Fizz out vs pop steady
When you think of elementary school science fairs, you might picture wobbly, not-quite-to-scale planetary models… or baking soda and vinegar volcanoes. To be clear, that was exactly what everyone around me had on display. But not me. Way back in 1989, when I had bangs and wore jean jackets for the first time, I had one hell of a science fair project.
I made root beer.
Which meant that I could win points for serving sugar water to voting participants- skewing brain chemistry towards dopamine production, but I digress.
The whole idea came from my father; he brewed root beer with his dad. He mentioned, off hand, that the bottles of maturing soda pop would occasionally explode, blasting bottle caps against the basement ceiling and startling everyone. The idea of explosions, combined with soft drinks was irresistible.
So, I of course chose the very academic sounding topic of fermentation to get this thing past the elementary school review board.
Of course, this meant that I had to look a few things up. I had to explain what was going on inside the bottle to give soda its nose-tickling bubbles. I had to draw diagrams and chemical equations on tri-fold posterboard. I showed how flavored sugar water with a pinch of baking yeast set off a series of chemical reactions that transformed some of the sugar into carbon dioxide and something called ethanol (yes alcohol). Since it was the eighties, nobody asked any questions, because science terms.
If you put everything in a bottle and capped it, the carbon dioxide would have nowhere to go, thus accumulating in the liquid and creating a fizzy brew. The sheer pressure of carbon dioxide could occasionally become too much for the bottle to contain, and the bottle caps would be pushed off in a cascade of bubbles usually only seen with champagne after a NASCAR race.
Here I am, some thirty years later, still enamored with the idea of fermentation.
My late summer garden is churning out more produce than we can eat at the moment, and I am finding every way possible to put it to use. Canning and freezing are on my agenda, of course. But so is the magical process of fermentation.
Maybe it was the early exposure to the concept from my root beer project. Maybe it is my extensive immersion into Eastern and Central European food culture on my mother’s side (Sauerkraut, pickles… vodka). Whatever it is, I still get excited to participate in the yearly ritual of creating delicious food that will last me until my garden creates more next year.
This cycle of the seasons used to be something that we all understood. The ebb and the flow. The quiet times and the busy times. The times to build up reserves and the time when you will rely on those very reserves to sustain you.
But these days, my participation in this cycle is sometimes viewed as luxury rather than necessity. Because we don’t derive our living from producing consumable things for ourselves. Anymore, we live from money gained from trading our time to produce things (both durable and intellectual) that a company will profit from. This work is not seasonal, but constant, and requires constant effort and bandwidth no matter a person’s ability to perform.
After reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, I couldn’t help but wonder if modern capitalism is trying to override the natural human tendency to work deeper and better with variation in effort over the seasons. In his book, he discusses the tendency of modern work, intellectual work in particular, to be under the pressure of constant productivity. So much so, that people engage in pseudo productivity to be seen as “doing a good job” and experience high rates of burn out in the process.
To go back to the gardening/ preserving analogy, it would make no sense to keep the constant pace of productivity that occurs in late summer throughout the fall and winter. Apart from there being naturally less to do, it would waste valuable time that could be used in contemplation and planning for the following year. Sure, those two actions- production and contemplation- look totally unrelated. One is definitely more, well, productive at first glance.
But, without the slower time, the time to reflect on challenges and successes, the time to consider what changes might need to be made, there can be no beneficial transformation that can translate into the next season of productivity.
While the cabbage and salt slowly transform to sauerkraut in 5 liter crocks on my winter countertop, I will also take the information from the year and subject it to deep thought, to contemplation. In the absence of other activity, new and different focus is permitted. Disparate concepts find ways to fit together and enzymatically cultivate the new.
Like Newport, I believe we need these seasons to sustain true productivity and create actual genius. There is no getting around these human tendencies. I mean, we can and do medicate ourselves to push through the artificial modern models, whether its with prescriptions or alcohol or perfectionism.
Why wouldn’t we instead, leave time for quiet? Why wouldn’t we allow for variation in our pace? How come we don’t solve for working in a more natural way?
The pressure of producing beyond what is seasonal, beyond what is natural can explode into the sticky mess that we have now, mental health crises and quiet quitting. Beyond metaphor, we are doing this type of thing in every industry from corporate agriculture to medicine and wonder why we see worsening outcomes.
There is a limit to productivity. And in the deepest irony possible, limits are often best overcome by taking breaks, and allowing space for deep work to develop. Limits are overcome by the natural human tendency to fit activity into cycles rather than one never-ending, constant routine.
This is true of both humans and home-brewed soda pop.
The best bottles of root beer were never the ones with hyper-productive fermentation. In fact, too much sugar and yeast made for spectacular and rather dangerous bottle explosions. They produced a fury of carbon dioxide in a short period only to crash and burn. The destroyed bottles never get to be reused in subsequent production cycles. Of course, not enough fermentation, and it goes without saying that they weren’t worth drinking.
But then there were the bottles that got just the right mixture; they produced a velvety pop of flavor and fizz. These ones took a little longer to develop, of course. They had the time and conditions to get it right, to transform water, sugar, yeast and a flask of flavoring into something deeper, better. Something that I could proudly serve up to friends and judges alike, never mind that pesky 3% alcohol level.
The point of all of this (hallelujah) is, humans probably do what they do best without the constant need to produce. We can land in genius territory by working deeply at a pace that suits us. We can overcome obstacles, not by forcing past them, but by taking the time to reflect on them.
I’ll raise a glass of (root) beer to that.
