Made by Hand (21 page)

I also came across a few sobering items about
kombucha.
A book called
Medical Toxicology
reports that while consuming four ounces of
kombucha
a day “may not cause adverse effects in healthy people,” people who drink excessive quantities or who have health problems could be putting themselves at risk. One person who applied
kombucha
to the skin for pain relief contracted cutaneous anthrax. Two
kombucha
drinkers ended up with “severe lactic acidosis”; one died. And one case of hepatitis was “associated with use of the tea.” The book states that commercial preparations of
kombucha
evaluated by the FDA were found to be free of “pathogenic organisms” but that homebrewed
kombucha
is subject to all kinds of dangerous microscopic beasties.

After weighing the risks and benefits of
kombucha,
I decided to side with Sandor Ellix Katz, author of
Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods
. In his book, which is part how-to guide and part manifesto for taking back ownership of one’s food, Katz writes:

Katz’s book (which was recommended to me by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen of the Homegrown Evolution blog) not only has a recipe for making
kombucha
(he mentions that his friend likes to brew it using Mountain Dew instead of sweetened tea). It also has recipes for yogurt, sauerkraut, mead, miso, kimchi, tempeh, pickles, cheeses, sour cream, sourdough bread, wines, and many other bacteria-rich foods.

Katz, who calls himself a “fermentation fetishist,” lives in the Short Mountain Sanctuary, “a queer intentional community” in rural Tennessee. He has AIDS and believes that fermented foods are an important part of keeping himself healthy. But the most important aspect of fermented foods for Katz is that its techniques are “ancient rituals that humans have been performing for many generations. They make me feel connected to the magic of the natural world, and to our ancestors, whose clever observations enable us to enjoy the benefits of these transformations.” He also believes fermentation is a way to counteract the effects of industrially processed food that’s consumed by people who have been “completely cut off from the process of growing food, and even from the raw products of agriculture.” I found his ideas on fermentation to be inspiring and applicable to other DIY endeavors.

I decided to start making
kombucha
again and to try some of Katz’s other recipes, too. Since I didn’t know anyone with a SCOBY they could share with me, I sent $25 via PayPal to a Web site that sells a little plastic test tube filled with a bit of SCOBY floating in liquid. I added it to a gallon of tea-steeped sugar water, and in a couple of weeks, a large SCOBY was covering the tea. (I since learned that I could have just bought a bottle of
kombucha
for a few bucks from the market and used that as a starter.) Jane, my younger daughter, enjoys helping me prepare a batch of
kombucha,
though she can’t stand the taste (which is just as well, as I only want consenting adults who’ve been apprised of the risks to be drinking it anyway). Carla likes the taste as much as I do, especially since I discovered that it comes out fizzier, more tart, and less sweet when it’s been brewing for a month, which Katz and others recommend, not just a week, as I’d been doing back in 1995. Together, Carla and I go through a gallon in about three days. That means that, to supply our needs, I keep nine gallons brewing in the pantry closet and one gallon in the refrigerator for drinking. When we finish the batch in the refrigerator, I grab the oldest one from the closet and start a new batch. Making
kombucha
has become a twice-weekly part of our lives.

With my
kombucha
routine in full swing, I turned my efforts to yogurt and sauerkraut. Our family now goes through a gallon of kraut and more than five gallons of yogurt every month. Hardly a day goes by that I’m not in the kitchen making a batch of one of these three foods, which I never get tired of eating. All three are incredibly simple to make, and the ingredients are very cheap compared to what we’d pay for the finished products in a supermarket.

It costs me fifty cents to make a gallon of
kombucha
; in the store, a pint bottle costs $3, which means a gallon costs $24. I make sixteen eight-ounce jars of yogurt a week, which costs $6 total; the supermarket charges at least $16 for the same number of eight-ounce containers. Sauerkraut requires nothing more than noniodized salt (iodine prevents fermentation) and cabbage, which I buy for $1 a head at the farmers’ market. Three heads make a gallon, so my sauerkraut costs seventy-five cents a quart. If you buy nonpasteurized sauerkraut at a supermarket, you’ll pay about $6 a quart, and even then it will have been cooked at a temperature of about 140 degrees to kill off most of the bacteria (otherwise the sauerkraut juice could seep through the seal between the jar and the lid).

But even if I wasn’t saving money, I’d still make these foods myself. That way, I am able to adjust the flavors to suit our tastes by adjusting the fermentation time or tweaking the ingredients. And, most important, I enjoy doing it.

My success with
kombucha,
yogurt, and sauerkraut has emboldened me to try more of the recipes in
Wild Fermentation
. Miso is next on my list. To make it, I need to get some
koji,
rice that has
Aspergillus oryzae
spores growing on the grains. It takes a year or more for the
koji
and soybeans to turn into miso, but I’ve learned that slowing down is part of the joy of being a DIYer. I’m willing to wait.

8

KEEPING BEES

“I have established mystic contact with the spiritual core of apiculture, and now anything is possible.”

—CHARLES MARTIN SIMON, ORIGINATOR OF BACKWARDS BEEKEEPING

 

 

 

 

In 2008 I noticed that fewer bees were buzzing around my yard. Later, I found my fruit tree harvest to be much smaller than in previous years. The problem doesn’t just exist in my backyard. There’s a massive bee die-off going on all over the United States, and while speculation abounds (is it mites? microbial pathogens? pesticides? genetically modified crops? air pollution? pathogens? cell phone radiation?), no one really knows for certain the causes of what has been called “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD. It’s likely that CCD is caused by a number of these factors. In September 2009 a
New York Times
blog ran an article in which several bee experts offered their ideas on the subject. One, Rowan Jacobsen, author of
Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis,
concluded, “It looks like the pieces of the colony collapse disorder puzzle are starting to fit together. And we can stop arguing about who was right: The virus camp, the fungus camp, the pesticide camp, the varroa mite camp, or the nutrition camp. It turns out everybody was right. (Well, everybody except the cell-phone and microwave-tower camps.)”

