Setting the Table for Relatedness: Fermentation in Designing Permaculture Projects in Sardinia

Abstract: This article analyzes practices among a group of permaculturists in Sardinia, Italy. Their daily choices emerge as rooted in a specific understanding of the world that gives great value to their social and environmental relations. The ethnography carried out about fermentation of foods and soil compounds offers an entry point to this world ontologically founded on a particular way of budgeting costs and benefits between human and non-human elements. Microbes and their symbiotic colonies emerge not only as allies in designing a healthier world for future generations, but also as reference models.

Keywords: ethnography; Sardinia; permaculture; fermentation; relatedness; microorganism; alternative economies; alternative ontology

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Introduction

For ethnographers today, no task is more important than to make small facts speak to these large concerns, to make the ethical acts ethnography describes into a performative ontology of economy and the threads of hope that emerge into stories of everyday revolution. (Gibson-Graham 2014, 152)

As I was tying tomato plants in my garden, last summer, a few millimeters from my hand, was a yellow and black spider more than five centimeters long. Just a few years ago I would have been quite scared of such a spider, maybe tried to kill it or drive it away but this time I did not. I just stopped what I was doing, observed it closely, and consulted my network of friends as to what this spider’s presence said about the health of my vegetable garden. My world had changed.

Figure 1. Wasp spider. Photograph by the author.

This transformation, as deep as it was slow, began in 2019 when I began my research on permaculture in Sardinia.

This article, through people’s stories, aims to open to scrutiny a different way of seeing our world, one in which humans are neither the main actors, nor the only ones allowed to act and “speak.” The entangled threads of these different voices emerge from ethnographic data collected over the last four years among the network of people running permaculture projects in Sardinia, Italy. Here I propose a reflection on how permaculture enables the structuring of a new ontology of relations that can address rising environmental concerns; the focus on fermentation offers a glimpse on how, in a permacultural framework, microbes can be considered as part of a “nature” humans can learn from.

To this end, the first section will describe data collection methods as deeply interwoven with my experience on the island and of permaculture. The first section aims also to answer the following questions: how this movement took root in Sardinia and how it has taken specific meanings, and why the island is contextually interesting from an anthropological perspective. In the second section, case studies focus on human-microbe relations in permaculture projects and the importance given to interconnections within a system. In the third I will argue for a deeper understanding of how fermentation is integrated in permaculture discourse and ethics. The second and third sections delve deeper into the main research question: understanding microorganisms’ collaboration in fermentation processes from the permaculture philosophical framework, do theyalso offer a model for people’s actions towards their social relation? How does this contribute to locating human beings in a different position in the ecosystem? The fourth section moves up the scale from microorganism colonies back to humans and their communities and approaches the question: how have fermentation practices in Sardinia become a practice of resistance and resilience? In the Conclusion, I question people’s practices as driven by a radical criticism of the Capitalocene (Moore 2015) moving from the ethics proposed by permaculture to a new ontology of relationships. The pivotal reflection driving the article is an analysis of how peoples’ actions and choices on a daily basis are rooted in a different way of balancing costs and benefits in designing a permaculture project, generating an ontological shift, maybe an alternative “telluric force” (Stoppani 1873, cited in Crutzen 2006) based on the value of relations.

Before entering the article’s core discussion, however, it is worth briefly explaining the use of some terms. Throughout the article I use the term “microorganism” to refer to microscopic living organisms too small to be seen with the naked eye, unicellular or multicellular, including bacteria, yeasts, molds, and fungi. With the term “microbes” I refer mainly to unicellular bacteria causing fermentation. I use “bacteria” in more specific discourses also naming the types, or when my informants themselves use the term bacteria. As for the terms “identity” and “tradition,” I consider them as categories, “floating signifiers,” from time to time filled with different meanings in people’s accounts.

The use of the term “nature” is also particularly slippery and filled with different meanings depending on who is using the term. Generally speaking, asking a permaculturist if humans are nature, he/she will answer unquestionably “yes.” On the other hand, one of the main permaculture principles (Holmgren 2002) is: “work with nature and not against it” introducing a sort of separation between the two elements. This somehow suggests that humans are “natural beings out of nature” because of loss of consciousness, skills, and competences once present but now forgotten. Therefore “nature” seems to be a complex meshwork of relations occurring between each element of the environment (bacteria, animals, vegetation, winds, waters….), sometimes including human beings, sometimes not; “nature” is something humans must model their actions on, something to return to be part of, fairly and effectively. The issue then seems to be to undermine the centrality of humans, considered just one element of the system, able to ecologically give to and take from the other elements.

I use the term “environment” more than “nature” to refer to a complex system encompassing all the aforementioned issues. The term “Capitalocene” proposed by Moore (2015) pushes forward the reflection about the Anthropocene, a widely used concept today also in mainstream discourse and a clear reference term for people trying to act differently towards environmental systems. The term “Anthropocene” created a new urgency for “talking about, theorizing, modeling and managing a Big Thing called Globalization” (Haraway 2016,4) in relation to global environments. It is therefore a concept that is “good to think with” (cf. Levi-Strauss), to define and draw attention to what we are living through. Moore, introducing the concept of Capitalocene, tries to answer the questions raised after the introduction of the Anthropocene focusing the discussion on which humans in which specific history and place we are talking about, considering “human organizations – like capitalism – as part of nature” (Moore 2017, 1) and strengthening the comprehension of the processes that accelerate humanity’s telluric force, generated in a specific time, place, system of power and profit.

Chapter 1: Principle 1 – Observe and Interact: Permaculture, Sardinia and a Passionate Anthropologist

The term permaculture merges three words: permanent, culture, agriculture. It refers to a global movement that encompasses a set of ethics, principles, and design guidelines for creating a sustainable and permanent culture of interaction and integration between humans, non-humans, and the environment (Lockyer and Veteto 2013). This approach was developed by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in Australia in 1974 and in 1978 Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements, was published. In December 1981 the book received the alternative Nobel Prize from the Right Livelihood Foundation in Stockholm. Permaculture is a holistic approach which has engaged academic interest in the humanities only in the last ten years, but has spread all over the world since the 1980s especially within eco-villages, transition towns and bio-regionalist and de-growth movements.

