Touch Fermentation

MUSINGS ON CARE, COMMUNITY AND COLLABORATIVE LABOR

I’m not sure when I first learned of nukadoko, but I’ve been talking and thinking about starting one for at least six or seven years. I think I was drawn to the idea of care and what it means to be someone who can maintain a nukadoko bed and be someone who always has fresh, homemade pickles on hand. It seemed to signal a connection to tradition (but not my own familial or cultural tradition) and care and thoughtfulness and authenticity that I wanted to project about myself into the world, as well as confirm in myself. Before finally starting my own bed, I thought that it would be easy and I thought that I’d find a lot of pure joy and satisfaction from the process of embodied collaboration with the rice bran and microbes and veggies. In the ensuing weeks, however, maintaining the bed has become a space for mulling over themes of care (for myself and others) and community cultivation and maintenance.

Translated as “Nuka [ぬか(rice bran)] + Doko [床(bed)]” (Plant-Based Matters, 2021), nukadoko is a fermented rice bran bed for pickling vegetables. Its main ingredient is rice bran (nuka), the hard outer layer of the rice cereal grain that gets ground and polished off during the processing of white rice. The nuka is then mixed with salt, water, dried kombu, dried chiles and vegetable pieces, and left loosely covered at room temperature for ten days to mature and ferment. The resulting mixture feels like wet sand and has a toasty smell to it. Initially the nukadoko tastes salty and a little floury or nutty, but not much else beyond that. During those first ten days, it needs to be mixed twice a day to aerate and to check on the vegetable scraps buried in it, which should be swapped out every 4-5 days. During the next ten days, the bed only needs to be mixed once a day and can be fully covered.

MISTAKES + MAINTENANCE
Despite every source recommending against using tap water because the chlorine in the water could interfere with the growth of Lactobacillus and disrupt the contamination necessary for fermentation (Fournier, 2020), I unthinkingly used tap water. And then spent a week worrying that I messed up and it wasn’t going to work, and I had killed all my microbial partners before we even got started. I considered scrapping the bed I had started and making a new one, or starting a second one with purified water instead of tap to have a back-up bed in case the original one didn’t survive. Ultimately, I decided to give it a chance and just see what happens with the tap water bed. I still worry that I didn’t give my nukadoko a good enough start to thrive. I still worry about whether the microbes in my bed are doing well and wonder if I should start a new one. I still might.

This worrying isn't isolated to just my microbial partners. When I first started working with my current therapist in 2019, I went in with the goals of standing up for myself more and being better at comforting my friends when they’re sad or upset. He pushed on the second goal in our initial meeting, asking if I disappoint or let my friends down frequently. I talked in circles for a while, trying to explain that I’m just not good at it and feel like I don’t always understand what my friends need or how to make them feel better when they’re upset. He nodded and said “I see. I hear that you want to make your friends feel valued and loved and special. But I also think that you, yourself, need to feel valued and loved and special.” My first therapy homework assignment was to cook with another person rather than cooking for them. The goal was to not feel like I have to create or curate an experience for the other person, but rather live in the experience alongside them and find joy in it for myself. I’ve tried to view my keeping on with the tap water nuka as an expression of that lesson: I’m not in total control of the outcome or the process. I’m learning as I go; I’m doing my best to foster a healthy microbial community.

The process is a little bit of a black box. Now that (I think) my bed has fermented, I’ve started storing the nukadoko in the fridge to slow down the process and make it more manageable in my day-to-day life. So now I periodically take it out from the fridge and, starting from the upper right corner of the container, dig my fingers into the cold, damp mixture until I find the bottom and gently dislodge the compacted nuka. Over the weeks, the bed has become much softer and more pliable as though the rice bran’s grit has been worn down. I move methodically, digging a winding path that snakes around the container, pulling out buried vegetables along the way. As I unearth the vegetables tucked into the bed, I remember this passage from Solid Objects:

He remembered that, after digging for a little, the water oozes round your finger-tips; the hole then becomes a moat; a well; a spring; a secret channel to the sea. As he was choosing which of these things to make it, still working his fingers in the water, they curled round something hard—a full drop of solid matter—and gradually dislodged a large irregular lump, and brought it to the surface. When the sand coating was wiped off, a green tint appeared. (Woolf 1918)

I have only faint memories of the meaning behind this story, which I first, and maybe last, read in my high school British literature course when I was fifteen. If I recall correctly, the main character is an ambitious lawyer or a politician who becomes transfixed by these found objects and eventually abandons his ambitions and his career in service of collecting. His friend witnesses the transformation and pities the main character who, meanwhile, has found joy and meaning from the solidness and tactility of said objects. There seems to be a similar association with fermentation, or at least what it means to be someone who ferments while living life online: People who keep and maintain ambitious fermentation projects are just better and know that true joy (and health) comes from tapping into tradition. Through the process of making and maintaining the nukadoko I’ve shared some glimpses on social media, and part of me wonders if I’m trying to broadcast a trad-wife-lite image of myself to my friends and acquaintances: My life is going so well that I’m not only taking care of myself but also maintaining a microbial community in my fridge that gifts me pickles in return. I brush the damp, sandy nuka off each wilted vegetable piece and set it aside so I can continue to mix the nukadoko, alternating between digging my hand into the bed and breaking up soft clumps between my fingers and thumb.

