Gardening – Fermentation inside and out

However hard we try, we all produce food waste. What we do with that waste is important for the natural cycle of decomposition.

Do you put yours in a bokashi bin, compost it, put it out in council’s food scraps bin or down the insinkerator? All these have merit apart from the insinkerator, which in my view, wastes a potentially important waste product that could go back into our soils.

Living as we do in high energy, often wasteful homes, growing our own food and then transforming our food waste through various methods of decomposition provides the opportunity to return the carbon back into the soil where the plants will take it up again, completing the cycle of plant and animal life.

All the atoms, not only in us, but in our vegetables as well, have been used millions of times before, because new life depends on decomposition and recycling carbon. Earth is really just a giant recycling plant where living things are re-made from the remains of dead things.

Gardeners spend a lot of time talking about the benefits of nutrient rich, bioactive soil. A plethora of microbes tend this healthy soil and thus a healthy garden. But what about the beneficial microbes that we consume? In that regard, gardeners are re-discovering the health benefits of fermented foods as a way to use their homegrown produce.

Fermentation is the link between gardening, vegetable growing, human health and food waste. Fermentation is a biological process in which sugars are used to generate energy for living cells without the need for oxygen. Fermented food contains beneficial bacteria that can feed your gut bacteria, and fermented food scraps work in a similar way when used as compost material. According to research, fermented food waste (such as that produced in a bokashi bin), increases good bacteria – especially bacteria that can increase crop growth and make plants more pathogen-resistant while lowering carbon emissions.

More research is being carried out into how fermented food waste could help combat issues like plants diseases, and how turning food waste into highly nutritious soil additives could make cultivating food crops more eco-friendly.

In Japan there is some archaeological evidence to suggest people began fermenting berries there around 5000 years ago. Fermentation has been a subject of scientific study since the 19th Century. To scientists, fermentation was more than just a food process, it was a way to transform society and solve both environmental and resource problems.

Today a visionary man, Koichi Takahashi, has founded a company called the Japan Food Ecology Centre that is piloting a unique fermentation method to transform leftover human food into high-quality pig feed. The facility makes a good profit off the 35,000 tons of food waste it processes into pig food, biogas and a nutrient rich agricultural fertiliser, each year.

Takahashi’s belief is that food waste comes with a massive positive planetary impact, and for this reason he did not take out any patents on the technology, allowing others to replicate his method. He hopes this technology will change society.

In our new age of technology, growing a garden can seem like a mundane chore. But consider, by planting a handful of seeds, you can create an entire vegetable garden. Now, all you have to do to complete nature’s cycle is to return the carbon back to the soil by composting, fermentation or simply digging the food scraps into the soil and letting nature work its magic.