It proposes a philosophical framework based on taking responsibility for one’s actions towards the human and non-human environment (people, other animals, earth, water, vegetation, landscape patterns and microorganisms). This leads directly to the three ethics of “earth care, people care and fair share.” If the first two ethics are more intuitively clear, the third is more controversial; “fair share” between people and other actors in the system means sharing resources but also putting limits to human growth and “nature” consumption, or even better enriching the system with an eye to the future for the third ethic has also been reworked as “design for future generations.” Nevertheless, “taking responsibility” for one’s actions and “taking care of…,” in a permaculture perspective, does not mean that humans are somehow to be considered as the guardians of creation let alone owners of nature. At the same time, permaculture should not be considered a mere theoretical eco-utopic approach; on the contrary, it is deeply practical and open to bottom-up, local actions, as it suggests a set of techniques to be enriched by people’s creativity and filled with local meanings. It is necessarily set in the context of, and drawn from, natural patterns and observations where landscapes, winds, water, animals, bacteria and human cultures and practices are all equally historical agents.

Figure 2. Ethics and principles of permaculture. https://permacultureprinciples.com/resources/free-downloads/#principles-poster.

Figure 3. Permaculture flower by David Holgren. At its center are the tree ethics and the 12 principles. Following the spiral arrow, one can see how these drive the designing process in various aspects of life. https://permacultureprinciples.com/resources/free-downloads/#principles-poster.

In 1985 Mollison standardized the 72-hour course in Permaculture Design. By 1991 the number of graduates had reached 4,000 worldwide, all engaged in some form of environmental and social work (Accademia italiana di permacultura, website). In Italy the Permaculture academy was founded in 2003 by some eco-village activists who had experienced similar schools in other European countries. The role of the Italian academy is mainly to convene two national meetings a year, connect with other European academies and promote a network of trained tutors via a diploma path to becoming a permaculture designer. Basic 72-hour courses are run locally by tutors with specific teacher training. In Sardinia there was an association (SarPa- The Sardinia Permaculture Association) from 2015 to 2022, with local, national, and transnational links. During its active years, the association ran many 72-hour permaculture courses, short introductions to permaculture and collaborations with local associations or municipalities. The association aimed to promote permaculture and advocated a well-established network of people and projects throughout the island. The founding group considered the association as a way to better manage the bureaucracy of 72-hour courses, but most of all as a “social experiment.” Indeed, they decided to invest their commitment in developing specific attitudes toward equality among the members, using consensus methods and feedback in every decision process. SarPa decisions had to be approved by the whole assembly and not by a restricted management group. Over the years, the association went from 14 to more than 120 members. Association activities gave birth to a well-established network across the island, promoting strong personal ties between people and assuring help and collaboration with each other. Meetings often gave (and give) an opportunity for celebrating together after work, sharing food and, of course, drinking local wine and beer: as permaculturist like to say: “if it isn’t fun, it’s not permaculture.”

I met some of the members in 2016 during my PhD research, and the more I got to know them and experienced their way of being together, the more I gleaned great stimuli for reflection, as well as points of contact between the anthropological discipline and permaculture. Among all these points of contact, the great value given to relations and interconnections at different levels within a holistic analysis of specific local human and environment systems stimulated the most reflection. I became very passionate about this and on finishing my PhD, (which was focused on a totally different subject) I decided I wanted to know more about permaculture. In 2019 I started my own 72-hour course with SarPa and deepened my knowledge of the association and its members. The data and testimonies presented here come from these five years of my independent research on Sardinian agro-pastoral traditions renewed and reinvented through permacultural practices. I spent time working together with Sardinian permaculturists, following them to national and regional meetings, taking part in initiatives, as well as participating, as observer or organizer, in three 72-hour courses in addition to mine. I undertook semi-structured and informal interviews (and video interviews) to better understand how the permaculturalists themselves gave meaning to their actions and designed according to the principles of permaculture. I never used questionnaires; structured interviews have not been my systematic method. I preferred semi-structured interviews, participant observation, conversations, co-conducted video narrations of their projects, frequent feedback, and comparison: because of permaculturists’ tendency to meta-reflection, it often happened that while working with our hands, conversation fell on meanings and values incorporated in practical actions.

To give just one example: at the end of June 2020, Sara and Sandro¹, a couple of SarPa members from Oristano, needed to build fences for the rotational grazing of their donkeys. They called friends from the association, organizing a permatóbiuto help design and build the fencing. The term permatóbiu comes from “permaculture” merged with the word in Sardinian local language atóbiu² which means “meeting.” The atóbiu is an intentional, rather than chance, meeting. It is at a perma-meeting where association members meet in order to design actions in their systems of living, to work and think, integrating views and ideas, in a process which also allows time to have fun and celebrate. It is an initiative similar to what is done in the Australian network or in other parts of Italy (especially Sicily) but under other names (called mainly “perma-blitz”). How does it work? If a SarPa member needs help, to design a project or to develop it, he/she can call the network to a meeting (usually one or two days long) where he or she will host people at his/her place. People usually bring something to eat and share. The meeting consists of working sessions where people come and go, some just to say hello to the hosts and celebrate the local food and drinks together. During 2019 six pematóbius³ were organized addressing extremely diverse needs of the members: building a compost toilet, designing a new eco-village, or planting a food forest.

