Abstract A fermentation renaissance is afoot. This revival has given rise to work in the environmental humanities that mobilizes DIY fermentation to ground a progressivist politics. The authors share in this enthusiasm but articulate a concern that imputing an essential politics to fermentation is not possible and risks turning it into a fetish. Drawing on a range of work on fermentation, some of which has raised similar concerns, the article outlines a political zymology (zymology being the science of fermentation), channeling the concerns of political ecology to facilitate a critical engagement with fermentation’s diversity and avoid its fetishization. The article begins by defining fermentation, situating the fermentation zeitgeist in the ongoing microbial moment, and reviewing recent scholarly work on fermentation that proposes an essential fermentation politics. The article then develops a framework for political zymology, articulating four dimensions for differentiating fermentations—ecology, microbiopolitics, political economy, and cultural politics—and, in doing so, defetishizing it. In conclusion, the article discusses the value of political zymology as a domain-specific subset of political ecology and gestures toward an additional, complementary mode of political zymology of collaboration across disciplines and professions.
Evans et al. (Sun,) studied this question.