Lactobacillus & Everything You Know & Love

lactobacilli are cute and friendly (once you get to know them)

Gearing up here in Westhampton for our 1st Picklefest, and I thought I’d relay some of the biocitizen-y things we are talking about as the Fest approaches—7pm, July 26th, Westhampton Memorial Library.

Picklefest is an event focused on teaching people the art of making their own raw, vinegar-free, naturally fermented pickles—the classic German-Jewish Dill pickle. I am involved in it for 4 reasons:

Preserving food via fermentation is extremely energy efficient, doesn’t take much time, and is cheap and easy. The “penny saved is a penny earned” yankee in me loves the off-the-grid, self-reliant dimension of pickling. Pickling is an Emersonian enterprise.

Gardeners and CSA customers end up with surplus produce from now until Fall. Pickling is the time-tested way of preserving this surplus. Just about anything grown around here can be pickled. (A neighbor told that his grandmother used to pickle hamburgers, submerging them in brine and sealing the top with lard; with a boyish twinkle, he declared they were the best hamburgers he ever ate.)

Pickles are yummy.

Natural fermented pickling happens when you submerge food in salt water and let lactobacillus munch everything in their path. If ever a bacteria has loved us, lactobacillus is that bacteria. Not only does it munch all the sugars in the brine, it munches every other kind of bacteria and microflora, including the ones that harm us. As it munches, it releases acids that change the PH of the brine—making it sour and inhospitable to all other life forms. In short, it transforms its environment to survive, much like we and our ancestors have done and do. Picklefest gives me a chance to celebrate lactobacillus acidophilus.

Each of us has about a quart of lactobacillus in our digestive system, and they do the same work in our tummies as they do in a pickling jar. They help us digest our food, and by breaking food down, release nutrients and minerals that nourish us and make us who we are. We have a symbiotic relationship with them, a relationship that we actually don’t know that much about because science has not probed too deeply into the subject. Yet, researchers do know that lactobacillus munch pathogenic microflora and therefore play an important role in our immune system.

What fascinates evolutionary biologists is the prospect that, way way back, lactobacillus co-evolved with our ancestors and collaboratively co-created an environment—our stomachs—that suits their needs. Remember that bacteria are the oldest life forms on earth; this view of evolution regards us as essentially as history’s most advanced form of pickling jar . Lynn Margolis, of UMass Amherst, is one of the pioneers in this field of inquiry which is called endosymbiosis.

What fascinates me is that we have an inner ecology as essential to us as the ecologies we perceive outside. I want to explore those inner coasts and mountains.

What is even more fascinating is that there is link, as murky as pickling brine, between lactobacillus and everything you know and love—

!!!!!

Related posts:

1. Reflections Upon a Dane who Reminisced about Pickled Meat
2. Northampton Kim Chi
3. you are a rain forest
4. natural selection by love, and by force
5. On Meeting Ken Greene of The Hudson Valley Seed Library