For amateur picklers and kimchi-makers, there is a new edition of “Wild Fermentation,” the 2003 manual<br />that helped its author, Sandor Katz, become a heroic figure among cooks who ferment their own foods.<br />“You’re constantly in this thing that’s not reality, and eating food can be the most real act you can partake in.”<br />At Lalito, his restaurant in Manhattan, Mr. Gonzalez serves food he describes as “hippie Chicano,” like vegan chicharrones<br />and the brown goddess cucumber salad, with brown mole vinaigrette, mint and candied pepitas, as well as dishes like eggplant topped with tahini, lemon juice and Japanese gomasio seasoning.<br />Like the back-to-the landers and Whole Earth Catalog readers before them, a new generation is once again becoming interested in fermentation, especially do-it-yourself projects, a shift<br />that Mr. Katz attributes to people becoming more critical of the industrial food system and seeking alternatives.<br />We can appreciate their flavors, textures and general possibilities because we —<br />that is, the big collective we — know so much more about cooking foods of all kinds.”<br />The current food mood may also be a reaction to the more exhausting aspects of life in the digital era.<br />The last several months have seen the release of many vegetable-rich<br />and raw-food cookbooks, including ones from Lucky Peach; Martha Stewart; Wolfgang Puck; the vegan website Thug Kitchen; Sarah Britton, of the website My New Roots, whose Instagram feed of bowls and sprouts has over 330,000 followers; and Amanda Chantal Bacon of Moon Juice, a small chain of juice shops that started in Venice, in Los Angeles.<br />“It’s as true in any creative field as it is in food.”<br />Deborah Madison, the author and chef who made vegetarian cooking sophisticated with her 1987 cookbook, “Greens,” has seen this food before: She cooked it in the 1960s<br />and ’70s, as one of “a growing number of people who were trying to cook differently from our parents,” she said.
