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

SESSION DETAILS

#1. Starter Cultures Against Purity: 16 September, 20:00-21:30 CET, online

Fermentation as a practice against clean beginnings, moral innocence, and fantasies of separation.

We begin with fermentation as a living challenge to purity. Ferments depend on contact, mixture, microbes, decay, and time. They remind us that life does not begin clean and that transformation is never fully controllable.

Readings & thinkers: Alexis Shotwell, Mary Douglas, Sandor Katz
Fermentation practice: simple sauerkraut or seasonal veggie brine fermentation

#2. Ancestry & Appropriation: 30 September, 20:00-21:30 CET, online

Returning to ancestral knowledge while navigating the complexities of nostalgia, nationalism and appropriation.

How do we reconnect with ancestral foodways, land-based knowledge, and inherited practices without turning ancestry into purity, identity branding, or blood-and-soil nostalgia? We explore cultural memory, appropriation, diaspora, and the messy work of inheriting both nourishment and harm.

Readings & thinkers: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Grace M. Cho
Fermentation practice: Fruit vinegar

#3. White Innocence & Dirty Hands: 14 October, 20:00-21:30 CET, online

Critical whiteness, defensiveness, accountability, and the fantasy of being good.

Whiteness often protects itself through innocence: I didn’t know, I meant well, I am one of the good ones. This session examines white innocence, defensiveness, guilt, fragility, somatic inheritance, and accountability.

Readings & thinkers: Gloria Wekker, Sara Ahmed, Resmaa Menakem, Mia Mingus
Fermentation practice: sourdough starter as a practice of feeding, discard, maintenance, and beginning again

#4. Spice, Empire & Heat: 28 October, 20:00-21:30 CET, online

Taste, extraction, anger, pleasure, colonial desire, and the danger of righteousness becoming purity politics.

Spice carries histories of pleasure, medicine, trade, extraction, enslavement, empire, and desire. Through heat and acidity, we explore the colonial routes of taste alongside the emotional heat of rage, moralism, and the desire to be right.

Readings & thinkers: Amitav Ghosh, Sidney Mintz, Lizzie Collingham, Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown, Sara Ahmed, bell hooks
Fermentation practice: fermented hot sauce

#5. Care & Control: 11 November, 20:00-21:30 CET, online

Mutual aid, solidarity, reciprocity, tending, and the difference between care and management.

A ferment needs care, but it cannot be controlled. This session turns toward mutual aid, solidarity, reciprocity, and the subtle ways care can become management, surveillance, paternalism, or saviorism.

Readings & thinkers: Dean Spade, Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, bell hooks
Fermentation practice: sourdough flatbread, dosa batter, or tending earlier ferments

#6. Contaminated, Compromised & Committing: 18 November, 20:00-21:30 CET, online

Grief, repair, solidarity practices and carrying on without clean endings.

We close by gathering what has been fermenting in us. What has ripened? What has gone off? What needs more time? What must be composted? Rather than seeking clean closure, we ask what it means to remain contaminated, compromised, accountable, and committed.

Readings & thinkers: participant contributions, Alexis Shotwell, adrienne maree brown, Mia Mingus
Fermentation practice: shared ferment table — each participant brings a ferment, failed experiment, kitchen note, or reflection from the season.

Optional in-person dinner: potluck in Amsterdam on 25 Nov 2026 from 18:00-21:30

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.

Note: the suggested readings may be a bit dense in theory. We welcome both scholars and people with no academic background to join. You don't need to read heavy texts to participate. No academic background or training is assumed or needed to engage. We will be digesting theory together in different ways, through sound, movement, cooking, drawing, and images.

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.