Show Notes
When we talk about the microbiome, people think about the colon and trillions of microorganisms. Have you ever considered that humans have other interactions with microbiomes that occur with our cooking? On this week’s episode of FORK U, we continue with our series “Food That Made Civilization.” The topic is Fermentation.
How Fermentation Built Civilization We were selecting a microbiome without knowing it. Bacteria, yeast, and molds. Feed the ones that worked, keep the conditions they liked, and do it again. Your grandmother may have kept the bowl that made better bread. She saved some of yesterday’s dough to start tomorrow’s. Others learned that milk mixed with a bit of salt and kept in a goat’s stomach became yogurt or cheese instead of something that had to be thrown away. In Asia, they salted cabbage, put it into a jar, and buried it, which allowed them to survive the winter. And perhaps in what is modern-day Iran, they learned that when they crushed grapes, stored them in special containers, they made wine. And in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), ancient Sumerians left written recipes of barley brewing dating back over 5,000 years, which was probably beer. There were no microscopes or bacterial cultures. We didn’t know that yeast metabolized sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, or that lactic-acid bacteria changed the chemistry of cabbage and milk. But what they didn’t see was a colony of bacteria, yeast, and mold, creating environments in which organisms thrived, and transformed foods into something more edible and even stable for preservation. Those microorganisms gave us bread, beer, wine, cheese, kimchi, vinegar, and eventually penicillin.
What Did Ancient Beer Taste Like? We are fascinated by what people before us ate and drank. From the Midas Tomb in ancient Phrygia, now Turkey, they discovered that people had made a fermented drink from barley, grapes, and honey. It was probably beer, wine, and mead in the same cup. Based on a chemical analysis of these vessels, Dogfish Head Brewery used modern yeast to make a beer called Midas Touch. But I wished we could have cultured the yeast and bacteria from one of those vessels? As much effort as Dogfish used to reproduce the ingredients on the basis of chemical analysis, the beer is not the same. The barley, grapes, and even the water are different. Some of those grape varieties may not even exist anymore. The temperature and storage conditions we are guessing at best. And the microbes undoubtedly changed over the three thousand years while waiting to resume their shift. Dogfish Head analyzed ingredients from pottery in China. That 9000-year-old pottery once held a fermented beverage made from rice, honey, and fruit. This was being drunk years before the Great Wall was built. Which makes me think, the Great Wall was the velvet rope, seeing if your name was on the list for the rice wine party. But consider it like this: even pizza lovers from New York will tell you that without the NY water, or coal-fired oven, you cannot make a true NY pizza. The yeast we use now are descendants of those used by our ancestors. But the microbiome changes, they reproduce, mutate, mix with other organisms from the flour, the grain, the fruit, the hands, and the environment. Yeast today are more different from their ancestors than we are from ours. But we are never drinking the exact same beer. We are drinking what became of that ancient experiment. Just like you never step in the same river twice.
Then We Finally Saw Them Then came Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who developed the first microscope. He was not a physician. He was not a professor of microbiology. There was no microbiology. He was a fabric salesman with an obsession for making good lenses. When he put those lenses together, he saw a world no one knew existed. He pointed it at everything: water, tooth scrapings, and eventually beer. He saw tiny living things moving around in a world humans had never seen. Leeuwenhoek called them animalcules
More from Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson
With all the spices we have access to, it is amazing how bland recipes have become. I have many cookbooks, some from great chefs, television personalities, and friends. What I am always surprised by is how bland the food has become. People seem to think a bit of salt, pepper, maybe onions, and garlic provide the spices one needs. Perhaps it is because some associate spice with heat. Mostly because many have never experimented with some of those great warm spices available. A pinch of coriander, some freshly ground cumin, a little cardamom, or a touch of cinnamon can turn an ordinary dish into something remarkable. And the most astonishing part is that these spices financed voyages around the world, built cities, created fortunes, and caused people to kill one another. Without the spice trade, it is safe to say that the United States, as we know it, would be vastly different from what it is now. The money loaned to the United States, when we were a fledgling country, came from the wealthy spice merchants from what was considered one of the great hyperempires of the world, based in Amsterdam. But before we go to the birth of the United States, let me take you to the meatball.
Tea: The Drink That Built an Empire—and Helped Break One China had the tea. Britain had the appetite. John Hancock had a business to protect.
MesoAmerica and Chocolate In our series looking at foods that built civilizations, today we are going to stay in the Americas with chocolate. Chocolate has been used as currency, consumed by kings, incorporated into religious ceremonies, and prescribed as medicine. Today, it is a multibillion-dollar industry that wants you to believe that eating chocolate is an act of preventive cardiology. I mean, why not? They convinced us to give chocolate to people we love, eat it when we are happy, when we are sad, when only the dog understands us. Don’t feed chocolate to your dog. And we have done all this with a bitter seed that most of us would probably spit out if we tasted it straight from the tree.
I’ve been doing a series about foods that built civilizations. In this episode, we are talking about the potato. It is difficult to imagine that thousands of years ago, people constructed large buildings, managed rivers, built monuments, and created art. We have glimpses of these civilizations through stories, archaeology, and the structures they left behind, but much of their history has been lost. Imagine, we don’t even know where Cleopatra or Alexander the Great are buried, yet we know their stories. As European powers conquered Indigenous peoples, their languages, cultures, and oral traditions were suppressed. When a language disappears, so are the stories preserved within it. Our clues come from archaeology when we uncover a monument, a building, or an ancient settlement. In the Andes, the potatoes they cultivated were not the Russets, Yukon Golds, or fingerlings you find in the store today. Different colors, shapes, and textures. Adapted to survive the elevations, temperatures, and growing conditions. Biodiversity protected their food supply against frost, disease, and changing environmental conditions. If one variety failed, another might survive. The ancient wisdom of diversity that Andean farmers developed over thousands of years was lost when the potato eventually reached Ireland.
In our series about foods that built civilization, we talked a lot about grains, from wheat to corn to rice. Today, we are taking you to the ocean, with the civilizations that salmon built. From California to the interior of Alaska, salmon, a staple, allowed people to settle into villages, develop complex social networks, art, and trade routes. Those trade routes are as large as the ones in the Mediterranean. Some tribes built communal homes and developed complex art and language. Some were Seafaring tribes with canoes up to 60 feet long that traveled across oceans. All because there was a fish that would return in large numbers to streams and rivers, reliably, predictably. So predictable, the people could build their lives around salmon runs. So much so that some built a calendar not only with lunar cycles, but also with the return of the salmon. Civilizations have always gathered around food and water. The Mediterranean connected people who grew wheat and olives, giving people time to make wine, mine copper, build ships, trade with their neighbors, and occasionally go to war with them. Asia had rice and grain near the great river systems. The reliable calories from rice and grains allowed villages to become cities and to travel by water to trade. Today we are going to my home, from the Ventura River in California to my home state of Alaska.