LA: That was so peaceful to listen to, which sounds like the process of making soy itself, that you have to wait a year.
JL: Yeah, I am not a patient person.
LA: I was about to say, are you patient? Because I would be, I don’t know if, I don’t think my skill set is going to be in making soy.
JL: So I think that was also part of what enticed me to make soy sauce as part of, yeah, my grandparents, my grandmother, her family had once been soy sauce manufacturers back in China, and I don’t know, I think once I learned that, just the idea stuck in my head that I wanted to reclaim some of that knowledge somehow. I didn’t want it to be lost knowledge, but I’m not patient, and so I would check on these jars of fermenting soybeans all the time.
I constantly was just peering into the cupboard being like, how are you doing? Are you done yet? Are you ready yet? And of course they’re not. They take a really long time, but it taught me something about waiting and I think gradual change because I documented it on Instagram and I put a lot of videos just to keep a kind of diary of it, and it’s great to look back on because I can see the change when I watch it back, like photo by photo or video by video, but in the moment, it felt like an absolute eternity just waiting for these beans to do their thing, and so much is out of your control.
It really is. Fermentation is kind of about letting go. You can set things up correctly, you can make sure things are clean, make sure things are well prepared to ferment, but then they do their own thing.
LA: Which is so at odds, I think with being a sort of modern day human being, we think we have control over everything and that everything should happen right away, and I mean, what a reminder that we really just, we can’t control it, and we’re totally out of control.
JL: Absolutely. But I mean, if you think about that and relinquishing that control and being open to, I think the joy of it, every month I would have to stir these fermenting soybeans, which meant that I got to check on them once a month, so I would open these jars to stir them and it was, I don’t know, it was kind of like Christmas morning once a month being like, “Okay, how are you?”
LA: I have to ask, was this during COVID?
JL: Yes, of course it was.
LA: I was like, “Yeah, I remember some of my projects and being really excited about them at the time.”
JL: Yeah, I mean, I think the idea, I had been wanting to do it for months before Covid, but it was actually only during COVID that we moved somewhere big enough that I could store huge amounts of soybeans, fermenting for as long as it would take me to actually make soy sauce.
