Special Edition Ask Allie: Home Fermenting Survey by Researcher Leni Charbonneau
Been a hot minute since our last Ask Allie column, and I am delighted about what’s caused me to post one today!
I received the following email from Leni, and she had a lot of cool stuff to say. She needs our help, community members! Let’s take up the call and help Leni (and by extension, everyone) better understand modern home fermenting by completing her survey!! Clearly some of you have already done so, and we thank you for it!
Hi there Allie! My name is Leni and I am an environmental historian based out of Sweden. I am studying cultural histories of yogurt production, and most recently my research has turned to study modern home fermenters and trends in the sources of starter cultures. For a little more context, I am interested in the life of commercial starters once they have been recuperated by home fermenters to base their own projects.
I currently have a survey out oriented at home yogurt producers, and I came across your work as many of my respondents have mentioned Positively Probiotic and the value of using heirloom cultures.
From this, I actually have two questions for you:
The aforementioned survey is actually still up, and I am trying to cast a pretty wide net of respondents. I was wondering if it would be possible to share the survey link with some of your networks? The survey is quite short (about 7 minutes) and would hopefully be an interesting reflection for any producers tied into your network: https://forms.gle/7u2oZvHdxjWUspP99
I was also wondering if it would be possible to conduct a short interview with you about your experiences providing heirloom cultures and fermentation advice in the next week or so? Or, if it would be preferable, I could write out questions over email? I also totally understand if you cannot afford the time at present for that. In any case, I want to thank you for taking the time to read my message! It has been a pleasure to read through your blog posts and see the community you are culturing here.
— Leni
Hi, Leni! Your email is a ray of non-lethal sunshine in my crazy day of gardening in ridiculous Houston, TX heat! Thank you!
Yes, I will absolutely do an interview with you. Since it looks like you’ve read some of our posts, you already know I’m a former academic and so this is situation is a happy place for me. I’m going to put up a special edition Ask Allie as soon as I’m done responding to you with a portion of your email and the link so all of our community members will have access to it. That should go live in a couple of hours max, so your survey will be on the blog and also on our Facebook page shorty.
Also thank you for doing this kind of work! It’s a unique angle of approach to studying fermentation, and I’m very interested to see how your research goes. I’ll take the survey as soon as I’m done making the post on the blog, too.
A question for you, since cultural histories of yogurt production are your area of expertise: if you had the chance to read the yogurt-specific histories (though maybe not the Greek one, since I was trying to hold at a 750-word cap at that point with the company) like amasi, skyr, etc., did I miss anything important I should add to those articles? [If y’all didn’t know, I really do like this kind of feedback]
Regarding the commercial yogurt starters and the survey, there’s a minor potential complication that you may not be aware of, which is that we produce our cultures identically to how they’re generated in a home setting. They really are heirloom cultures sourced from their indigenous homes, so we try to make them the same ways they’re made in their point of origin when possible.
Also I am absolutely delighted so many people mentioned our company! We typically hear from community members when there’s a problem, so it’s lovely to learn about this kind of feedback.
Regarding the interview, the weekend would be ideal for me because Ross will be home to perform childcare. I can also do evenings, but since I think you’re GMT+2 (which is 7 hours ahead of me, same as in Denmark where one of my oldest and closest friends is), my weekday evenings might not be such a great choice for you in terms of being up in the middle of the night.
Your choice on whether you’d like to send the questions ahead of the interview.