The days before that permatóbiu and during the working days at Sandro and Sara’s place, I collected some video testimonies I consider of great value. Sandro and Sara agreed to a video interview with me and to make a short video-documentary about their project: “When we need help, we ask, perhaps it is the best way to look for solutions... through the collective intelligence.” Sara intervened: “We believe a lot in it!” Sandro continued: “Much of what you see here is a collective work.” Sara added:

…for us the association represents the possibility of giving action to our ideals... we think that change must be enacted, not only thought and idealized, but also acted upon in concrete everyday life... a different lifestyle… (…) we try to understand how in the concrete life of all of us, there can be those ideal conditions in which our nature as human beings finds a space... Working together has led us to understand that the transition from the ideal to the concrete is possible, that another system is possible, that another world is possible, that other social and human relationships are possible. For me SarPa is like going back to my origins, to my grandmother’s stories. It means to experience what she tells me about her social experience in the town, where everyone had a role, no one was excluded and there was great human solidarity even with all the difficulties of poverty... however, there was a great richness... she tells me that great richness of solidarity is missing now... s’azudu! S’azudu torrau. Well, she didn’t call it s’azudu torrau because this expression is used in Campidano and she was from Marmilla, I started recognizing it with the name s’azudu torrau with the association.

S’agiúdu (or s’azudu, as Sara says, torrau) literally means “the returned help,” an ancient Sardinian practice often called upon to claim Sardinia’s peculiar culture. As Angioni (1982) points out, this type of “returned help” has been sometimes exaggerated and used to claim a particular propensity towards the gift inherent in Sardinian customs. S’ağğdu torrau (as he calls it in his research), must be historically understood within a complex logic of production exchanges more than within the logic of gift, which instead have episodes of exceptionality; nevertheless this kind of help was established “especially between relatives and friends or, in any case, between people in some way related by kinship...In general, it was a form of exchange in which solidarity relationships played a role...and in each case following the rule of reciprocity” (Angioni 1982, 111–12). Through s’agiúdu torrau , a local community member called the others to realize works that are too large to be carried out by one person alone. The help is offered for free without monetary recompense, but the help itself would have to be returned when needed, generating strong social ties sometimes also across generations. Indeed, the help could be returned also by people’s children years later. The re-signification of s’agiúdu torrau by today’s permaculturists, while sometimes assimilating it more to a form of “gift,” nevertheless emphasizes its characteristic as a tool for strengthening community ties, a value that, as this contribution aims to highlight, takes on particular importance within the permaculture framework as considered inherent in Sardinian customs. During Sandro and Sara’s permatòbiu , Antonella (a SarPa member) and I would care for the workers, cooking for all. While cutting tomatoes and stirring the pasta sauce we started reflecting on this practice of the returned help: “S’agiúdu torrau?” said Antonella tasting the pasta sauce “... it’s a little acid” and then, back to the argument “…they did it always before…I mean, my dad... all the big works at home he did with s’agiùdu torrau, it was normal. Now we think it is something new age… ahead of its time… everything that was normal before comes to seem ahead of its time now…or that you have to look for…pretty cool eh! …Hey, the coffee is ready!”

In Sandro and Sara’s words it is possible to glimpse what was stated above about the idea of “humans (participating with) nature” as something betrayed, that can be restored by looking back to ancient traditions in a new ethical and practical framework, not a utopia. In their and in Antonella’s view, permaculture offered the tools to recall their family history, a tradition re-framed in a shared present time, with the gaze turned to a fairer future.

In 2022 SarPa members decided to close the “formal” association. They felt the bureaucratic requests of the new Italian third sector regulations were too demanding, to the point that deadlines were stifling the convivial and spontaneous spirit of their meetings. The informal network did not stop after the association closed: people still care about each other and carry on their collaborative networks.

In the next sections I focus on fermentation practices questioning human-microbe relations and the multiple transformative meanings these can assume in the framework of permaculture in Sardinia.

Chapter 2. The Problem is the Solution: Emma’s Pets

I met Emma in 2019, during my own permaculture course in Sardinia, and thanks to her I discovered the world of microorganisms. Since then, I started fermenting initially with sourdough and then later with more interest in kombucha and ginger beer, and now have at home an entire room dedicated to fermentation.

Figure 4. Preparing ginger beer at home, as well as lactofermented vegetables and mead. Photography by the author.

About 8 years ago Emma bought an arid piece of land in the countryside outside Cagliari; she is a permaculturist and wanted to start her own project, depending as little as possible on industrial food production, leading a healthier life, working less in order to save her time for human relations and opening her place to people who wanted to learn permaculture. Unfortunately, she quickly discovered that the land she bought was polluted by various buried materials, hard and difficult to work with, and she realized that she lacked the energy and money to reclaim it.

In permaculture it is said that “the problem is the solution.” With that perspective, what she considered an obstacle to her project was providing information about her system. There are no bad or good things in “nature,” only elements to observe, comprehend and work with. With no money and no energy, she had to look for help and solutions that did not require massive and costly interventions. She started working with what she had: wood chips from brushwood to cover the bare soil, vetiver plants to improve soil hydration, dust, leaves, and microbes. Under the leaves and sticks that lay on the ground a few weeks after pruning her trees she noticed a white powdery substance: a mold that she discovered was a treasure to start getting to work! Mixing it with cooked potatoes and salt, she learned to produce JMS (JDAM⁴ microbial solution) a fermented mix of indigenous microorganisms used in organic farming to inoculate the soil. She learned about bacteria and fungi, and with these allies she improved the quality of her soil. Within 2 years she started to eat her own garden vegetables:

People ask me why I don’t have cats or dogs here; I answer that I already have my beloved pets: my bacteria and my mycorrhizal mushrooms! We live here together, I care about them, and they care about my soil, and my soil gives me health.

