Fermented Foods and the Path to Enlightenment: A Love Story

Poppets! Happiest of Mondays of a short week here in the States. FYI: The Missive will be dark this Thursday and Friday, whilst I attempt to make and consume as many brown butter pecan pies as possible #blessed

This is an old one, but eternally relevant to my interests: in 2015, psychiatrists posited “that fermented foods— such as pickles, sauerkraut, and yogurt—ease the eater’s social anxiety and in particular their neuroticism.” Supposedly, social anxiety decreases in an amount directly related to an increase in consumption of fermented foods. So the next time someone makes fun of your Kombucha homebrew, tell them that it’s so you can deal with the anxiety of chatting with their judge-y ass. Actually, don’t do that. Would definitely offset the offset of stress.

Also an oldie over at Smithsonian Magazine, “A Plea to Resurrect the Christmas Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories.“ I love ghost stories. Let’s make this a thing, mmmkay? And btw friends, if anyone ever forces you to describe me in one online publication (you know, that totally normal comparison that people always make whilst describing their loved ones,) I hope you’d say Smithsonian Magazine or JStor Daily, which also published The Irish Were Way Ahead of the Soda Water Trend.

And speaking of JSTOR Daily, I recommend you check out this piece on the interwar years in Germany entitled Gender Identity in Weimar Germany. What gets frequently forgotten when discussing the rise of Hitler and Nazism is that the Weimar Republic was way ahead of its time when it came to progressive laws related to gender and gender identity. As I mentioned previously, I just finished reading The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic by Benjamin Carter Hett, which details the political climate into which the Nazis established political power. Does the book, and therefore me, say that there are haunting political parallels between the dismantling of a liberal, democratic state in a very short period of time and say, I don’t know, NOW? That’s for you to decide (breathes into a paper bag.)

Be kind to each other, why don't ya?

Yours in academic nerdy,

Xoxo Amy