Portland Fermentation Festival: Sauerkraut, Kimchi and Little Overlap With MAHA

The annual Portland Fermentation Festival, nicknamed "Stinkfest," was held last week in Portland, Oregon, in the United States. The gathering draws people who love fermented foods such as sauerkraut and kimchi. The topic is also in the public and political spotlight at the moment: the MAHA ("Make America Healthy Again") movement and members of the Donald Trump administration are described as enthusiasts of meat, usually steak, eaten at every meal with fermented sides.

The author of the source article, food writer Joe Ray, travelled from Seattle to find out whether festival-goers and the MAHA crowd overlap anywhere. His cousin-in-law Erick, a longtime part of the Portland food scene, doubted it: there would be no overlap, he said, but food would be the bridge between the two groups.

The atmosphere

Several hundred people passed through over the evening, visiting tables of free samples. Each exhibitor paid 25 dollars for a table. Nothing is sold, which gives the event a potluck feel. Near the entrance, a table lets attendees drop off their own homemade ferments to share.

Co-organizer Liz Crain, a journalist and cookbook author, said this was the festival's 14th edition. It was started in 2009 by friends who love to ferment, with help from fermentation author Sandor Katz. Crain said MAHA's tenets contain some good points, such as looking critically at pesticides, but that they are muddied by an anti-vaccine stance and conspiracy theories. She called a diet based only on meat and sauerkraut insufficiently diverse.

Chris Curtin, a fermentation microbiology researcher at Oregon State University, added that narrowing a diet has historically not turned out well in the long run, and that fermenting is an accessible experiment anyone can do in a home kitchen.

What was on offer

Samples included an orange whey drink, chicha (Peruvian corn beer), Japanese miso soup, koji and amazake, and wines from Oregon's Willamette Valley. Some attendees declined to comment on MAHA, while one group of friends said they briefly ate mostly kimchi and meat 20 years ago and felt better for it.