As Krzywoszynska, Banwart and Blacker suggest “places are socioecological webs of relations that involve soils and their humans, humans and their soils,” and

place-dwelling and place-making nature of human beings points toward the importance of embodied and localized experiences in knowledge production (...) A place-based knowledge of soils starts with the soil-dwellers, and takes their embodied and purposeful activities as a point of departure for developing greater practical and ethical attentiveness to soils. (Krzywoszynska, Banwart and Blacker 2020, 91)

Emma’s practical and ethical attentiveness to her soil points directly to a techno-scientific apparatus which is shaped on and shapes social relations and material arrangements, transforming the materiality of existence (Papadopulous 2011, 178-79). Here referring to the theoretical framework of science and technology studies and Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2015, 2017) accounts of soil can help to understand the crucial shift from one epistemological approach to another where this “materiality of existence” and politics leads to a different ontology.⁵ To understand the shift from epistemology to ontology passing through technical application of science within the permacultural approach, let us go back to Emma working together with soil and bacteria.

She depicts her project as a transformation from a desegregated soil and system to a tight and interconnected intertwining of roots, bacteria, and fungal spores which is actually building a healthier soil, healthier humans, and a place full of beauty. The understanding of “interconnection,” in a permaculture perspective, involves something more than the awareness that each action towards the environment produces an effect and feedback. Within the ethical framework of permaculture, taking responsibility for one’s actions and taking care also means to evaluate how each action and choice can destroy or increase biodiversity, improve or hinder wildlife at many levels, from a macro-overview to a very micro perspective. For example, it is not necessarily the case that a good intervention in a vegetable garden will produce a bigger harvest, it may reduce the harvest but increase biodiversity and the interrelation between the elements of the system at large. This is considered a fundamental step towards resilience. It marks a turning point: understanding one’s actions as a way to promote a complex, interconnected, dynamic coexistence between humans, animals, waters, wind, and other-than-human beings leads directly to a different evaluation of what is soil itself in a world where nature and humans are undivided, bringing about different ways of care. Indeed, as Puig de la Bellacasa points out, “[M]odes of soil care and soil ontologies are intertwined: what is thought of as soil affects the ways in which we care for it, and vice versa” (Puig dela Bellacasa 2015, 2). The circle closes back when considering that different ontologies re-articulate what is an appropriate technique to work within a very different world.

A good example to better clarify this point comes from examining domestic facilities within permaculture practices. Some permaculturists live in self-built homes, totally or almost totally not connected to electrical grid, sewage mains or water distribution systems. Every home system (heating, electricity, or plumbing) is studied and implemented with specific techniques which are deliberately used to sustain an ethical and ideological choice of resistance to a system of consumption and erosion of soil and environment. Compost (or dry) toilets are generally preferred to traditional toilets. This is a toilet where urine and feces must be separated; urine goes into the phytoremediation system and feces into a bucket mixed with sawdust. Using compost toilets, solid excrement is not flushed away with water; it does not have to disappear as soon as possible far from home into the sewage system. Solid excrement is conserved for a few years in its composting caissons, and it is not seen as waste but as a good nutrient source to be reused to feed the soil. Flushing as a practice is considered unethical because it does not adequately account for water as a good; furthermore, mixing urine and feces pollutes a huge amount of water. Excrements become part of an integrated system through the action of microbes over time.

In such an organization, using commercial antibacterial products to clean household surfaces is unimaginable: these would destroy the balanced system of gravel, plants and bacteria once in the phytoremediation tanks, and then polluting the soil too. To clean the home, many permaculturists use homemade soaps or EM (“effective microorganisms”). The latter are strains of probiotic microorganisms, mainly lactobacilli, photosynthetic microorganisms, and yeasts, developed by Teruo Higa, a Japanese agronomist and microbiologist, in 1982. It is a composite of microorganisms, which activates local and native microorganisms, enhancing their natural power of maintaining soil and plants health, thus encouraging more resistance to stressors. Disinfecting a surface destroys all bacteria, both good and pathogenic, leaving free access to the rapid recolonization of the surface by both types of microorganisms. Conversely, cleaning a surface with probiotic bacteria promotes surface colonization by non-pathogenic ones (Caselli et al. 2019). Moreover, probiotic cleaning products, once in the phytoremediation tanks, will even improve water, soil, and plant health. EM can be used to clean but also to germinate seeds or inoculate the soil through irrigation to process nutrients and make them more available for plants. Indeed, in many permaculture projects food for humans and animals, as well as soil compounds, are often prepared through fermentation. The cycling of bacteria, fungi and yeasts is completed through the composting of excrement, which once transformed into soil returns to the land that produces food for people and animals. In such a framework, microbes, fungi and yeasts are pivotal: without them no regenerative agriculture or compost would be possible, nor a “healthy” biodiverse system. Bacteria then are more connected with the idea of health than disease. I first tasted Kombucha (a fermented tea drink) at Emma’s place and discovered that some foods can be “dead” and others “alive.” The idea of “alive or dead” food (or compounds) comes from Emma’s descriptions as well as from some fermentation workshops where I assisted during permaculture festivals. Products within large-scale food production for which durability is guaranteed through processes such as pasteurization were considered “dead,” devoid of bacterial life. A living product, on the contrary, changes and transforms due to the presence of living bacteria. In these narratives, the idea seems to emerge that a living food is the product of an involvement of reciprocal care between a person, bacteria, soil, and raw materials; at the same time, alive foods and compounds seem to transfer their positive vitality to whoever consumes them. To give a quick example: Adelmo is a permaculturist in Sardinia, an expert in home construction with natural materials, and a permaculture tutor and teacher.⁶ During a conversation with him, speaking about what makes a healthy integrated home system, he said ironically but with a hint of seriousness that the cycling of good bacteria for composting requires good quality feces and therefore a good diet. It is not possible here to go deeper into this circular relationship of “vitality and health” through bacteria care, even though this could be an interesting topic for future reflections.

After becoming acquainted with Kombucha at Emma’s place, I started my fermentation adventure, even without a compost toilet to improve the soil in my little town garden where I lived at the time.

In the next section I will delve further into food fermentation, reflecting on how the very microscopic observation of microorganisms can offer a model for advocating relatedness also within human communities. Indeed, following the permaculture principle “design from patterns to details” of which the underlying idea is that we must learn from and with nature, symbiotic colonies of microorganisms offer an organization that is “good to think with” (cf. Levi-Strauss) for better understanding what I will call here “a new ontology of relations.”

