Some anecdotes:

- My wife is Korean, and a lot of Korean food is fermented, preserved, or otherwise kept using a traditional pre-refrigeration method. There are a number of really beautiful traditions that come from the logistics of keeping stuff around for months, or even years. The idea of things being diverted off at various stages of fermentation for different uses was a massive revelation to my American mind.

- That being said, my Korean relatives are completely blown away by some old Western methods of fermentation especially around land mammal meats -- various sausages, smoked meats, salted meats -- and fermented milk products like cheeses.

- The best restaurant in the world, I think in Norway, featured a dedicated fermentation R&D lab as part of their core restaurant menu development process.

- The global trade in alcoholic drinks in based on truly beautiful and sophisticated battles between various micro-organisms.

- My friends in the bio-world recently (in the last few years) have taken an interest in fermentation as part of the thinking on long-term food sources for space habitability. Nothing produces the incredible complexity in microbiology, specifically ones good for food sources for humans, creates anything close to the complexity of fermentation. The thought it using stages of fermentation to produce all of the feed material needed for complete human nutrition. But it's perpetual.

Bonus - you might also divert some parts of the process into fuel, air, and other required processes. It's incredibly compelling, highly technical (informed by modern AI models) research.