What my Polish grandmother knew about fermentation

My grandmother lived in a village on the Polish Baltic coast that no longer exists in the form I knew. She had a cellar with three stoneware crocks. One for sauerkraut, one for pickled cucumbers, and one for something fermented on a beetroot base that I never managed to identify and that ended up in the winter soup. What she did was not a hobby. It was what you did when you had no refrigerator for six months of winter and no vitamins from a supermarket. Today, fifty years later, what she could do as a matter of course is returning as a Gut-Health Trend, in glass bottles at nine fifty a litre. It makes me tired, and sometimes it makes me sentimental. When I write this entry, I write against the tiredness.