Collin Andrew/The Register-Guard
Tara Whitsitt has been called the Johnny Appleseed of pickling.
In October 2013, food activist Tara Whitsitt left her home in Eugene, Oregon with a plan to travel the country and teach communities about the ancient, culinary science of fermentation. She converted an old bus into a mobile laboratory that has served as her classroom, workspace and means of transportation for the past three years on the road.
“A lot of what I do is breaking myths,” says Whitsitt, who has been called the Johnny Appleseed of pickling. People wonder if the process is dangerous to attempt at home and whether the resulting food will be safe to eat. “But people are really more curious than anything.”
Whitsitt is one of the featured presenters at the annual Fermentation Fest, Oct. 6-8 and 13-15 in Reedsburg. Now in its seventh year, this “live culture convergence” draws farmers, chefs and food scientists from all over the country and offers an array of classes, lectures, dinners and tastings.
“Fermentation is a big part of the movement away from the industrial food world that we’ve been caught up in for the past 60 years,” says Whitsitt, who first started experimenting with kombucha and homemade sauerkraut when she was living in Brooklyn, New York in 2011. “I had this jar of red and green cabbage fermenting on my shelf, and as the week passed, the colors changed and bubbles started forming,” she recalls. “It was an extremely beautiful process.”
From that moment, she was hooked. She left the city and moved to a commune in rural Oregon, where she had the idea to bring fermentation education on the road. “I wanted to go out and work with people who had less access [to nature],” she says. “I wanted to share that connection between microorganisms and us.”
Eduardo Angeles, a mezcal maestro from Oaxaca, Mexico, is another featured presenter. He’s coming to Wisconsin thanks to Lou Bank, founder of the nonprofit SACRED, which helps support mezcal-producing communities by building libraries, water reservoirs and greenhouses for agave plants. Mezcal, a spirit made from distilled, fermented agave, is experiencing a boom in popularity, but small artisan distilleries are struggling to compete with large-scale producers who have moved in and acquired many of the region’s agave farms.
“Eduardo is one of the rare maestros who’s producing independently,” says Banks, who befriended the Angeles family when he visited Mexico eight years ago. “And there’s no other place in the world doing what these artisans are doing.”
