#10: Pure, or not pure (with Stephanie Maroney)

Different ideas about food and eating can actually change our understanding of society, and have a strong influence on how we live our lives. 

Fermentation questions purity: it needs bacteria to grow, and in our society, bacteria are seen as something unclean. Can fermentation, which goes against separation, control, and boundary-making, help create a healthier society? 

Our guest Stephanie Maroney –a scholar of feminist food studies– has a great deal to say about how science uses colonial practices in order to find solutions to western problems. Particularly with the extraction of “ancestral microbes” from Hadza people, an indigenous ethnic group in north-central Tanzania.