The process is much more physical than I thought it would be. In the beginning I was clumsy and didn’t know how much pressure I needed to break up the mixture, so I frequently overestimated and flung chunks of rice bran across my kitchen. I’ve gotten better at it but still haven’t achieved the level of grace on display in videos of other people mixing and maintaining their nukadoko. It’s also more maintenance work than I expected it to be, especially during the first ten days when the bed needed to be mixed twice a day to encourage bacterial growth. I had a romantic notion in my head that it would be satisfying and fun and that I would find pleasure in the process, forgetting that “Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.) The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom” (Ukeles 1969). In Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto for Maintenance Art from 1969, she reframes the work required to maintain and care for her family, her home, and herself as acts of artmaking in the face of a world that devalues maintenance work and caregiving, asserting that:

Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do is Art is Art.

Lately, I haven’t found joy in maintenance. Not in caring for the nukadoko, nor in taking care of myself nor my environment. Outside of the refrigerator where my nuka waits patiently to be handled and fed, dishes are piling up. Mail is stacked on the counter. Laundry hides behind my bathroom door. We both need to be refreshed, aerated, taken care of, but I don’t have the capacity for either of us these days. While S.E. Nash and Stephanie Maroney’s time at Katz’ Foundation for Fermentation Fervor (FFFF) was a period of time in which they “‘embraced a tactile connection to the creative activities of microbes by caring for miso, sourdough, pyment, sauerkraut, milk kefir, and many other living foods… [where the] connection of food, fermentation, people, and microbes makes room for rethinking the composition of our individual bodies and social fabric alike’” (Fournier 2020), right now I can only see that I’m struggling with my own little fermentation project because I’m struggling in other parts of my life. And I fear that my nukadoko’s microbes are being harmed as a result of it.

CONCLUSIONS
Before starting therapy, when I had people over for meals I would camp out in the kitchen, keeping everyone at a safe distance while working to provide a curated and planned evening for them. Oftentimes I never actually joined them when it came time to eat, but rather hovered over the table, checking that everyone had enough food, wine, water, napkins and trying to anticipate their needs before they asked for anything. I had seen myself as separate from my friends, feeling like I needed to make sure it was perfect so that they’d be happy and so that they’d come back and continue to be friends with me. Learning to cook with people instead of for them has allowed me to more fully see myself as a part of my communities, relationships and friendships rather than as a curator or cultivator of them.

I still don’t know if I’m maintaining my nukadoko correctly. I wonder if I’ve actually cultivated Lactobacillus, or if the salt in the mixture is the only thing curing the vegetables buried in my nukadoko. Despite not knowing if I’m doing it correctly, I do enjoy feeling, tasting, smelling and seeing the way it changes day to day. Lately I’ve been planting cucumbers in the bed, and it’s responded by taking on a softer, more moist texture as the cucumbers have lent their water to the mixture. I try to see the change in its texture as a good sign, as though the microbes in my nuka understand and can meet me in the middle as collaborators in our survival.

NOTES
I really didn’t expect to end up so melancholy in this. I came into this project with an idea of what I’d get out of it (satisfaction at maintaining and being part of a community of microbes) and my experience and lived context over the past month or so very clearly has altered the questions I’m asking (what happens when one partner in a symbiotic relationship lets the other down? Is the relationship stable enough to sustain life?). I’m glad to be continuing this as my final project so that I can continue pulling on the thread of finding out what happens next. I also think that there needs to be more meditation on the project’s namesake (Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Touch Sanitation, especially in context of Hayward’s Fingereyes) and what it means to use touch for embodied learning and collaboration with unseen organisms.

SOURCES

京つけものもり(@user-xz6sg5es3r); ‘How to make “Nuka-zuke’(vegetables pickled in salted rice-bran paste),” YouTube, 21 Jan 2018. Online video, 00:02:47. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH9PvlJjp6Q

Akiko & Peter; “Nukadoko (A Fermented Rice Bran Bed for Pickling),” Plant-Based Matters, 12 Aug 2021. https://plantbasedmatters.net/nukadoko-a-fermented-rice-bran-bed-for-pickling/

Lauren Fournier; Fermenting Feminism as Methodology and Metaphor: Approaching Transnational Feminist Practices through Microbial Transformation. Environmental Humanities 1 May 2020; 12 (1): 88–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8142220

Linda Ly; “How to Make Nukadoko (Fermented Rice Bran Bed) for Pickling,” Garden Betty, 29 Aug 2014. https://www.gardenbetty.com/how-to-make-nukadoko-fermented-rice-bran-bed-for-pickling/

Mierle Laderman Ukeles; “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” QueensMuseum.org, 1969. https://queensmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Ukeles-Manifesto-for-Maintenance-Art-1969.pdf

Virginia Woolf; “Solid Objects” in Woolf Short Stories, a Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook, 1920 (posted Oct 2002). http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200781.txt