In the culinary world, the name David Zilber is synonymous with fermentation.
Once known as the head of fermentation at the world-renowned restaurant Noma, Zilber co-authored The Noma Guide To Fermentation with René Redzepi. Zilber is one of the few people to make the leap from chef to fermentation guru to food scientist, which Zilber says he can be "all those things at once".
"I think a pandemic, having the world shake beneath your feet is a good way to reassess your life. In 2020, I'd been in Noma for over six years. I was part of the great resignation and the big pivot. I felt it wasn't the end, it was just the beginning. I read a lot of history books and thought this isn't going to go away quickly. I didn't think it's going to be very enjoyable to work in this restaurant setting. So I decided I'd put in my time; I did good work there. I'd achieved more than I'd ever imagined I would when I first stepped through those doors. So I took a leap," explains Zilber.
However, he did not think that it would be the end of fine dining as we know it.
"I thought it would be a contraction. There will always be a desire for the very wealthy to feel like they're being pampered; and for special occasion restaurants for normal people. I don't think it can go away that easily," he says.
Chef David Zilber.
"But I did and even before the pandemic, I'd talked about how maybe the world of fine dining or the amounts of restaurants trying to do very ambitious food was oversaturated and that you were seeing symptoms within the industry. Not having a talent pool large enough to support the ambitions of everyone who had their doors open to do thoughtful, ambitious tasting menus, things like that.
"So that kind of signalled to me that maybe the industry was due for a bit of a shrink. That has in fact happened. A lot of restaurants, very good restaurants, have closed over the past few years. The strong ones have survived and a lot of people got out of the industry, myself included."
But where does one go after working at Noma?
"I had no idea what I was going to do when I quit. There's this book I love by Julia Cameron, called The Artist's Way. It's like a workshop of a book that teaches you how to be creative whether you're a painter or a designer or a writer. It's like exercises in creativity. One of my favourite quotes from that book is, 'Jump and the net will appear'. That's what happened. Right after I quit, Chr. Hansen called me, a bioscience company from Denmark," says Zilber.
A talk with Chr. Hansen, which develops natural solutions for the food, nutritional, pharmaceutical and agricultural industries, morphed into building Zilber's laboratory, "basically a playground for me to experiment with in their sandbox, recipe develop and put their bacteria to work in the food industry. It is important to me to work within sustainability, to try to do good and apply what I know to better the world in whatever small way I can", says Zilber.
"Even when I was at Noma, we were doing joint research together. They would send me fun microbes, I would mess around with them and tell them what I thought. When they reached out to me, it was a chance to kind of flip the script on its head.
"I wrote an open letter that I published online where I talked about this kind of inverse relationship to the clout that chefs in food get, the press, the influence, the airtime and the media, for the amount of people that they actually feed. You see a cover of Time magazine labelled 'The Gods Of Food' with three chefs, who have restaurants that seat maybe 40 people each.
"Are they really the gods of food or are the gods of food the food scientists working in some of the largest corporations like Mondelēz group, Nestle, Unilever, who you never hear about? You wouldn't know them unless you were on the food science page and LinkedIn.
"Isn't it more effective to work in that arena? Knowing what you know, if you really think that you're trying to affect change? That's what I wanted to do and that's what I'm getting to do. I would say it's more of an uphill battle than I might have thought. The food industry has a way of being conservative, even when they're trying to be progressive. It's very slow moving, but nonetheless, there are a lot of people out there who have great intentions and want to do a lot of good and make food better for people."
Lots of stuff has come Zilber's way since leaving Noma. He even came to Thailand towards the end of last year and cooked and conducted a masterclass at the Intercontinental Phuket's fermentation-focused restaurant, Hom.
"Sure, I may not be as active in fermentation communities as some of the other big fermenters who do circuits at festivals and tons of workshops, and that's amazing. I love doing a little bit of that. But I've done the work," says Zilber emphatically. So much work he's writing another book. "I wish I was writing it faster. I would love it to be finished this coming year; I would love to hand in the manuscript in 2024. I've been working on it for a couple of years now."
But how does fermentation play into the impact of food in today's world, especially with climate change, sustainability and food waste?
"I would say that the average person already eats a ton of fermented food. Fermentation definitely already makes the system far more sustainable than it could potentially be. If you took fermented foods out of our diet, if we only ate fresh or processed food, the world would be a far less sustainable place than it is. Is it a panacea? Can we only eat fermented foods? No. I always like to say that we have a future in the past.
"Fermentation before the kind of green revolution was a huge staple of people's diets and it did allow people's food to last -- that made food more sustainable. Literally. It sustains food. I like to say that if there are again contractions in the agricultural supply chain or food system, that it will kind of be like the natural default to eat more of those foods or processed foods in those moments. Like they haven't gone anywhere, in spite of all of the technological revolutions that have brought everything from chocolate bars to Twinkies to every corner of the busy streets on Earth. But I'd like to say that if the going gets tough, fermented foods will be there to kind of cushion our fall.
"I got into fermentation because it was made my job at Noma. The kind of revelations about the philosophy and the meaning behind it came out afterwards by doing it where I'm like, 'Oh, this is profound'. But I do love fermentation, because of its transformations. How has it transformed me? It gets you to look at nature, differently at the natural world, differently to humanity's place within the natural world, differently. I have a one-year-old so I'm reading all these baby books with them. Baby books have a really great way of simplifying concepts and spoon-feeding them to a child, who's trying to make sense of the world. Fermentation does that, too.
"Fermentation teaches you about the relationships between organisms and the requirements of symbiosis. And the importance of reciprocity, care, attention and intention through these very simple microcosms of food production. When you bake bread, it gets you to consider the histories of the interactions, microbes and weeds or certain vegetables and people who have come together."
Of course, food is always changing even if it seems like we're stuck in a rut.
"People's habits of consumption need to change for food to change for the better. I think humanity has a bad track record of voluntarily giving things up. Humans over the past, say 60 to 70 years since World War II, have had a pretty bad track record of like, 'Oh no, I'll leave the cake on the table'. But when push comes to shove we make do with what we have.
"The optimist in me goes to work every day and puts on experiments and talks to the R&D teams and says 'Hey, we could take this waste product and turn it into something that you could sell that would really improve people's food, or we could take all these chemicals out of your product and make it healthier for people'; you know look for grains to work with that could sequester carbon in the soil. We could be the supplier that affects that change in the world.
"I keep putting it out there. Some gets taken up, maybe at a slower pace than I would like. The optimist in me keeps going to work and wanting to make these things real. The pessimist in me thinks that they won't."
Listen to David Zilber on "The Fermentation Speaker Series" podcast in collaboration with The Center for Human Microbiome Studies at Stanford University's School Of Medicine.
Zilber's fermentation workshop.
