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Sauerkraut at Every Meal? These Fermentation Fanatics Tried That Long Before MAHA
Waking early, I put a small jar of my sauerkraut into my messenger bag, hop on my bicycle, ride to Seattle's King Street Station, and board a train heading to the Portland Fermentation Festival, the yearly gathering affectionately nicknamed “Stinkfest.”
Usually the sheer existence of a festival like this is enough to get people revved up to come together and talk about their favorite ferments, but in an interesting twist, fermented foods are enjoying a popularity boost from a different crowd. The MAHA movement, and particularly the Donald Trump cabinet, are big into fermented food, eating meat, usually steak, with fermented sides like kimchi or sauerkraut at every meal.
I've come to Portland, Oregon, wondering if there was going to be any overlap in the Venn diagram between festival attendees and the MAHA steak-and-ferment crowd. I mentioned this to my cousin-in-law Erick, who's been part of the Portland food scene for years, and he laughed out loud.
“It'll be more like a Venn dumbbell,” he said, making a pair of thumb-and-forefinger circles and tracing a line in the air between them. “No overlap, but food will be the bridge.”
The festival is almost exactly what the fermentation-friendly might hope to find. Right inside the main door next to the check-in desk is a bacterial petting zoo—a common thing at this sort of event—and a table where attendees can drop off their own ferments to share. Further on, lining every wall of the main room, are exhibitors who have paid a grand total of 25 bucks for a table, handing out free samples of fermented foods.
The space quickly fills up–several hundred people flow through over the course of the evening–and it appears that there's both a line in front of each exhibitor and perhaps a more organic continuous line with people flowing clockwise from one exhibitor to the next. People are notably excited and happy. There's a kid walking around with a tray of handmade pickle pins he's giving people to wear and there's a collective gasp when 20 or 30 minutes in, Dillon T. Pickle, the mascot of the Portland Pickles West Coast League baseball team, walks into the room. At one point, a big baby crawls across most of the main floor, unhindered and happy.
In the middle of it all is festival co-organizer, journalist, and cookbook author Liz Crain. She explains that the Fest, now in its 14th installment, was started in 2009 by friends who love to ferment. There were members of a little company called Pickleopolis and a club called The Kraut Collective, and, with some help from author and fermentation rockstar Sandor Katz, they launched a Portland tradition.
When I ask how the festival has evolved since its first year, she gets a little philosophical.
“Cheap. Portland. Weird. People get excited,” she says in a tone where several punctuation options would be in the spirit of the festival. “People lined up on the sidewalk all the way around the building for the first one. I poured hard cider that I made from a tree in my backyard.”
“There's nothing for sale, and that gives it a potluck-y party style. Most big festivals have consumers and purveyors, but without those distinctions here, it makes conversations a bit deeper, a bit more personal,” she says. “There's no gatekeeping, no secret recipes. It's always been wacky and fun.”