in 2054. Traditional fermentation knowledge will die with the elders, too afraid to teach it. Corporate control will tighten. More regulations. Higher compliance costs. Complete monopoly.

Imagine: That grandmother in Iowa is arrested. Her fermentation crocks are destroyed as ‘biological hazards.’ Her granddaughter grows up never tasting real sauerkraut—only the pasteurized, dead version sold for $12 a jar by corporations. That teenager in Milwaukee? Juvenile detention. Those Bengali mothers? Deportation proceedings.

Our children will grow up with compromised immune systems. The next blackout will be worse. More people starve. More food waste.

The path to authoritarianism will be wide open. Food dependency becomes political control. Populations that cannot feed themselves accept any terms. The American experiment in self-governance ends with dependence on corporate food.

Two futures. One choice. We decide today which America our grandchildren inherit. Freedom or dependency? Resilience or fragility? Cultural preservation or cultural extinction? Constitutional protection or corporate control?

This isn’t complicated. This is about whether Americans have the right to feed themselves and their families using knowledge passed down through generations. Everything else is noise.

So what now?

I have a simple ask.

To Congressional Members present. The political reality is that 76% of Americans support this amendment. This crosses party lines: rural conservatives and urban progressives agree. Every single one of you has constituents who ferment. Every single one of you represents grandmothers who could be prosecuted under the current law. Every single one of you will be asked: ‘Where did you stand when we criminalized traditional food?’

So I ask you to vote YES on the Fermentation Rights Amendment when it reaches the floor next month. Bring this to a vote within 60 days. Don’t support amendments that weaken the core protections. Co-sponsor the enabling legislation to establish the National Fermentation Institute. Publicly commit to supporting ratification in your home states. We need your full-throated advocacy in your districts.

To those of you watching these proceedings on television, radio, or social media. Call your senators and representatives TODAY. Tell them: ‘I support the 28th Amendment. Vote YES.’

More than that, get involved in direct action. What does that mean? Simply teach someone to ferment. Find one person who doesn’t know how to ferment and teach them. Share your starter cultures. Share your knowledge. Share your food. Share your story. If fermentation has benefited your health, tell people. If you’ve been harassed for traditional practices, document it. If your grandmother taught you these skills, honor her by passing them on.

To those lawmakers in State Legislatures. You have a crucial role to play. There are 38 states needed for ratification. We have commitments from 32 states already. There are six more states that are battleground ones: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, and Wyoming. We need your support. Make your state the one that gets us across the threshold.

Finally, to my friends in the food industry: You have a choice. Adapt or become obsolete. The market is moving toward fermentation, whether you like it or not. Work with us to maintain quality and authenticity, or be bypassed entirely. Understand there’s profit in fermentation—but not in monopoly control. Work with us, not against us. If you continue lobbying against this amendment, you will lose. And when you lose, we will remember who stood against food sovereignty. Your brands will be boycotted. Your products will be rejected. Choose wisely.

In closing, I want to go back to that grandmother in Iowa. I want to write her a letter. I want to tell her: ‘Ma’am, your sauerkraut is no longer a crime. It is a Constitutional right. Teach your granddaughter. Teach your neighbors. Teach everyone. You are not a criminal. You are a patriot. You are preserving what matters.

Fifty years from now, our grandchildren will look back at this moment. They will ask: ‘What did you do when traditional knowledge was criminalized? What did you do when food sovereignty was threatened? What did you do when the choice was between freedom and dependency?’

Let us be able to say: ‘We chose freedom. We chose resilience. We chose to protect ancient wisdom. We chose to pass the 28th Amendment. We chose right.’

The vote is coming. The choice is clear. The time is now.

Fermentation is not dangerous. Dependence is dangerous. Let us choose independence. Let us choose the right to rot. Let us choose the 28th Amendment. Thank you.”

The Vote to Pass

Shortly after Josh’s testimony, Senator Gonzalez introduced the Fermentation Rights Amendment with surprising bipartisan support. The ratification process moved faster than anyone anticipated. State after state approved, driven by overwhelming public support.

On Friday, June 13, 2053, the Twenty-Eighth Amendment was ratified. The signing ceremony took place not in Washington but in Josh’s basement—where it all began. The President arrived to find neighborhood kids making sauerkraut exactly as they did when it was illegal.

“Dr. Evans,” President Ocasio-Cortez said, “you’ve added to the Constitution. That’s a profound legacy.”

“It’s not my legacy,” Josh responded. “It’s humanity’s. We’re just remembering what we always knew—that food is alive, we are alive, and living systems need each other.”

The President watched a seven-year-old girl pound cabbage for sauerkraut with complete confidence, learning from Mrs. Chung’s patient instruction.

“This is what we protected,” Josh continued. “Not just the right to ferment, but the right to pass knowledge between generations. To maintain cultural heritage. To choose resilience over fragility.”

After the ceremony, Rachel found Josh sitting on his basement steps, watching the celebration.

“Satisfied?” she asked.

