There are thousands of products of fermentation, from beer and wine to cheese to kimchi to soy sauce. They’re all dramati- cally different creations, of course, but they’re unified by the same basic process. Microbes—bacteria, molds, yeasts, or a combination thereof—break down or convert the molecules in food, producing new flavors as a result. Take lacto-fermented pickles, for ins…
Roe are the eggs from fish, crustaceans, and mollusks. The eggs contain the germ of the next generation along with a lunch bag of nutrients for the offspring. Roe are also food for other animals in and around the sea, as well as for humans. Roe can be eggs from sturgeon but is also much more than caviar. The book therefore also deals Preface1 with the roe we call kaviar from other fish species …
This book is about putting meatless diets in the US in their cultural and culinary context. We’re not just talking about hippies who would put carob in a cookie rather than chocolate chips, or the folks at The Farm commune in Tennessee who made cheese from nutritional yeast and tofu—though they do appear in the book. But there are also the ecofeminists of the second wave who gave up meat wh…