Book Review of Kimura H., Aya. Fermenting for the Future: Japanese Pickles and Microbial Foodways, California, LA: University of California Press, 2026. 336 pp., ISBN 9780520410015.

Abstract

Fermenting for the Future follows Japanese tsukemono to examine how industrialization, empire, technoscience, and capitalism have transformed relations among microbes, plants, people, and place. Through fermentation assemblages, book chapters trace an antibiotic turn marked by sterilization, standardization, agricultural delocalization, and declining microbial and crop diversity, alongside a contemporary probiotic turn that revalues microbes as agents of health and ecological renewal. Yet microbial revival remains ambivalent: beneficial bacteria can be isolated and commodified, while the relations that sustain fermented foodways continue to disappear. Bringing microbiopolitics into conversation with political economy and sensory practices, the book asks how human–microbial relations might be cultivated without romanticizing fermentation. Ultimately, it foregrounds decomposition as a neglected dimension of agrifood systems, showing that microbial resurgence requires confronting the political-economic conditions that have made microbial and agricultural diversity precarious.