“Not yet,” he replied. “The amendment protects fermentation. But we need infrastructure—culture libraries, education programs, research into climate-adapted fermentation. The legal battle is over. Cultural rebuilding is just beginning.”

“Always the next fight,” Rachel observed.

“Always,” Josh agreed. “But this one we fight from a position of strength. No one can criminalize fermentation now. That’s worth everything we endured.”

Long-term Impact

The Twenty-Eighth Amendment undermined the surface patriotism of those who paid lip service to “the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands.” The old idea of citizenship gradually transformed into symbiotic belonging—a growing recognition that people are fundamentally part of humankind first, rather than any particular nation or tribe.

With fermentation as the foundation, a sense of community developed in ordinary daily life among people who had been isolated behind their screens. People identified themselves by their cultures: “I’m of the Baltic Oolong line,” or “My SCOBY descends from the Cascadia Jun strain.” These were living histories, not brands—shared responsibilities.

By 2070, many considered themselves citizens of the SCOBY Nation, which had no capital, no flag, and no army. Its borders were the invisible threads of microbial exchange spanning the globe. Its citizens were anyone who cared for life, from the yeast upward.

And beneath it all pulsed a unified belief: that the future wasn’t manufactured—it was fermented.

The First Legal Fermentation Festival

That autumn, Philadelphia hosted the nation’s first fully legal fermentation festival. People gathered to celebrate the passage of the June 13 Amendment—commonly known as “3F Day”: Fermentation Freedom Friday.

The Philadelphia waterfront transformed into a celebration of everything that had been illegal just months earlier. Mike’s wild-fermented beers flowed freely from taps, no longer hidden in unmarked bottles. Jo’s koji cultures were displayed like precious artifacts in climate-controlled cases with detailed lineage information tracing them back through generations.

The Kombucha Kollective had set up massive teaching stations where teenagers instructed adults in SCOBY cultivation. Their formerly encrypted techniques were now demonstrated in broad daylight, with city officials watching approvingly.

Paige Bourne’s distributed bioreactor exhibit attracted engineers and home fermenters alike. Her open-source designs, once shared through underground channels, were now published in peer-reviewed journals and displayed on giant screens.

Mrs. Chung was honored on stage, receiving a lifetime achievement award for “preserving cultural heritage through acts of culinary civil disobedience.” At 87, she’d become the grandmother of the fermentation revolution.

Her acceptance speech was brief: “I just make kimchi. Same kimchi my grandmother made, her grandmother made, back a thousand years. I never stopped. You call this bravery? I call this my life. Thank you for remembering that food should be alive.”

The crowd gave her a standing ovation.

Travis Shepherd and the Bootlickers took to the stage. They’d trucked in from Amarillo to perform their hit song Let It Bubble (The 28th Amendment Song) celebrating Fermentation Freedom and the history of the Movement:

Well, my grandma’s kitchen never needed no power line,
Her crocks kept bubblin’ through the blackout just fine.
While the city folks were starving with their ‘fridges going dead,
She fed full forty neighbors on her sauerkraut and bread.
Carmen knew well what the corporations tried to hide,
That livin’ food keeps livin’ when the factory food has died.

So pass that jar around, let the good bacteria flow,
We got a constitutional right to have our cultures grow!

Old Doc Evans was a lawman ’til he saw the light one day,
Found the rules he was enforcin’ only served to pave the way,
For all them corporations selling folks a crappy happy meal
While grandma’s got arrested sharing kimchi that could heal.
He traded in his badge for mason jars and truth,
Said “I’ll teach the children what they dun stole from our youth.”

So pass that jar around, let the good bacteria flow,
We got a constitutional right to have our cultures grow!

Ninety thousand strong on Independence Day we came,
Eating fermented kraut was another kind of game.
They couldn’t arrest us all for breaking their unjust decrees,
Sippin’ on our ‘booch in the shade of cherry trees.
The jury said “not guilty” and the movement found its voice,
Between livin’ food and dead food, we all made our choice.

So pass that jar around, let the good bacteria flow,
We got a constitutional right to have our cultures grow!

Now it’s 2053, we got an amendment to our name,
From the basements to the Congress, we changed the whole damn game.
No more hiding SCOBY mothers like they’re contraband or dope,
Our children learn fermentation alongside reading, math, and hope.
So here’s to every culture that our ancestors kept alive,
‘Cause the best technology is food that helps us thrive!

So pass that jar around, let the good bacteria flow,
We got our constitutional right, so let those cultures grow!

So pass that jar around, let the good bacteria flow,
We got our constitutional right, so let those cultures grow!

Mike found Josh in the evening, both men watching the sun sett over the festival.

“Mate, remember when we were criminals? When this was all underground?”

Josh laughed. “Two years ago. Feels like a lifetime.”

“Right on,” Mike agreed. “We’ve lived multiple lifetimes in two years—criminal, defendant, revolutionary, now protected by constitutional right. What a ride.”

“It’s not over,” Josh cautioned. “The amendment protects our rights, but corporations haven’t given up. They’re pivoting to ‘artisanal’ fermentation brands, trying to commercialize what they couldn’t criminalize. Different battle, same war.”

