The Social Pickle collective in Sheffield, UK is building community from the ground up, nurturing diverse microbial communities that inhabit the soil, water, plants and gut. What began with fermenting vinegar from surplus apples has evolved over the years into a community initiative that promotes connection through activities such as fermentation celebrations, wild plant harvesting and preservation, and composting with local producers.
Community and collectivity are central to the ideals of agroecology. Healthy and thriving agroecosystems require regenerative networks of human, animal and plant life that support each other. Both history and research show how important community is for personal and societal health. Loneliness, for example, is one of the top predictors of physical and mental health problems; even the simple act of eating with others can vastly improve happiness and wellness. On a larger scale, social networks are crucial for recovering from crises, as blatantly seen during COVID-19, where those without access to social networks or mutual aid groups struggled most to procure food and other essentials.
But having and being in community to support health isn’t just about people; our health is also inextricably linked to animals, plants, and wider environmental health, a concept known as One Health. Many Indigenous cultures also centre a collective responsibility of care for each other and the land, principles that are also drawn on by agroecology.
The common thread supporting health across ecosystems are the diverse microbial communities that live in the soil and water, on our crops, and even in our gut
Our addition to these existing frameworks is the idea that healthy ‘macro’ communities can only exist when there are healthy ‘micro’ communities at the foundation. The common thread supporting health across all ecosystems from the bottom up is the diverse microbial communities that live in the soil and water, on our crops, and even in our guts. These bacteria, fungi, yeasts and moulds are the engines turning the circles of life – they regulate planetary carbon and nitrogen cycles, decompose organic matter to feed new plant life, and even function within us to help us process and access nutrients from our foods.
In building agroecological food systems that support wider health, it is essential to care for these micro communities. Our role as humans is that of the steward – even if we do not work the land, we are all stewarding microbial communities around us, whether inside of us or in a jar of fermented food. As we learn how important these communities are, we can be more intentional with how we support them – and thus wider public and planetary health – within our daily lives.
Community fermentation
We gained these collective learnings through Social Pickle, a volunteer-run fermentation project born out of Foodhall, a community food hub, during the pandemic in 2020. Social Pickle is based in Sheffield, a small industrial city in north-central England. Although Sheffield has grown rapidly over recent years, the benefits of this development have not always been shared equitably. The city has a clear east-west divide: southwestern neighbourhoods are designated in the top 20% of the least deprived areas in the UK, and northeastern neighborhoods are in the top 20% of the most deprived. In response to these inequities from a food systems perspective, urban farms, gardens, local food businesses and community food projects have emerged and joined forces over the past decade to ensure access to healthy, nutritious food for all.
Foodhall was integral to this effort, providing a social eating space to bridge this divide by bringing people together around nutritious meals cooked from surplus food. During COVID, Foodhall shifted its focus to operate one of Sheffield’s largest emergency food distribution programs. As Foodhall volunteers, we received a flood of food donations, but had limited capacity to process and distribute them due to social distancing. A group of us saw an opportunity to use fermentation both to preserve this surplus food and to enrich it with more nutrients, thus further supporting the health of our vulnerable communities.
Sheffield apple cider vinegar
Social Pickle’s main aim is to bring people together to share in the joy and knowledge of foraging, preserving, pickling and fermenting food in ways that are open, accessible and fun. Our original six members included artists, writers, chefs, students and scientists. The journey began with the creation of apple cider vinegar from surplus and foraged apples across Sheffield, which we distributed in local shops and door-to-door to help fund our collective. Vinegar in itself offers many health benefits, but also is used to extract nutritional and medicinal compounds from plants (e.g., ‘fire cider’) and to preserve produce as ‘pickles’.
The importance of our vinegar stretched beyond the bottle; it reconnected us with each other and with our natural environment
The importance of our vinegar stretched beyond the bottle; it reconnected us with each other and with our natural environment. Raw vinegar has a ‘mother’ – a gelatinous community formation of bacteria, yeast, and cellulose – which can be added to new vinegars to jumpstart the fermentation process. Our first vinegar thus became the literal and figurative mother to many future ferments, pickles, medicines – and friendships – across Sheffield. With just some local apples and a little sugar, we were able to build entirely new micro and macro communities during a time of isolation.
Preserving foraged and surplus food
We next experimented with other forms of food preservation, transforming surplus foods in Foodhall’s kitchen into marmalade, fermented banana sauce, Brussels sprout kraut and kimchi. Although COVID prevented in-person workshops, we found creative ways to build community and share knowledge, like our virtual launch party, where we taught vinegar making, held a collective tasting, and co-created a poem.
As COVID restrictions eased in 2021, we launched biweekly ‘Glut Clubs’. These open fermenting sessions allowed people to experiment with various food preservation methods to capture the excess of the seasons through surplus and foraged foods.
