Kimchi, kombucha and the new age of symbiosis

If chefs are the new rock stars, then there’s a bit of Tame Impala, perhaps some Björk and Kendrick Lamar to David Zilber’s philosophical approach to cooking. Dedicated to the craft, but constantly seeking to expand his genre. Beyond flavor, beyond food, to… something more.

The restless Toronto kid has come a long way since his formative years in an organic butcher shop whose sandwich board read: “Eat organic food. Or as your grandparents call it: food” – a phrase that has stuck with him ever since.

Zilber rose to notoriety as the head of fermentation at Noma in Copenhagen, named world’s best restaurant from 2010-2014. The Noma Guide to Fermentation, co-written with head chef René Redzepi, showed readers had to graduate past kimchi and sauerkraut to koji, kombucha and misos, and became a New York Times bestseller.

Today he works as an application scientist with biotech firm Novonesis, offering him the opportunity to ferment with large-scale impact. While the Noma guide was about helping people on board with fermentation, the tentative title of Zilber’s forthcoming book The Symbiotic Supper: Fermentation and the Co-Evolution of Microbes and Mankind suggests he’s ready to take his followers deeper into this mysterious new world.

We meet with him in the historical center of Copenhagen, where he lives with partner and young son, and immediately get talking about how his career as a bleeding-edge fermentation practitioner has coincided with a voracious appetite for science books, and the wormholes they take him down. “They say that luck favors the prepared mind”, Zilber says.

Fermentation wasn’t always the plan. “When I was growing up, I wanted to be a paleontologist,” Zilber says. “I just caught the dinosaur bug and it never really went away. That love of science kept nagging on me. So I would read a lot all through my cooking career. A book on language became a book on human evolution, then one on geology, and one on cosmology… But I had no explicit interest in fermentation before I was given the opportunity to step foot into that kitchen.” By ‘that kitchen’ he means, of course, the fermentation lab at Noma.

A century of science

From Netflix documentaries to Bill Gates funding ambitious new research in microbes, and entire ‘gut health’ sections in the supermarket, the link between bacteria and health has gathered increased buzz. But we’ve known about it for more than a century, Zilber points out.

“The entire concept of probiotics started with Ilya Metchnikoff, in the early 1900s Paris, asking the question, why in all of Europe you see Bulgarian peasants living consistently to the age of 100 or beyond. So he traveled there, looked at their daily habits, and found that they all drank yogurts containing Lactobacillus bulgaricus.”

“When I was traveling through Eastern Europe last year, I would visit homes where grandmothers spent most of the day cooking or tending the garden. Every meal would start with a trip to the cellar where some jar was repurposed as a fermentation container. And that was their grocery store.”

“Every meal was so packed with flavor. Everything had a story. Here’s the kraut that I’ve made for this winter. It would be like a massive olive bin with cabbage enough to feed a family of four for months. I can’t think of anything more sustainable. It is literally sustainability.”

Without sharing, we’re nothing

As he gets to talking about the fermentation community, Zilber lights up in a way that suggests his inner child is fine with not being a paleontologist. “Fermentation is an endless rabbit hole full of endless rabbit holes, and all the fermenters are just such collaborative, sharing, communal people. With every new brew of craft beer and kombucha, with every new miso, fermentation is still growing, it’s continually being invented.”

“You know, I often get asked, if I don’t have a kombucha scoby [symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast], how do I make kombucha? Well, you have to go find one. These are lineages and they have to be shared, one needs to become two and two needs to be given to your neighbor to make four. You cannot have fermentation culturally or microbiologically without the act of generosity, it’s a nonstarter.”

Readers expecting cooking tips from Zilber’s forthcoming book should brace themselves for warp drive. He’s determined to write a fermentation book like no other, leaning into “teaching about humanity’s relationship to nature”.

At this point our conversation seems lost to the gravitational force of the big conundrums of life science. We touch on David’s admiration for Lynn Margulis, who was dubbed a “rebel scientist” in the 1960s, and her remarkable work on bacteria symbiosis and later Gaia theory – ideas both shunned at their inception, but ever growing in relevance and recognition.

It feels like the world is finally catching up to the fact that we rely on greater systems of life, and that maintaining the health and vital functions of our complex planetary system requires humility, giving back. Zilber says: “Bacteria were the first forms of life on this planet. They will be the last forms of life left on this planet. Any organism that you can see with your naked eye could not survive without microbes. Which is kind of wild to think about. They are the most resilient, the most numerous, the most powerful, the most mutable forms of life on Earth.”

Which raises the question: how come they’re so badly understood? “Well, I think it’s hard to fully grasp from today’s standpoint how awful the plague was. When we learned that many diseases were caused by microbes, we never stopped to think that a small minority of organisms shouldn’t taint the profound influence that microbes have on our life and wellbeing.”

“I grew up with commercials for Lysol on the television saying “it kills 99% of all germs on contact. My mother grew up in the Caribbean in the 1950s and no chicken would enter our house without first being washed and soaked in vinegar and salt water, you know.”

“There’s this kind of ongoing crisis of ever increasing allergies among children and spikes in autoimmune disease that we’ve seen in the past 40-50 years. ‘99% germ free’ has done more harm than good,” Zilber says. 

Time for change

So how does he think our grasp of nature’s secrets will develop and change in the rest of our lifetime? “Just because something is known to a few doesn’t mean that it has affected policy yet, it doesn’t mean that it changes the life of someone on a daily basis, and it doesn’t mean it has reached species-wide consciousness.“

“This is definitely evidenced by our disregard for Indigenous teachings throughout history. We ignored what their learnings of the land and the landscape and the animals and nature had taught them over the course of tens of thousands of years.”

“The pessimist in me believes that what we have left to learn are the hard lessons from not taking that knowledge that is already available to us and acting on it.”

On the topic of possible new fermentation products that can supplant the sterile, ultra-processed foods that make up too big a part of modern diets, Zilber chooses instead to focus on their ability to enrich people’s lives more profoundly. The “hyper-industrialized” global food system not only takes a huge toll on our land, water and climate, says Zilber, it also shuts out the benefits of microbes. “For the sake of individual health and for planetary health you have to reintroduce microbial life into the systems that for too long have been designed to exclude it.”

“Maybe the most empowering part of fermentation is that it makes someone feel like they can own a part of their food system. When people make ferments, there is this deep emotional attachment to them. Like a scarf you knitted yourself.”