Not only do we love sauerkraut in our family, but we make “love sauerkraut.”  What do I mean?

Are you familiar with Dr. Masaru Emoto’s work, Messages from Water? He has done experiments where he writes a word on a bottle of water and freezes the water into a “snowflake” crystal.  The results are astonishing.  Water with positive words have beautiful crystals, often having a shape slightly representative of the word.  Polluted water that has been prayed upon has crystals that change radically and beautifully.

Polluted water from the Fujiwara Dam, Japan

Same water from the Fujiwara Dam after a Buddhist prayer

For decades, holistically-minded physicians such as Dr. Deepak Chopra, have extolled the virtues of “positive thinking” on health and healing.  When you realize the effect positive intention and prayer can have on water and that the human body is made up of 70% water, you can see how these positive thoughts and intentions can affect our health.

One day in the kitchen, we took this a step further.

Based on this set of notions, my husband and I have been infusing our homemade fermented foods with love and good intentions for years.  Our first premise is that if we can do this for water, we can do it for our food too. Secondly, we humans have been living synergistically with bacteria for hundreds of thousands of years.  We need them. In fact, we would not be alive without them.  If “prayer” can have a positive effect on water, we assumed it could have a positive effect on our synergistic friends, good bacteria.

We figured several things: 1) We believe in it. 2) It can’t hurt. 3) It makes us feel good to do it. 4) It may even make a big difference.

So being “woo-woo” San Franciscans, we decided to put positive intentions, prayers, and messages on our brand new batches of fermented food we were about to ferment, particularly our kombucha and sauerkraut.  Therefore, every time we make a new batch of fermentations, we “infuse” it with our intention.

We save all the little pieces of paper.  Over the years, here are some of our “messages” and intentions:

• Love
• Allowing
• Positive focus
• Self confidence
• Creativity
• Self compassion and forgiveness
• Digestion and assimilation
• Faith and release of fear
• Feminine power

Most of us feel food is love and cooking with love is something many mothers and grandmothers believe in and have been doing for generations.  This is just another way to do it.

So whether you are making fermented foods or cooking a roasted chicken for dinner, putting love and intention to what you are preparing for your family has many good benefits—including making mom feel good while doing it.  It’s a small moment in our day to slow down (often in all the chaos) and spend one moment focusing on the positive and what we want to create in our lives.

Try it yourself.  Get out a small square of paper, write your intention on it, and tape it to the crock (or a water bottle). Take one moment (20 seconds) to align with your desire then move on to the rest of your day.  When fermentation is complete, transfer it to jars (you can even transfer the word on the individual jars). When you eat it, take a second to remember the message infused into the food, and enjoy!

Whether you are cooking dinner or making a batch of fermented sauerkraut, while you are chopping and preparing, take a moment to reflect on your day and what intention and love you want to infuse into your food.

You’ll never look back and think it was a waste of time.  And if you save those messages, you may be surprised when you reflect back months and years later at the positive things that have manifested.

Photo Credits: “Love Kraut” by Julie Matthews, and Crystal images copyright of Dr. Masaru Emoto