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Vancouver resident Lorraine Burke remembers as a child watching her grandmother ferment cabbage to create sauerkraut.

Back then it was a way for her grandmother to preserve the vegetables she grew on her farm.

But decades later, Ms. Burke, who is now in her 50s, has started seeing fermented foods in a new light.

A few months ago, she tried drinking kombucha, a Japanese fermented tea. Then she reintroduced sauerkraut into her diet. Lately, she has been downing a tablespoon of fermented apple cider vinegar every morning.

“It's improved my digestion is what it comes down to,” said Ms. Burke, who swears the live bacteria in the ferments helps her cope with spicy dishes, which she couldn't stomach before.

“I'm into [ferments] in a big way now,” she said, adding that she even keeps her own kombucha tea starter living in a jar in her fridge.

Turned off by processed foods and artificial preservatives, a new wave of foodies are making their own sauerkrauts, kimchees and brined pickles the old-fashioned way – encouraging bacteria and yeast to work their course.

While some, such as Ms. Burke, are drawn to the taste and purported health benefits of ferments, many fans also have a philosophical view.

“With the way the world is going now and everything's spiralling out of control … food is something that people can really take control of,” said Tamara McPhail, a resident steward of Linnaea Farm on Cortes Island, B.C., who recently began fermenting some of the vegetables she grows.

“Even if you've got a small bachelor pad, you've got room to ferment food.”

Almost anything can be fermented (techniques vary) – transforming vegetables into sauerkrauts, honey into mead, fruit into wines, dairy into yogurt, and meat into prosciutto and salami, said Sandor Ellix Katz, a self-proclaimed “fermentation fetishist” and Tennessee-based author of Wild Fermentation: The Flavour, Nutrition and Craft of Live-Culture Foods.

Though people around the world have been fermenting foods for thousands of years, it began falling out of household practice in the latter half of the 20th century as large-scale food production took off, Mr. Katz said.

Its popularity continued to wane for another reason: To the untrained eye, it looks a lot like simply leaving food out to rot.

However, fermentation involves manipulating conditions to encourage the growth of certain types of microorganisms while keeping others at bay, Mr. Katz said. For instance, sauerkraut involves submerging cabbage under liquid so that mould won't grow, while acidifying bacteria proliferate, which gives sauerkraut its sour taste.

Mr. Katz said a few of his experiments have gone awry, either when the temperature wasn't right or when he failed to evenly distribute a starter. On other occasions, flies have ruined batches of food.

“I've had maggots crawling out of it,” he said.

Still, there is little risk of food poisoning if people rely on their senses, said chef Andrea Potter, who teaches fermentation classes at Vancouver's Radha Yoga & Eatery and through the Sustainable Living Arts School.

“The thing with fermented foods is when something's going wrong – which doesn't happen very often – it really lets you know. There's something so putrid about the smell, you'll never try to put it in your mouth,” she said.

And when it goes right, Ms. Potter said, one of the fascinating things about fermentation is the end results are more than the sum of their parts. The combination of cabbage and salt becomes an entirely new food, vinegary and rich in B vitamins produced from thriving microbes.

Not all ferments contain live bacteria when they are consumed – for instance, baking kills the micro-organisms that create sourdough bread – but the living microbes in many ferments, including probiotic yogurts, aid digestion and are believed to help the body ward off diseases.

Mr. Katz said some people have even credited ferments for alleviating their symptoms of Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome and acid reflux.

Registered dietician Gloria Tsang agrees that probiotics, which have recently been heavily promoted by yogurt maker Danone, are scientifically proven to enhance people's absorption of nutrients.

But she said she could find little research to suggest fermented products should be categorically regarded as superfoods.

“I know they're not bad,” said Ms. Tsang, a Vancouver member of the Dietitians of Canada and founder of the nutrition website HealthCastle.com.

Still, she said, people with compromised immune systems and patients heading into surgery should avoid eating live bacterial cultures altogether.

For enthusiasts, however, the fermentation revival is about more than just health. It's about working with the sources of food – plants, animals and microbes, Mr. Katz said.

“It's about recontextualizing food in our lives,” he said.

Special to The Globe and Mail