Chapter 3. Designing from Patterns to Details: Making kin with Our Tiny Companion Species

In July 2023 I was invited to hold a fermentation workshop during a permaculture course, which greatly improved my understanding of the intersection between permaculture and human-microbial relationships: both the process of preparing the workshop together with permaculturists and the conversations with the students were illuminating. They are the driving force behind the following reflections.

On a terribly sultry summer day, a group of permaculture students and I tried to survive the heat by drinking ginger beer and talking about microbes. As the workshop started, a student asked if it wasn’t dangerous to “play with microbes” and someone else quickly replied, “adding salt or brine to vegetables is like having a very good bouncer at the door of your nightclub, it only allows good bacteria to enter, and keeps pathogenic ones away, so that the party for our palate is fantastic.” We reflected on how humans have fermented since ancient times, to the point that our taste and bacteria have domesticated each other, evolving together. “Our relations with the bacteria that are responsible for the various types of fermentation can be thought of alongside those we have with dogs, cats, sheep or cows” said someone else, only slightly ironically. In fact, the change of perspective proposed by permaculture is not about understanding what is “out there in the environment” as an unambiguous “matter of fact”, but as emerging from a dense network of interconnections. Thinking upon and knowing “nature” means to “care about” it in the way Puig de La Bellacasa suggests: “Relations of thinking and knowing require care and affect how we care”(2017, 69).Tom, an anthropologist by training and now a small-scale farmer, conducted the workshop with me; he used this joke to invite students to delve deeper into this co-evolution and reciprocal domestication. He invited students to think from a very micro-perspective, imagining microbes as “tiny elements of care” (Puig de La Bellacasa 2017); just like us, cats, or cows, what do they need to feel good and prosper? They need food, a healthy environment, and the opportunity to interact. We need to give them food: amino acids, proteins or sugar and they will eat and digest. By doing this, they increase the bioavailability of nutrients, decrease or eliminate cooking times, and produce carbon dioxide, acetic acid, or alcohol, which is what we are looking for in our diet (or to regenerate the soil). We can design a permaculture project, he suggested, with this micro scale in our minds as a model: observing the needs of each element and its outputs we can better understand how to maximize its role in the whole system, and we can promote biodiversity and resilience also in a more macro scale such as the one of our homes or our local communities.

Permaculture offers a tool for “budgeting” the costs and benefits of different elements in a system and maximizing efficiency of design: functional analysis. In a functional analysis every element within a system is understood in all its/her/his properties, considered (and, in a design project, located) following the rule of connecting as many different elements’ inputs and outputs within the system as possible (what it/she/he needs and what it/she/he offers to the system), with the intention of maximizing efficiency and resilience.

Figure 5. Explaining functional analysis during a PDC. Photograph by the author.

The stress is on connections; the more an element is connected to others and its functions are increasingly redundant at a system level, the greater the system’s resilience. Any element is connected through its inputs (what it needs) and its outputs (what it produces), the inputs of one are provided by the outputs of another. In such a perspective there is no waste, what is the result of one’s process is a resource for the other. Any permaculture project must be guided by functional analysis and aims for the functional redundancy of singular elements through the multiplication of inter-connections.

The Kombucha SCOBY offers a very good example of this mechanism on the micro scale. The term “SCOBY” stands for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast: once added to a sweetened liquid the Scoby yeast consumes sugars and produces ethanol and carbon dioxide. Then acetobacters oxidize the ethanol into acetic acid thanks to the oxygen present in the environment (Zilber and Redzepi 2018). If only one of these elements fails to interact with the others, the magic of the drink we love is not produced. Starting from this example, during our workshop Tom recalled the permaculture principles: observe how nature works, identify a natural pattern, and reproduce it in designing your project’s details: this helps it act with nature and not against it. I continued after Tom: “If you set the table well for microorganisms (as David Zilber says), they will prosper and multiplicate, and you will definitely need a good network of friends to share the surplus of Scoby, kefir grains, and ferments. It is an output which strengthens connection, I know exactly where my Scoby comes from, it carries the story of my relations with people.” (see also Pétursson and Sturludóttir in this volume )

Some in the group already had some experience with lactofermentation or with kombucha production, while others didn’t, so we began discussing each other’s techniques in the various fermentations: how many grams of tea per liter? How many grams of sugar? How many days? What temperature? The setting helped: in those days, with the temperature at thirty-eight degrees Celsius night and day, how could I give a fixed number of days for the kombucha to be ready? Clearly, it is different fermenting in winter than in summer. How can we be sure that our dear microorganisms have enough to eat, if the room temperature is optimal to promote quick interactions and exchanges between the saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast and acetobacter? There are many energy flows and limiting factors to keep account of during a design process. As much as permaculture suggests to “observe and interact” (principle one) when designing a garden, at the same time we have to find a way to observe and interact with our fermenting microbes. While your pets intensely stare at you when they’re hungry or cold, with microbes it’s a little more complicated. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, but one of you needs a little work to make both of you happy. This is the task of the fermenter (Zilber and Redzepi 2018). Indeed, to produce good, fermented food it is important to carefully balance precision, care for ingredients and develop a “personal” relationship with the micro-organisms mediated by all the senses. How do they smell? How do they look? How much are they making the airlock bubble? Many books on fermentation suggest that the main way to understand if a jar of lactofermented vegetables is ready is to taste, taste, taste! (See also Veera Kinnunen in this volume).

