Ever since I met Frank Cook back in 2008, I’d always wanted to interview his friend, Sandor Katz. The two of them were good friends and conducted workshops together. In this short video Sandor talks about his friendship with Frank, and the ways they were exploring wild foods and wild fermentation…
“My name is Sandor Katz. I am the author of a book called Wild Fermentation and another book called The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.
I met Frank around 2003 (I believe) for the first time. Our first encounter was at a gathering in North Carolina that was called the Pollinator Gathering, and Frank arrived just as I was leaving. But all weekend long people had been talking about him and that he and I should meet each other.
While I was teaching people about many different modes of fermentation, making sauerkraut, making tempeh, making miso, making meads. Frank was mostly focusing on making meads, specifically herbal elixir meads. As a means of preserving plant medicine from his foraging walks.
For me it was a pleasure to teach with someone who I liked so much, who I had so much to learn from and really tag-team teaching was wonderful because we could really put ourselves into it 100%, and then have a little bit of downtime where we could rest and relax and rejuvenate and get ready for the next bit of teaching.
He was always getting people working with their hands in the kitchen and then getting them outside, getting them to know the plants that were right around them.
Frank was so amazing on plant walks, because he rarely got very far. He had such a really comprehensive knowledge of plants that you would just get out in the yard and there would be hours of things to talk about within an easy walk around the house.
The students and Frank would always bring back bags of leaves, roots, berries and fruits and things that they had harvested and we would figure out how to incorporate them into fermented vegetables as well as into herbal elixir meads.
On our workshops that were more than one day, we would always make tempeh and incorporate that into the meal, and we would often make ‘Idli’. Frank had travelled the world much more extensively than I had, so he had experienced a food like ‘Idli’ in its indigenous context in a way that I hadn’t. So he knew the right kind of ‘Dal’ stew and the right kind of chutney to prepare with it. So we always had a really fruitful collaboration.
And actually the last workshop that we taught was just about a week before he died. He wasn’t feeling very well and it was a two day workshop, and at the end of the first day he told me that if he wasn’t feeling better in the morning, that he didn’t think he’d be able to be there for the second day.
But in the morning he arrived and said that he had slept great and felt much better, and he threw himself into it. And then that weekend he went to a permaculture gathering, the South East Permaculture Gathering in North Carolina, and he led a plant walk there. He was definitely low energy but I had no sense at all that he was seriously ill, and on the verge of death. I don’t know if he did either.
I get the impression from talking to mutual friends that he realised that he was dealing with something serious and that he was making a little bit of an effort to downplay it, so as not to worry people.
But really since Frank’s death I have had a lot of reflection, trying to take on the important work that he was doing and trying to incorporate some of the teaching that I had always deferred to him, because he was doing it so much better than I could imagine doing it myself.
I do have this huge sense of loss not only of a beautiful human being and friend but of someone who had a really specific gift that he was sharing people in an active way.
I have been really trying to take on some of that sharing with people that he was doing. One way that I have been doing that is incorporating acorns into my life, and into the teaching that I have been doing. That was something Frank was absolutely passionate about. This abundant, protein rich food source that was so widely available, and so widely ignored. So I have been working more with acorns, and incorporating that into the work that I do with fermentation.
Also, to the more limited extent that I have knowledge about plants that are edible and useful and common. I am trying to share that information with people more.
You know Frank influenced many, many people. It was funny, at his memorial service I met 7Song who was his first plant teacher who he talked about a lot. And 7Song talked about how gratifying it was for him to have a student who really got out into the world sharing this information so much. Wherever 7Song went he would meet people who would say “Oh, you’re Frank Cook’s teacher”. And what an honour and gratifying thing it was for him.
So yeah, Frank really put himself out there and was so passionate and so willing to share what he knew and what he’d learned.”
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