CCD is a big deal to beekeepers, since the big money in beekeeping isn’t honey but in mobile pollination services. Every February, bees are transported to the Central Valley in California to pollinate blossoms on a half-million acres of almond trees. If almond growers depended on natural pollinators like wild insects and bats, they could expect about 40 pounds of almonds per acre; with colonies of bees for hire, they can increase the yield to a whopping 2,400 pounds per acre. When almond blossom season is over, the mobile beekeepers, some of whom own tens of thousands of hives, load the hives onto semi trailers and ship them to other parts of California to pollinate other crops. In the summer, the beekeepers truck the bees north, where they make honey from alfalfa and clover nectar.

The pollination business has been hit hard by colony collapse disorder. There were 5 million managed bee colonies in 1940; today there are 2.5 million.

I decided to start keeping bees, both to pollinate my trees and vegetable garden and to provide wax and honey. It would be useful and fun, I thought, and I’d be doing my part to reverse the losses of CCD.

When I told my friend Kevin Kelly, a writer and beekeeper in Pacifica, California, he smiled in approval. He knew I was already raising chickens.

“You can read everything that’s interesting about chickens in one night,” Kevin warned. “But you can read about bees every night for the rest of your life.”

One reason bees are so interesting is that, like people, bees are social animals that lead structured, complex, and orderly lives. Another reason is that bees are mysterious creatures, performing their alchemical magic in the darkness of their hives. I’d never given a lot of thought to how bees actually made honey. I figured it involved nectar, but beyond that, I had no idea how they did it. One night over dinner, I polled everyone in the family. I guessed that bees stuffed pollen and nectar into the cells of their hives and then squirted some kind of glandular secretion into the cells, kicking off a reaction to convert it into honey. Here’s what the others said:

Sarina: “They take it out of the combs.”

Jane: “The bees break the pollen. Honey is inside.”

Carla: “They breathe in pollen and mix it with some chemicals in their body to make honey.”

We were all wrong. Our ideas about how bees make honey reminded me of children’s drawings that depict carrots growing in farmers’ fields orange-end up.

Honey comes from nectar, not pollen. Nectar, which is mainly sucrose and water, is produced by plants as an incentive for bees to pollinate. Field bees use long, tubular tongues to suck the nectar out of flowers, clovers, dandelions, and tree blossoms. It is stored in a second stomach, which can hold about seventy milligrams, or 150 flowers’ worth, of nectar. That’s quite a load for a bee to carry, since a bee weighs about that much itself.

Once a field bee gets back to the hive with a full tank, it offers the nectar to a house bee, which sucks the nectar out of the field bee’s mouth and then chews it, all the while mixing it with an enzyme called invertase, which breaks down the nectar’s sucrose into glucose and fructose. The house bee also adds another enzyme, called glucose oxidase, which goes to work on some of the glucose, turning it into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide, both of which make the honey resistant to microbial and fungal contamination. After half an hour of mixing, the house bee deposits the liquid into a cell of the honeycomb, and other worker bees fan their wings to cause some of the water to evaporate. When the liquid becomes viscous enough, they cap off the open cell with wax, and there the freshly made honey stays until the bees get hungry. A bee colony, which can consist of as many as eighty thousand bees, might eat two hundred pounds of honey each year.

I started reading up on beekeeping. The books all warned not to capture and use wild bees, because they were germ-laden and nasty-tempered and wouldn’t produce nearly as much honey as commercial honeybees. But in early January 2009, before I placed my order for bees-by-mail, Eric Thomason from Ramshackle Solid told me that he’d joined a club called the Backwards Beekeepers. He invited me to come along to the next meeting.

On a sunny Sunday morning, I drove up a ridiculously narrow street in Silver Lake, arriving at a house perched on the side of a hill. Eric was just arriving in his pickup. Together, we walked through the gate, past a swimming pool, and into a backyard overlooking the HOLLYWOOD sign and the Griffith Observatory.

A German shepherd barked crazily as we arrived but quickly calmed down. (For the rest of the morning the dog, Tiger, nuzzled his wet nose into my trouser legs and pushed his snout under my arm in an attempt to get me to pet him.) A few people were sitting on lawn furniture. Eric and I shook hands with the homeowner—an architect named Leonardo—and a couple of other club members. The founder of the club, Kirk, was there, too. He wore a Birkenstock gimme cap, a green T-shirt, and old blue jeans hoisted up with suspenders. With his wire-frame glasses and gray walrus mustache, he looked like a younger Wilford Brimley.

As more members trickled in, I sat on a fraying wicker chair and listened to Kirk talk about bees. He has a rough but pleasant down-home accent and a colorful way with words that makes everything he says a delight to listen to. One of the club members asked him about the best place to order bees from.

“Don’t buy ’em,” he said. “The bees you buy commercially are sick; they’re fucked up because they feed ’em chemicals and corn syrup and all kinds of shit. It’s just like tenting a house for termites with you being stuck inside the house.”

This was surprising to me. “I read that wild bees were too mean to use,” I said.

“If you’ve got mean bees,” Kirk said, “you get rid of the queen. The bees will make a new queen.” (The queen is the only female bee in a colony that is able to reproduce.) He also warned me against buying queens by mail. Before shipping, queen bees are anesthetized with carbon monoxide gas, their wings are clipped, and they’re artificially inseminated, a process that’s contrary to the let-bees-be-bees philosophy of backwards beekeeping.