During the workshop I confessed that in my own experience some communities of microorganism seemed to me “nice and tolerant” while others “overbearing and demanding.” For example, I tried water kefir grains, but I quickly stopped working with them. They were too needy of my care and the product must be consumed quickly to maintain its taste and not explode in the bottle due to the carbon dioxide pressure. In my hectic life, I have developed a lasting relationship of “mutual understanding” with bacterial colonies more willing to tolerate my forgetfulness, my lack of time, and my need to safely preserve the fermentation product in the fridge for even a month: kombucha fits better with my lifestyle. However, for each student it was different, some did not agree with me because their specific relation in their specific space of interaction was different. Colonies of bacteria in a kombucha Scoby can also vary depending on where it comes from (even if the main two elements are usually saccharomyces cerevisiae yeast and acetobacter). Stimulated by the idea of being part of a complex set of human-microbes’ relationships that can modify the structure and taste of a product, another student said: “More than fifty percent of our body is composed of microbes, if you really think about that you can understand that the limits of self and not self are so blurred.” Indeed, the focus on microbes leads to considering each one’s body as more than a single and defined unit, but rather as the result of multiple interactions that make up the very nature of the human.

Roberta Raffaetà conducted ethnographic research in the Segata lab, a laboratory of metagenomics at the Center for Integrative Biology in Trento, Italy. She analyzes the ways in which microbes became real social actors through meta-genomic findings. She urges reflection to consider identity itself as the result of interactions mediated by microbes:

Microbes are part of our very identity as humans. The composition and activity of microbes are central aspects for carrying out multiple processes involving health such as metabolism, weight regulation, the activity of the immune system, allergic reactions, reactions to stress and the success of therapies, they even influence mood and personality. [...] The interactions we establish with other humans and non-human beings shape and change our microbes […]. Instead of describing health as the property of a single organism’s immune system working to stop and kill invading enemies, we are in the era when [microbes] are considered necessary for our health. (Raffaetà 2020, 29)

In other words, our health and our identity as humans is not simply a characteristic of the individual, but something that is created in the complex relations between people, environment, and microbes that co-evolves and co-constructs our experience of “being in the world.”

What permaculture invites us to do as a preliminary operation to design actions is to think with complexity, look at the system and disarticulate human centrality. Therefore, bacteria and fermentation offered a great opportunity to rethink ourselves, our health, our social networks, our experiences, our life environment. Including microbes in permaculture projects means considering humans as a dynamic ecosystem with permeable boundaries, merging with the microbiome of the earth, of the vegetable garden and of the animals that coexist in the same system: if the soil is ill and dead without microbes, food will also be “dead” and produces unhealthy people unable to take care of the soil. The logical consequence is to consider as equally valuable the well-being of animals, plants, soil, water, micro-organisms, and humans. Microbes not only have a role as partners and co-builders of the system but circulate creating connections between elements. “My hens, my apples, my soil, and me, we share the same, local, microbiome.” Said one of the teachers during my permaculture course at Emma’s place.

From this perspective it is almost self-evident that to produce good, fermented food, one needs organic vegetables, because chemical products even on the peel could kill or alter the product’s micro-biota. It is even better if you grow them yourself, which is doubly valuable because locally grown vegetables will share with you the same native, well-cared-for, healthy, biodiverse, and domesticated indigenous bacteria.

Students in the workshop reflected on how, in order to produce good food and enough surplus to store for months through fermentation, it is important to “care for the earth” (first permaculture ethic), which enables the production of healthy food for “people care” (second permaculture ethic), in turn enabling “fair share” (third permaculture ethic) with people, but also fair sharing of the environment with our tiny companion species (Haraway 2008).

In this section, thanks to the reflections that emerged during a 72-hour permaculture course, I pointed out how fermenting food can assume a specific meaning if understood as starting from the ethics and principles of permaculture: microbes blur the boundaries of the self, enabling a more global vision, dis-articulating human centrality to advocate for shifting attention to what happens in the processes in-between the single elements, in-between the web of meanings woven in an inter-species story (Tsing et al, 2019; Haraway 2019), where microbes and humans have domesticated each other. In the final section I try to bridge the micro vision with a broader socio-political one based in Sardinia.

Chapter 4. Eating is an Agricultural Act: Resistance, Resilience, and the

Fermentation Revolution

There is a close link between historical events, relations of agricultural production and hegemonic/subaltern classes in Sardinia; that is to say, there is a complex relation between the bucolic imagery of the countryside with Sardinian shepherds and peasants as industrious, pious, respectful, proud, and natural; the metahistorical mythologizing of the “albeit genuine feeling of otherness” (Angioni 1982, 15) of Sardinians and the idea that “the bad were and are always people from outside!” (ibid.). Even nowadays it is common among Sardinians to portray Sardinia as suffering from the Italian mainland’s extractive attitude towards the island. This idea is supported by historical facts, described also in both popular and scientific texts. It is not possible here to delve adequately into the historical and cultural dimensions of this phenomenon, as well as the mechanisms that led and lead to a certain mystification of historical events. For an analysis of this issue, it is worth referring to Angioni’s contributions (Angioni 1982, 1986, 2000 and 2003). For the purposes of this discussion, however, it is useful to mention the historical moments that marked a rupture between environmental conditions, technical means and knowledge, and the social devices that enable and organize it (the social relations of production) (Angioni 1986,148). These historical events were the introduction of a feudal system with the Aragonese conquest and, during the Savoy administration, its abolition. These “marked the crisis of civil society in the last seven centuries of Sardinian history, as well as for the history of Europe in general, but experienced here in a manner more similar to that which was characteristic of the countries colonized by European powers: in both cases there is a traumatic change imposed from the outside mainly to favor external interests” (Angioni 1982, 75). In particular, the Savoy of Piemonte administration period from the 1720s until the unification of Italy in 1861 is often cited in people’s conversations as a symbol of the damage suffered by the island, especially the 1800s when Sardinia was deforested to satisfy the kingdom’s need for building materials. On this issue Colpi di scure e sensi di colpa [Hatchet strokes and guilt]) by Caterini (which also inspired a documentary Àrbores – una storia dimeticata [Àrbores – A Forgotten Story]) had a certain resonance within the permaculturists network, formal and informal ecological groups and independence-based movements. It was during the same period of Savoy administration that the feudal system was dismantled. In 1820 a law was enacted: l’editto delle chiudende (“The Edict of Enclosures”) which gradually dismantled the traditional practice of using unfenced lands near towns as common lands for the local community’s cultivation and grazing (defined with the word ademprivi ). Many Sardinians perceived these fenced lands, that were no longer available for common usage (but used by large landowners, often originally from the mainland), as “stolen” from locals in favor of private outsiders’ interests. In some understandings of the historical events, this theft goes along with the loss of ancient agro-pastoral practices of sharing, with the impoverishment of communities, the depopulation of rural areas, soil erosion and pollution due to industrial monocultures (Parascandolo 2016). During the 2019 festival of Mediterranean Permaculture organized by permaculturists in Sardinia, professor Parascandolo from the University of Cagliari was invited to present his and Maurizio Fadda’s book Il nostro cibo – per la sovranità alimentare della sardegna (Our Food – For the Food Sovereignty of Sardinia): a passionate manifesto on the importance of local food production, advocating small farms and urban gardens as a way to regenerate an environment depleted by massive global monoculture holdings, and showing how, along with the loss of ancient practices and common lands, the local social context was also lost. The discourse on island food sovereignty (Parascandolo and De Meo, 2020) takes strong roots in post-colonial identity discourses: on several websites and blogs advocating for the region’s independence it is denounced that more of 80% of food consumed on the island comes from across the Mediterranean Sea, although the Sardinian economy is traditionally based on agriculture and livestock.

