Loss

Pickling “connects you to your place,” said Eugenia Bone, author of the forthcoming cookbook Urban Preservation. In an effort to eat seasonally, the local food movement has rediscovered pickling as a method of preserving the summer’s bounty for the winter. In 2007 the Oxford English Dictionary's word of year was "locavore," someone who eats food grown or produced locally or within a certain distance, such as 100 miles.

Members of the local food movement believe that eating local food in season reduces a person’s carbon footprint, avoiding the resources expended as produce travels hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles by plane, train or truck to reach supermarkets.

Health is another pressing concern. Bone said that the end product of the corporate food chain is diabetes and obesity. Katz noted that boxed, irradiated and pasteurized foods lack beneficial bacteria, and are, in fact, dead. He said that those who consume only factory-made food become “microbial blank slates,” with weak immune systems susceptible to disease. Pickles and other traditional fermented foods can help replenish the intestinal bacteria that aid in digestion.

New York University food historian Gabriella Petrick pointed out that corporate food isn’t all bad, connecting supermarket chains to lower food prices, which translate into affordable meals for the poor.

Still, Robert LaValva, director of New Amsterdam Market, a nonprofit organization dedicated to establishing a year-round public market on the site of the old Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan, romanticizes about a time when local farms fed city neighborhoods. LaValva holds the relationship between farm and city on par with cultural institutions like the Sistine Chapel in Rome. “It’s part of our humanity, it’s part of our society,” he said. “You should treasure and preserve it.”

Revival

Home pickling is making a comeback - whether it’s fermentation revivalists like Katz, who travels the country speaking about fermented food; pickling classes at the Natural Gourmet Institute, a culinary school; or the monthly pickling and fermentation parties Taylor Cocalis, 24, educational coordinator for Murray’s Cheese Shop in Greenwich Village, plans for friends in her Park Slope apartment.

The pickle complements the New York City lifestyle, according to Nancy Ralph, founder of the New York Food Museum, whose annual Pickle Day in July draws crowds of up to 20,000. “If you make food every night, pickling won’t work,” Ralph said. “Living in New York City, you may not cook every night – all the reason to pickle.” A jar in the refrigerator can perk up last night's leftovers or provide tasty late-night snacks.

Home pickling is also an alternative for New Yorkers who have little room to tend a garden. “For most people in an apartment in New York City, it’s a lot easier to imagine having a half gallon of sauerkraut fermenting on a countertop than it is to have a garden,” said Katz. “That’s a direct connection to the source of food that anybody – no matter how cramped their living space is – can integrate into their lives.”

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