We also hosted open fermentation workshops at markets and events across Sheffield and nearby towns, and ran an annual ‘Pickle Fest’ – a community-based fermentation competition and celebration. Art played a key role in all our events, helping people connect with the micro communities that support our health. For example, attendees might illustrate their bacteria’s journey in a comic or write them a love letter to express intentionality and gratitude.
Although not farmers, all Social Pickle members are agroecological stewards – instead of a farm, our environment is a jar
Our events aimed to make fermentation more accessible, while fostering inspiration and community. As one Pickle Fest volunteer shared: “I love to see so many people come together [to share] their own homemade pickled, fermented and preserved creations! Sometimes preserving can sound a bit strange or even pretentious, but people coming together at Pickle Fest quickly shows that it’s a simple, fun and sustainable way to share food.” Although not farmers, all Social Pickle members are agroecological stewards – instead of a farm, our environment is a jar. As our project grew over the years and people entered the collective, the responsibilities of tending to our ferments and micro communities were communally shared. In sharing this process of collective care, and the joy and knowledge that came with it, we were building a new community of our own.
Connecting with Sheffield’s environment
Food preservation was the avenue through which we connected our newly formed micro and macro communities to our local environment. We sought to capture Sheffield’s seasons in jar-sized portions: starting in the spring of 2021, we partnered with a local herbalist in guided workshops where we infused our vinegars with the medicinal plants in abundance in our city parks, such as yarrow, elderflower, dandelion and plantain.
In 2024, this expanded into a year-round programme of open workshops and seasonal infusions called ‘Acid Seasons’. Spring brought us fresh herbal growth and opened us to new opportunities; the heat of late summer was captured in berry tonics, warming our bones and opening our hearts; in the fall, we made new apple cider vinegars, offering fresh fruits to vinegar ‘mothers’ of seasons past; and finally, as the winter months brought darkness, we harnessed the power of the earth in the roots below to spark warmth and comfort within. This process showed us the interconnection and symbiosis we have with the environment around us; as our physical and emotional health needs shift with the seasons, the land responds and provides new herbs, fruits, and flowers to nourish us. In turn, we reciprocated this care by stewarding our environment and the microbial communities that sustain it.
We also worked with farmers who supported microbial life in our local soils. Using agroecological methods such as minimising field disturbance and incorporating composts and manures, they protected and fed microbial life. These soil microbes are vital to food production; they break down organic matter into nutrients and help plants communicate and respond to stresses. They also improve soil structure by aggregating particles, which prevents soil loss and contributes to carbon sequestration – and thus, wider planetary health. Additionally, studies show that crops grown in more microbially active soils can have higher amounts of micronutrients and phytochemicals, contributing to the prevention of chronic disease when we consume them. As we fermented surplus produce from these microbially active soils, we captured and boosted this nutritive value for our communities.
We also gave back to these communities; by composting our kitchen scraps and then applying this nutritious organic matter to local garden beds, we supported soil microbial growth. In addition, we gave jars of locally preserved foods back to the farmers we worked with, as well as to the Sheffield community through a ‘pay-what-you-can’ model.
This model helped spark conversations about the value of local foods, the ways we can do more to care for others in our community, and alternative forms of economy that recognise value in more than just currency. We collectively formed the concept of the ‘Pickleberg‘, based on the iceberg market theory, to depict the many non-monetary activities, places, and people that are all bubbling ‘below the brine’ to contribute to the creation of our joyous local pickle economy.
Fermenting into the future
Since 2020, Social Pickle has undergone many changes. Foodhall’s closure in early 2023, mainly due to rent costs and financial difficulties incurred during the pandemic, meant losing our kitchen and pausing the Glut Clubs. We adapted by moving into a co-working space for storage and small gatherings, and partnering more with other organisations.
Social Pickle is again in a time of uncertainty; key members have come and gone, and we again lost our space in late 2024. Despite these transitions, Social Pickle’s micro and macro communities will forever continue sprouting across Sheffield, all rooted in our original vinegar mother. The knowledge, joy and creativity that has been shared through her, and through other microbes, pickles, sticky hands, laughing mouths and full bellies will continue to be shared and multiplied, building healthy and happy interspecies communities of care that will continue to sustain – and sustain us – into the future.
Author: Nicole Kennard helped to start Social Pickle in 2020 and co-organised the project until she returned to her hometown of Atlanta, US in 2023, where she continues to engage in community food projects and conducts research around resilient local food systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Contact: Nicole Kennard, kennard3@gatech.edu
This article draws on the collective experiences and insights from Nicole and other Social Pickle founders and members, including: Hannah Fincham, Ross Bennett, Lucy Marriott, Poppy Turner, Tara Hill and Matt McCabe.
Watch a video about Social Pickle here.
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This article is part of Issue 2-2025: Cultivating health and healing