In a framework where “people care, earth care and fair share” are considered the basic ethics for designing, the commitment to having more power and control over the quality of food production and distribution is broadly shared. Indeed, if humans and human communities are part of an integrated system, if each element gives to and takes from the system contributing to its overall health, if everyone must take responsibility for his or her actions, then actions are evaluated by the consequences that they produce on the set of interconnections and the context’s resilience. In the specific case of permaculture in Sardinia this seems to assume deeper meanings than a general attitude of conscious consumption because of the aforementioned issues: the value of “relatedness” incorporated into any permaculture project but also the importance given to local traditions.

In the first section I mentioned s’agiúdu torrau as a restored and re-invented tradition. It is now useful to illustrate a further way in which agro-pastoral traditions and permaculture intertwine. Another ancient attitude still deeply felt is that of hospitality. Sardinian hospitality is used both in tourist advertising and in identity discourse. A vast amount of literature has been produced on Sardinian identity. In this context, Gino Satta analyses how tradition and identity discourses are performed by the tourism industry and offers an interesting compendium of hospitality practices on the island. Welcoming “the other” who enters the home, the “stranger,” whether from another nation, region, town, or household, involves offering food to either consume together or to take home. This is a widespread practice throughout the Mediterranean, rooted in Greek and Roman culture, whose presence is still strong in Sardinia. Su cumbidu, “the invitation,” consists of “offers of symbolic goods that take place according to a precise etiquette when a stranger comes to visit one’s home or between fellow villagers in public spaces” (Satta 2001, 167) The attitude is so strongly felt and widespread that the use of the Italian term invito (“invitation”) also changes. It is common in Sardinia (not only using the local regional language, but also in Italian) to use the expression “I invite you a coffee” (ti invito un caffè), instead of “I’ll offer you a coffee/I invite you for a coffee” (ti offro un caffè/ti invito per un caffè): the thing offered as a hospitality invitation and the invitation itself merge in a single concept. Cosimo Zene worked on gift-giving in central Sardinia and the customary law of vendetta. Referring to a specific kind of gift (“the [...] imbiatu to define a system which refers to the mutual ‘sharing’ of food” (Zene 2007, 293)) he says:

this system is meant to strengthen not only ties of cooperation and solidarity amongst the villagers but also to maintain a way of life and of ‘being’, which refers to group and community identity. This is very close to what Mauss defines as ‘total social fact’ or ‘prestation totale’, because it both concerns groups of peoples as opposed to individuals and touches upon so many aspects of social life. (ibid.)

As with the gifts analyzed in Marcel Mauss’ famous essay (1923–24), the gift given binds the parties in a social relationship that continues over time a mutual interaction through giving and taking: “Si cheres chi s’amore si mantenzat, prattu chi andet, prattu chi benzat” – “if you want love to endure, for every plate that leaves, let a plate return” (Gallini 1973, 60). It is not possible to go deeper into the many shapes and meanings gift and gift economy assume on the Island, but we can touch upon the exchange of gifts as a political ethical practice among permaculturists.

Figure 6. Maurizio Fadda, co-author of the book Our Food - For the Food Sovereignty of Sardinia . During a Permaculture course in 2023. He held a lesson on the importance of preserving local and ancient varieties of seeds and hand threshing. On the t-shirt: “Eating is an agricultural act.” Photograph by the author.

In the second chapter I mentioned Adelmo, a permaculturist and teacher. Adelmo lived for a while in a camper van. He once told me that he found himself troubled entering friends’ homes: “In Sardinia it is customary to enter people’s homes by knocking with your feet” he said. Knocking with feet means that your hands are not free, they are busy with things to share, almost always food or drink. “Living mobile, I have no homegrown food to share, so I often stop over in their homes and exchange what I have, my ability to make” (Adelmo, conversation May 2021).

Figure 6. Seed exchange during the 2023 PDC. Photograph by the author.

Therefore, when I started visiting friends too, knocking on their front doors with my feet, instead of having my hands busy with industrial products, I preferred carrying my own products. Because I did not have a farm and my bread did not taste that good yet, I used to share ginger beer and kombucha. Someone even renamed me as “Miss Ginger.” I always left friends’ homes with my hands fuller than when I arrived, full of seeds or of vegetables to improve my fermentations. My vegetable garden had to grow to host the many new varieties and my skills in fermentation grew along with my friendship ties.

