Mandy Nolan’s Soap Box – Scoby Dooby Doo

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the kitchen, the kombucha is back.

I couldn’t believe it. I thought we’d got our fill of the fermented fungus juice back in the 90s. But oh no, that alien specimen lurking in the back of the share-house fridge is back! I didn’t go for it the first time round. I just couldn’t stomach drinking the juice of something that looked like a giant cervix floating in a bottle. Not that I’ve ever actually seen a cervix with my own eyes but, during all my antenatal care whenever the midwife talked about the cervix, I always envisaged it as a kombucha mushroom. I’d certainly seen a lot of those in the Byron 90s. There is something definitely cervixy about the kombucha – I don’t think it’s any coincidence it is known as the ‘fermentation mother’. Some people won’t even know what kombucha is. It’s basically a fermented tea made with a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast known as ‘scoby’. Some current kombucha ingesters probably think they have reanimated this ancient practice for the first time.

With the hipster eat-your-sauerkraut-off-a-breadboard trend in full swing, I guess it was only a matter of time before the big K made a komeback. In the 90s people were in love with their kombucha. I once lived with this woman who was so attached to her fungus she carried it with her in the car. In the front seat. It went to cafes. It went to yoga. I think it even showered with her. She talked to it. I think it even talked back. This nebulous floating microbial colony of bacteria and yeast was the closest she came to a soulmate. I don’t think her regular kombucha ingestion had any actual impact on her overall health; it just gave her something to talk about if she was going to root another hippy.

Maybe I’m shallow. I thought kombucha looked gross. Like watery compost. I don’t know, I’m not always a believer that just because something was once used historically that it somehow suffices as evidence as to its therapeutic effectiveness. I mean women once used lead to whiten their faces and that turned out to make you both classically beautiful and classically dead. There’s a wide range of kombucha health claims out there that are wildly unsubstantiated. They include treating AIDS, cancer and diabetes. That’s an ambitious claim, and somehow I don’t think if kombucha went head to head with chemo in a cancer-reduction rap battle that it would come out the victor. I mean, if I went to the doctor, and he/she said, ‘you have cancer’, and then said, ‘Have you tried kombucha?’ I’d have much faith in their treatment options. I’d be suspicious that they were actually part of some giant conspiratorial marketing push called Big Fungus. You know it’s literally a ‘growth’ market. The other kombucha claims are slightly more benign and are around stimulating the immune system and boosting libido. I think if drinking the stinky K-juice is the only thing that makes you horny, then you have to get a better class of porn.

A friend of mine alerted me the other day to the fact that kombucha is becoming like a currency on Byron Swap and Sell… one conversation went like this: ‘I want to buy some kombucha scoby if anyone has a spare amount please? I am in Myocum and can pick up in Mullum or Brunz.’ Crikey, it’s like ice. People are going online using innocuous chat rooms selling broken bookshelves and wicker dogs to score scoby! I’m a sceptic, I know, but fortunately I am not alone. The other day I overheard a hippy bloke offering a homeless man a sip of his kombucha. The homeless dude looked disgusted, pushed the open fungus bottle away and went, ‘I’m not drinking that shit’. He then resumed enjoying his goon sack. He might be homeless but he’s still a critical thinker.