A potted history of fermented foods – from pickles to kimchi

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Are you a pro at pickling? How about baking sourdough bread or brewing your own kombucha? If the answer is yes, you've probably picked up on one of the recent trends promoting fermented foods, which promise to boost your gut health and save both you and the planet from the scourge of food waste.
For the uninitiated, fermented foods include anything that uses bacteria to break down organic matter into a new product. Look around an ordinary kitchen and you'll almost certainly find something fermented: yoghurt (milk), beer and wine (grain/fruit) or vinegar (alcohol). Not all of these will give you the promised health boost, however, which comes from 'live' ferments containing probiotic microbes, usually lactic acid bacteria. In alcohol and vinegar the fermenting bacteria die during the process.
The health benefits of fermented foods are widely promoted. Some advocates, like epidemiologist Tim Spector, suggest the gut microbiome is the key to our health, while others are more cautious: in essence, although kefir is certainly good for your gut, it isn't a cure-all. Still, the research is ongoing and diversifying: one study has even suggested that probiotics could fight the less pleasant recent phenomenon of microplastics in our stomachs.
The future of fermented foods is definitely something to keep an eye on, but equally interesting is their long past and the different fermented food fashions we see over time.
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People have been fermenting food since before the written word. Thanks to archaeological discoveries, we know that 13,000 years ago ancient Natufian culture in the Levant was fermenting grain into beer and that around the globe in Jiahu, Northern China, 9,000 years ago, a mixture of rice, honey and fruit was fermented to make early 'wines'.
In fact, most cultures have at some point in their history fermented plants into alcohol, from agave pulque in Mesoamerica to gum-tree way-a-linah in Australia.
As to preserving food, archaeologists have found that nearly 10,000 years ago fish was fermented by the Mesolithic inhabitants of Sweden. Today nam pla (fish sauce made from fermented anchovies) is very popular, but fermented fish sauces were a major commodity in the ancient world, including the garum of the Romans. This was made from the blood and guts of mackerel, salt-fermented for two months. Although it might not sound very appealing, garum was an expensive condiment for the Roman nobility and was shipped all the way from Spain to Britain.
Garum eventually lost its popularity in Europe during the Middle Ages, but fermented fish made a comeback in the 18th century. In Asia fish sauces had continued strong, and colonialism brought the south Asian fish sauce kê-chiap to Europe, alongside soy sauce (fermented soybeans). Salt-fermenting oysters and anchovies in this style became popular in England and North America, and people eventually branched out to preserving tomatoes – giving us modern ketchup.
Cabbage cultures
No discussion of fermentation would be complete without pickled vegetables. Today, the most talked-about fermented vegetable is the cabbage, in the form of kimchi and sauerkraut, thanks to its strong probiotic and vitamin C content.
The historical origins of these dishes are unclear. Online articles might tell you that pickled cabbage was first eaten by the builders of the Great Wall of China 2,000 years ago and brought to Europe in Genghis Khan's saddlebags. These kinds of apocryphal stories should be taken with more than a grain of salt.
So should the apparent connection to Roman author Pliny the Elder, who made no mention of 'salt cabbage' anywhere in his works. While the Greeks and Romans loved cabbage and considered it a cure for many illnesses, they almost always boiled it, which would kill the lactobacillus.
Still, as Jan Davison, author of Pickles: A Global History, writes, literary evidence suggests that salt pickling in general does have a long precedence. Pickled gourds were eaten in Zhou dynasty China around 3,000 years ago.
It's hard to say when sauerkraut became a common dish, but the term was in use by the 16th century and was associated with Germany by the 17th. As to Korean kimchi, research suggests this style of preservation was practised by the 13th century, only using turnips rather than cabbage.
The popularity of radish and cabbage kimchi only came about in the 16th century, alongside the use of chilli peppers. Now an iconic aspect of this bright-red dish, peppers were not part of 'Old World' diets before the Columbian exchange.
History reveals our long relationship with fermented food. Our pickling ancestors were more interested in food preservation than in their bacterial microbiome – a very modern concept. Looking to past practices might even help us innovate fermentation technologies, as recent research from the Vrije Universiteit Brussels shows. I'm not sure about bringing back fermented fish guts, but more pickled turnips doesn't sound half bad.
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Serin Quinn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.