Episode Details

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