Which Countries Have the Most Distinct Traditional Fermented Foods?

Which countries have the most distinct fermented foods?

The names at the top of nearly every published inventory are Korea, China, Japan, India, Indonesia and Ethiopia, usually followed by Nigeria, Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico and Turkey. Korea is cited most often, on the strength of the jang family of fermented soybean pastes and sauces, the jeotgal salted seafood ferments, and kimchi — which is not one preparation but a category covering well over a hundred regional and seasonal forms.

That list is stable across sources. It is worth understanding what produces it before treating it as a fact about the world.

Why is Korea always at the top of these lists?

Partly because the traditions are genuinely deep and highly differentiated. But also because Korea has a national food-research infrastructure that has systematically catalogued them, and because that work is published in English. A tradition that has been inventoried, named, described and translated is a tradition that shows up in counts.

The same holds for Japan, China and India. It holds far less well for much of West Africa, Central Asia, the Amazon basin and the Pacific, where fermentation is no less central to the food system but far less of it has been formally documented in a language that international literature reviews search. When a paper reports that one country has more fermented foods than another, the honest reading is that more of one country’s ferments have been written down.

Why do fermentation traditions cluster where they do?

Climate and crop, mostly. Warm, humid regions with a strong soybean agriculture produced the mould-driven ferments of East and Southeast Asia — koji, tempeh, doenjang, natto — because Aspergillus and Rhizopus thrive there. Cold northern regions with a dairy surplus and a short growing season produced the lactic dairy ferments of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Scandinavia. Regions with an abundant vegetable harvest and a long winter produced the brine ferments of Korea, Eastern Europe and Anatolia.

Preservation pressure is the other half. Fermentation clusters densely where a harvest had to survive months without refrigeration, and where the fuel to cook or the salt to cure was expensive relative to the labour of managing a crock.

What does a count like this actually miss?

Our own catalogue is a useful illustration of the problem. It holds 118 documented variants. Counted by country of origin, Turkey comes out first — which tells you something true about who built this catalogue and nothing at all about Turkey’s rank in the world. That is the same bias visible in the published literature, only smaller and easier to see.

The second problem is granularity. Counting kimchi as one entry, and counting baechu-kimchi, kkakdugi, dongchimi and oi-sobagi as four, gives two very different answers about Korea, and both are defensible. There is no agreed unit for a distinct fermented food, which means every published ranking is partly an artefact of where its authors drew the line.

The third is that these are living traditions with custodians. A count treats a fermented food as a data point; the community that maintains it does not. Where an entry in this catalogue records a tradition, it records where it comes from and how well documented it actually is — including, often, that the honest answer is not very.