A six-session online study kitchen: with hands-on fermentation practices and collective study on imperfect attempts at living ethically.

“The slate has never been clean, and we can’t wipe off the surface to start fresh — there’s no ‘fresh’ to start.” —Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity

Course Theme: Fermenting Beyond the Fantasy of Purity

This season of SALT: Solidarity, Action, (Un)Learning & Transformation returns to the study kitchen to explore fermentation as an antidote to purity politics.

Purity is one of the great fantasies of violent systems. Fascists dream of pure nations, pure bodies, pure bloodlines, pure cultures, pure borders, pure traditions. White innocence dreams of clean hands and good intentions. It is so tempting to want to be right, safe, and untainted by harm - untouched by capitalism, colonialism, or pollution. The desire to be pure can become a perfectionist, self-righteous trap that paralyzes collective political action.

Fermentation teaches otherwise.

Fermentation is a messy metabolic process, a co-creation that begins with contamination. It depends on touch, mixture, microbes, air, time, and temperature. It asks us to tend processes we cannot fully control. It blurs the line between rot and ripening, danger and nourishment, decay and transformation. Fermentation does not absolve us. It implicates us. It teaches us to tend the mess daily. Rather than trying to purify ourselves, we will practice becoming more responsive and response-able. More discerning and able to adjust as needed.

In this season, we will ask what fermentation can teach us about living ethically in terrifying times of extreme violence and uncertainty. How do we resist fascism, white superiority complexes, neo-colonialism, and moral perfectionism - without reproducing their hunger for certainty? How do we act when there are no clean hands? How do we return to ancestral knowledge without blood-and-soil nostalgia? How do we stay engaged without turning accountability into a performance of purity?

What can we learn from microbial life in fermentation about creating the conditions for cultural transformation?

Across six sessions, we will ferment, read, listen, bake, write, stir, and study together. Each gathering includes a simple fermentation practice and opens into political, ethical, ecological, and embodied inquiry. We will work with cabbage, brine, vinegar, sourdough, dosa batter, and hot sauce as companions for tending to our collective attachment addiction to purity.

Practical details

Who Is This For?

This online study kitchen is for people who want to connect with an international learning community around food, politics, ecology, embodiment, and cultural transformation.

It is suitable for both beginning fermenters and experienced practitioners. No advanced kitchen skills are needed — only curiosity, willingness to experiment, and openness to learning from living processes.

It is for people who want to engage with scholarly and political texts, but not leave them on the page. Together we will translate theory into practice, conversation into commitment, and kitchen work into forms of attention, accountability, and action.

Register Here

What is SALT?

An experimental, translocal study kitchen where learning is inseparable from living. Through somatic practices, collective cooking, critical conversations, and shared reading, we gather around metaphorical and literal kitchen tables to ferment thought, nourish resistance, and practice embodied transformation.

Why SALT?

SALT stands for Solidarity, Action, (Un)Learning & Transformation—the core ingredients of this programme. Salt preserves, seasons, disrupts, and heals. It has been traded, taxed, mined, and marched for, entwining it to histories of violence and resistance. It draws out flavor in food and stings wounds before healing them.