[Music] I'm a microbe evangelist my journey began in 1994 in Germany where I encountered a microbe that would dramatically alter the course of my life I found it in a farmers cellar in a barrel of freshly fermented sauerkraut it tasted nothing like the bracingly sour canned stuff I'd grown up with this was mild and tart and crunchy and it fizzed on my tongue it was so delightful but there was something else something I couldn't quite put my finger on I just knew I wanted to learn more learning how to cook and owning a restaurant in
Germany gave me ample opportunity to do just that I discovered that there's a springtime version that's typically eaten fresh and that the fall time version which is meant to last through the winter he's usually a little saltier and typically eaten cooked I learned how to finish my sauces and my soups with its juice best secret ingredient ever and I noticed that the chef who taught me how to cook would drink it whenever he was hungover which was often and he would make this miraculous recovery I also learned that the sour and sour kraut came not
from vinegar as I'd always assumed but from a transformative microbial process called fermentation I didn't really understand what that meant until I went to a natural chef culinary program in California many years later and made my first batch of sauerkraut we massaged salt into fine shreds of cabbage until they became translucent and weepy and then we touched the mixture into a small fermentation crock and we waited for the alchemy to begin over the next few days the crock literally came alive we could hear it gurgling and burping as we worked on other projects in the
kitchen when the instructor handed me a fork full to taste a couple of weeks later I was immediately blasted back to that farmers seller and that fizz on my tongue I'd learned the culinary uses for sauerkraut in Germany but now I needed to understand exactly what had happened in that crock would it transform those simple ingredients into something truly extraordinary at the time sand or Katz's book wild fermentation was the go-to resource for novice fermenters and i dug into it with a fervor I learned the communities of microorganisms are responsible for many types of fermentation
and that these are tiny little beings that breathe and eat and produce waste products kind of like we do I became so fascinated with fermentation that in 2004 I decided to go on a cultured walkabout I traveled to southeast asia and learned about one of the oldest ferments on record fish sauce which is very similar to garam which was made in ancient greece and eventually morphed into soy sauce in china i met a kraut guru in austria who with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth would preach microbe wisdom while scooping sauerkraut out of a
big wooden barrel at his family's market booth in Vienna and I traveled to an Incan village deep in the sacred valley in Peru and I learned about chicha some milky sweet beer revered for its health benefits in its mild buzz it's made with corn mash and saliva there's a there's a an enzyme there's an enzyme mostly found in women's saliva called tit Celyn and it helps kick start the fermentation by breaking down the starches into more easily digestible sugars for the microbes I was mesmerised as I watched these women chewing and spitting into a big
communal bowl and the friend I was with told me that initially only in conversions were allowed to perform this ritual now fortunately this is no longer the case and I had the great honor of being invited into the chewing circle it was a little weird at first but it didn't take long before I was chewing and spitting and laughing with my new friends it was so beautiful to witness how playful they were and how much pride they had in their craft and I remember feeling this immense joy knowing that we were creating a healing and
delicious elixir for the community and it was then I knew I wanted to do something similar for my community - the spits no matter where I went in the world I noticed a common thread between all fermenters a genuine love and respect for their microbes every culture everywhere I utilized this fermentation in some way to alter consciousness to preserve food to make food more safe or more nutritious and of course to make it more delicious and I started to realize that this is an ancient and symbiotic partnership these microbes had figured out long ago how
to provide valuable services for us humans pretty clever survival strategy and recent research into the origin of life suggests that we might even be their descendants now some of these microbes came under scrutiny in the mid 19th century powerful microscopes had brought the microbial world alive for scientists and researchers and allowed microbiologists to identify boilage microbes in wine beer and dairy louis pasteur along with other scientists figured out the heat killed those microbes and pasteurization was widely adapted by the food and beverage commercial productions Lully pursuers work also advanced germ theory the idea that specific
microbes cause specific diseases and his work saved countless lives but it also made microbes the enemy by turning them into germs we start to fear microbes we went from partnering with microbes to waging an all-out war on them over the last hundred and fifty years some of our most beloved foods and beverages have either been completely lost or replaced with sterile versions like cans sauerkraut we're now discovering this may have been to our detriment there's speculation that 90% of all disease begins in the gut overly processed foods overuse of antibiotics pesticides herbicides chlorinated water antibacterial
everything they've all played a role in what scientists are now calling the impoverished Western gut compared to hunter-gatherer tribes in South America and Africa our gut microbe communities are significantly less diverse now those populations are more susceptible to infectious disease but they have almost none of our modern ailments microbiome science the discovery that humans are a collection of microorganisms the outnumber our human DNA by ten to one is radically changing our relationship to the microbial world researchers and doctors are starting to think of our guts as ecosystems that need to be carefully tended and they're
looking at new ways in which we can partner with microbes to bring balance back to our micro biomes one of the first things I suggest we do is to eliminate us to the extent that we can substances that are harmful to our microbes from our homes and from our diets those hunter-gatherer tribes that eat a lot of roughage it turns out our gut microbes love fiber they ferment it and turn it into a protective mucosal lining for our guts and including a diverse array of live culture fermented foods and beverages in your diet appears to
have a profound effect on increasing gut microbe diversity and overall health and well-being the Koreans never went to war with their microbes they have a strong vibrant and mostly matrilineal fermentation culture in November you can see mothers and daughters and grandmothers and auntie's come together out in the streets making big batches of kimchi especie an aromatic cabbage ferment and in Korea if you are an exceptionally good cook it's said that you possess sawn mat or good hand taste Korean artist and bio designer jaeyoon wu wondered if she could capture her mother's hand taste so that
she could use it whenever she missed her mother's cooking she this inspired her 2017 study called mother's hand taste she collected hand microbes in this case yeast from 12 participants and she asked them to make a fermented rice wine with the ingredients she provided she discovered that in three of the four families there was a continuation of the yeast Santa in the samples regardless of geographic location she could tell which family had made which wine that's because when you ferment at home you're not just making something tasty and nourishing you're making a family heirloom rich
with your family's unique microbial signature and that's what I want us to do I want us to rekindle this ancient relationship with the microbes that our ancestors relied on and our bodies still remember much like mine had in Germany in 2008 I left a perfectly good career as a chef to start a fermented food company that makes sauerkraut I'm pretty sure that was the microbes plan all along thank you you [Applause]