So far, it is possible to understand the practices of fermentation among permaculturists in Sardinia as an oriented action of resistance to a system of consumption and erosion of soil (and human relations), as a strategy to take back the power from the big agro economy (and from external interests) and oriented towards a different care of soil, land and life; all this seems to pass through the reference to precise Sardinian traditions.

Conclusions

Throughout this article I have investigated fermentation among permaculturists in Sardinia by assessing how their practices incorporate values and a precise interpretation of the island’s history, land ownership and the economic system of food production, but most of all how permaculture fosters a different way of perceiving the world: from micro to macro scales and back, following a meshwork of relationships between human and other-than-human beings. In this framework people are understood not as individuals but as micro-biomes consistent with their environment, each element somehow seen as a symbiotic colony of microorganisms. This makes boundaries between “nature” and humans less clear-cut, unhinging the centrality of the human in the ecosystem and means that to strengthen the whole system it is necessary to take care of each element. Indeed, in permaculture the functional analysis and the high value accorded to relations and interconnection, the awareness of being mainly a system and not an individual, are applied also in human network relations, fostering a different way of balancing costs and benefits in actions and design choices.

Permaculturists in Sardinia, in the exchange of “cared-for” fermented foods, seem to incorporate local traditions of gifting and mutual help. Food fermentation can thus be understood as politically situated in a discourse of resistance, a day-to-day revolution. Indeed, as Raffaetà points out, “the governance of bodies is mediated by the regulation of microbes” (Raffaetà 2020, 35), therefore caring about local microbial biodiversity when growing and fermenting fruits and vegetables seems to incorporate the desire to have more power over bodies and relations: “dissent over how to live with microorganisms reflects disagreement about how humans ought to live with one another” (Paxson, 2014, 115). In this perspective, growing vegetables for human nutrition, transforming the surplus and conserving it for several months to ensure good nutrition and the possibility of sharing healthy and “alive” food, seems to reinforce the politically-oriented actions linked to the three ethics, a conscious and shared reflection on how humans can live together and share their world with their “tiny companion species” (Haraway 2008).

At the very beginning of Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy’s work Take Back the Economy: An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities (2013) the authors state: “Our economy is the outcome of the decisions we make and the actions we take” (xiii), adding that “ethical action is a practice of adopting new habits—habits of reflecting on our interconnections with others, approaching the new with an inquiring mind and an appreciative stance, trusting others as we jointly encounter a future of unknowns and uncertainties, and learning to allay our fears and conjure creativity” (xviii). Through fermentation the people I met are performing a diverse economy through ethical actions (Roelvink et al. 2015): small, everyday actions such as eating, excreting, exchanging gifts or creatively co-operating with microbes to regenerate the soil. One of the predominant tenets of modern economics is growth; ethnographic data suggests that the difference in permaculturalists’ performed diverse economy does not have to do with the idea of growth, but rather with what has to grow through exchanges. Using functional analysis to balance the system’s inputs and outputs of energy, growth means enhancing the number of interconnections and elements linked to one another, from the microscopic to humans and up to wind and rainfall, with the aim of promoting abundance of fruits and interconnections, limiting the erosion of soil and relations, and ultimately working towards a different world and a future of wealth for the planet.

In an everyday context and at the most practical level they seem to challenge the concept of “Capitalocene” proposed by Moore (2015). Indeed, Moore suggests, exactly like that of unpaid labor in Marxist theory, a capitalistic approach to nature requires to look for “unpaid nature.” He calls this the “law of cheap nature” for commodity production. Food and raw materials are two of the four basic “cheap nature” categories. Functional analysis seems to offer a tool for budgeting “value” differently. Permaculturists’ actions are not driven by mere criticism of capitalism but are ontologically based in a different “economical balance” following a different “law of value” (Moore 2015) in designing their projects: not the law of cheap nature but the “law of relatedness.”

We can imagine the category of relatedness as something more than the connection of humans and their socio-cultural norms; we can imagine the possibility of being part of a broader system of elements, each giving something to, and taking from, the complex of rules and interactions, generating a new, alternative ontology. It is a concept close to the “making of kin” advocated by Haraway (2015) in an intentional community of reciprocal care and response-ability (including humans, non-humans, other-than-humans, the inhuman). It is important to equip ourselves with theoretical categories to name and understand our transformative power over systems we live in, but it is equally important to develop tools to guide, comprehend and budget actions, practices and choices in a different economic and political frame. All this is to suggest that Sardinian permaculturists are experimenting with a different “economic balance” to act and interact, rooted in a specific tradition context. Maybe Sardinian permaculturists’ practices are putting to work tools, such as functional analysis and the “law of relatedness,” to promote a new way of valuing interactions, reciprocal exchange and, finally, of generating alternative-cenes beyond the Capitalocene.

With this consideration, my research on fermentation practices among permaculturists in Sardinia has tried to offer an entry point to some questions, but may also open up to further research: how does this specific kind of “ecotopia” (Lockyer and Veteto, 2013) materialize in daily actions? Which principles guide the choices of people who recognize themselves within the philosophical framework of permaculture, and how do these allow them to move from the level of ethics to that of practice, and vice versa? How can local agro-pastoral traditions be renewed (and maybe also undermined) looking for a fairer future for human and other-than-human beings sharing the planet? Are permaculturists’ practices in Sardinia performing a diverse economy, following a different “economic balance” of their actions in designing interaction between humans, non-humans, and environment? Are we witnessing an experiment of a “new ontological politics” through setting the table for microbes?

Acknowledgments

In this article I have tried to engage in a reflection on what I learned during many enlightening conversations with permaculturists: a mycorrhizal undergrowth of people who generously accepted to share with me not only their food but also their ideas and perspectives. I must thank in particular Tom Rodgers, the permaculturist and anthropologist I mentioned in the text, Nanni Concu, permaculturist and environmental economist and Furio Settimi, passionate permaculturist and promoter of the 2023 permaculture design course.