Salty Dog

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Yesterday I wrote two revealing posts to one of the kefir e-mail groups I subscribe to. This group is a little different from the other discussion group in that it covers all sorts of foods that are fermented instead of just kefir. That's what the posts I fished with were about. I've been trying to compose a Google question that will inform me about how salt works with fermentation.

Basically my deliberately clumsy pleas to this group's pundits were asking for an abstract portal for understanding more about fermentation. Previous to my current interest, I never thought I'd be enigmatically drinking fermented milk with gusto. I'm trying to understand something I already gnow (with a "g", as in gnosis). Why do I gnow things before I know them?

I'm in a state of constant shock from realizing that I already knew what I might have tried desperately to understand. I thought understanding built the groundwork for gnosis, Now, I know that assumption never was true for me. I intuitively gnow wot gets sot before me in the specious present. When I "know" what I had previously only kenned by intuition, it makes deep ruts in the-more-of-me (memory, me-mores) than the other can "see".

A few people wrote back to encourage me, but didn't offer me any resources to research how salt works with fermenting. My questions were not well formed. If they had been I would have been answered. Finally, I just went to Google and typed in "salt vs fermentation", and got thousands of hits on the Results Page. 

I've been doing a lotta reading on this topic. The thing of it is that the articles I've read so far are more comprehensive than just about fermentation as it relates to salt. In a way, many of the articles are about pickling and preserving vegetables, and in particular cabbage. Cabbage as it's used to make sauerkraut and kimchi, but according to what I'm reading, just about any fresh vegetable can be preserved by fermenting. 

Baking bread seems to be a primary example of how fermentation brings out the best the bread grains have to offer. Particularly sourdough bread, and the material I'm reading is scornful of the way bread is baked in modern times. The commercial bakers use ways of coming up with bread products by which they don't have to ferment the dough. That takes too much time and labor and takes away from their profit. Fortunately, an interested person can make their own bread the old-fashioned way. No blame. 

The term "gluten" comes up again and again in these articles about fermenting and salt. Gluten is a protein whose nutrients don't get broke down for absorption in the GI tract if they haven't been fermented. That seems to be the big deal about gluten. Glutens are hard to digest like bran is hard to digest. They practically go through your system without being used for the good stuff they contain. 

The gut bacteria we each need are constantly at war inside our gastrointestinal tract. The friendly  bacteria can cope with salt and acid. The unfriendly bacteria cannot. That's why the friendly bacteria are constantly producing lactic acid. In order to kill off the unfriendly bacteria. 

They're doing it in your commode. They're doing it on your kitchen counter. 24/7. The friendly bacteria eat sugar and turn it into acid and alcohol. No sugar? Not enough salt? Then, the unfriendly bacteria are likely to predominate. Nobody wants that.

It is starting to look like I was correct, more or less, to assume that the real point of my diet is to feed the friendly gut bacteria. Too much sugar and salt in one place can actually hurt the friendly bacteria and retard their growth. They do what they do in the absence of oxygen. They're anaerobic. 

This is the crazy part of making sauerkraut that gets emphasized a lot. The cabbage you're trying to ferment and turn into sauerkraut has to be kept under liquids (mostly salt brine) to keep it from rottening. Fermentation of cabbage and other fresh vegetables can happen in the absence of salt if they're kept completely underwater. 

Under water. As in away from oxygen in the open air. The bacteria that ferment fresh vegetables do so without oxygen. In the past, that's the part I haven't really grokked, and I'm not sure I understand that process yet. I do understand oxidation of metals, like how iron rusts, and how stainless steel "sugars" when you weld it in the presence of oxygen. Maybe fermentation will turn out to work in a similar manner, and if so, maybe I'm not as much of a newbie as it may seem. 

It was the research I did on inulin that helps me to understand how the dynamics involved in the digestion of food. Not exactly, perhaps, but I'm beginning to get the picture, and the first images I got was from reading about how inulin is able to pass through the stomach acid and chemical breakdown in the small intestines to reach the large intestines where it does breakdown via fermentation and feed the friendly bacteria there. 

It's pretty much the same way that you can leave fermenting and fermented milk out on the counter in the open air and it won't spoil. Not only will it not spoil, but it actively fights off the unfriendly efforts of the wild yeast in the atmosphere to spoil the broth with too many cooks. 

I ask you to remember my disclaimer in the header. I'm not trying to tell the truth here, merely to manipulate words to attempt to find out what the truth can be:

Speech is mind. Mind is speech. 

I've been waiting for weeks and months and years to get this cataract procedure finally done and successfully over with. Maybe I really will be able to see the world as an innocent newborn again. The waiting is almost over. I'm scheduled to have it done within the next twenty-four hours. I'm very excited, and a little bit nervous. "What if it should fail?" 

I may not write for a few days while this operation gets sorted out. I hope the next time I write here I'll be able to say what I finally see again with unremitting youthful arrogance and unspeakably smug confidence that might arrive when I actually look at what I see in real time, and not by memory. 

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