“Let them try,” Mike said. “They can make fermented products, but they can’t make fermentation culture. That belongs to us—to everyone. You can’t patent community.”

As darkness fell, the festival continued. Bonfires were lit, and people gathered around them, sharing food, sharing stories, sharing cultures in every sense. It was ancient and modern simultaneously—humanity’s oldest food technology celebrated with contemporary understanding.

Paige joined Josh and Mike, bringing her grandmother, Adeline.

“Abuela wanted to meet the famous Dr. Evans,” Paige said.

Adeline took Josh’s hands. “Paige told me you gave up your career to teach children fermentation. That you risked everything. Thank you for protecting what I never stopped doing.”

“I should thank you,” Josh responded. “People like you preserved the knowledge when people like me tried to regulate it out of existence. You’re the real heroes.”

“No heroes,” Adeline insisted. “Just people who knew that food should taste alive. That’s not heroism—that’s common sense.”

A young reporter approached Josh, who stood apart from the festivities, drinking kombucha and observing.

“Dr. Evans, this festival exists because of you. How does it feel?”

Josh considered the question, watching children laugh as they pounded cabbage, watching elderly immigrants teach traditional techniques without fear, watching thousands celebrating foods and drinks that were criminal months earlier.

“It feels like remembering. Like we were all asleep, dreaming that sterile industrial food was normal, that beneficial bacteria were dangerous, that traditional knowledge had no value. This festival is us waking up.”

“This isn’t the end,” he continued. “It’s barely the beginning. We didn’t just win the right to ferment. We remembered that we’re not sterile machines requiring sterile fuel. We’re ecosystems. We’ve always been ecosystems.”

The journalist was taking notes. “What’s next for the movement?” he asked.

“This isn’t a movement anymore—it’s culture. Movements are temporary. Culture is permanent. We’re rebuilding food culture from fermentation upward, the way it always should have been.”

He handed the reporter a jar of kimchi. “You’ll need this where we’re going.”

The reporter looked confused. “Where are we going?”

Josh smiled. “Back to the future. Back to remembering that the best technologies are those that improve with time, not those that fight against it.”

Across the city, ten thousand crocks bubbled with possibility.

The crowd thinned out, and as the moon rose over the Potomac, the closing act of the day took the stage. From Arcata, California, The Hollow Pines – Finn Sutherland and River Pember – serenaded SCOBY love with their whimsical ballad: Our Fermented Future.

Baby sit a little closer, sip some ‘booch with me
I brewed this batch with the SCOBY my grandma gave to me.
On the back porch swing at twilight, watching fireflies dance
Your hand in mine, kombucha fine, the sweetest sweet romance.

They say that wine and roses are the way to win the heart
But your kombucha warmed me right up from the start.
Fermentation makes the heart grow fonder, truer words they ain’t been said
Your SCOBY’s got a place forever — in my heart, and in my bed.

Let’s share our SCOBYs, baby, merge our ferments into one
Like cultures in a crock jar dancing, underneath the sun.
The tang of your Lactobacillus is exactly what I’m missing
Your Brettanomyces bacteria got this country boy reminiscing.

Oh yeah, let’s share those SCOBYs, baby, merge our ferments into one
Your yeasts and my bacteria working till the magic’s done
You’ve got the acetic acid honey, I’ve got the patience and the time
Let’s bubble up together, let our cultures intertwine.

I’ve got that symbiotic feeling, something wild and something true
Your SCOBY’s in my heart, right there next to you
The way your Acetobacter turns sugar into gold
Is how you turned my lonely life into a hand to hold.

We’ve got the acetic acid and the glucuronic too
We’ve got that symbiotic feeling, so righteous and so true
One sip of your sweet ‘booch, Lord, and you had me from the start,
It’s our fermented future, that no-one can tear apart.

It’s our fermented future…
It’s our fermented future…
It’s our fermented future…

Epilogue: The Tea Connection

As fermented foods thrived, beverages remained a cornerstone of daily life in 2100. Favored among these was kombucha, and kombucha required tea. Climate change had devastated the world’s tea gardens. Salvation lay in the most unlikely of places, on the edge of Europe, where a handful of British pioneers created an innovative solution.

You won’t want to miss next week’s installment of Our Fermented Future.

Disclaimer

This is a work of speculative fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, assisted by generative A.I. References to real brands and organizations are used in a wholly imaginative context and are not intended to reflect any actual facts or opinions related to them. No assertions or statements in this post should be interpreted as true or factual.

Audio

Listen to an audio version of this Episode and all future ones via the Booch News channel on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week’s audio is 70 minutes long. If you just want to listen to the music (and you really should!) tune in as follows:

• Dakota Rose McAllister, County Fair Fermenting: 28:29
• Travis Shepherd and the Bootlickers, Let It Bubble (The 28th Amendment Song) 59:07
• The Hollow Pines, Our Fermented Future 1:06:35

Lyrics ©2025 Booch News, songs generated with the assistance of Suno.

The post Our Fermented Future, Episode 5: The Spoilage Rights Movement appeared first on 'Booch News.