Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Over the last couple of years, if you have seen any of the lists of the big, new food trends, you might have seen that fermented foods have been recognized as a new food trend. Which actually is quite absurd because for longer than any of us have been alive, almost everybody in almost every part of the world eats and drinks products of fermentation every single day. The products of fermentation have enjoyed enduring popularity and have never gone out of fashion.
We could talk about coffee, we could talk about bread, we could talk about cheese, we could talk about beer, we could talk about wine, you know, many of the greatest delicacies that people around the world enjoy are products of fermentation that have never gone out of style and have not recently just come into style. What has changed is that there is a growing awareness of the phenomenon of fermentation and a growing interest in it. Fermentation is practiced everywhere.
I certainly do not posses encyclopedic knowledge, but I have been looking for counter examples for many years now, and I cannot find one single example of a culinary tradition anywhere that does not incorporate fermentation. Anything can be fermented. Nothing we could possibly eat cannot be fermented.
This is a versatile process that can be applied to any kind of food we could possibly digest. And people have been fermenting for literally thousands of years. There's really nothing new about this phenomenon.
The archaeological record tells us that we can find evidence of fermentation going back at least 10,000 years, and these are on ancient pottery shards with residue of alcoholic beverages. But that really only tells us about the history of pottery, and the earlier vessels people used for fermentatiton were wood and gourds and other materials that are biodegradable, so they just have not persisted through time. But fermentation is an ancient practice that people everywhere have practiced.
And I think that recognizing how old this practice is, we can recognize that you don't need to know about biology or microorganisms in order to practice fermentation. And in fact, the practice of fermentation has been recognized as kind of mysterious and mystical all around the world because there was no known understanding of the mechanisms of it. During the age of microbiology - because most of the information that we've heard about bacteria and microorganisms leads us to be afraid of them, you know, it's about the danger of disease - you know, we've developed a widespread cultural fear of bacteria and along with that a fear of fermentation.
And so, you know, the work that I've been engaged in is public education about fermentation - demystifying this process for people and helping them understand, you know, how simple this process is and what an effective strategy for food safety it is. Microbiology certainly has illuminated the process of fermentation. So beginning with the work of Louis Pasteur about 150 years ago, you know, he began to recognize the existence of bacteria and yeasts and other microorganisms, and observe their activities, and for the first time from the scientific analysis, we began to understand that fermentation is the transformative action of microorganisms.
And one of the things that microbiology illuminated about this ancient practice is that everything we eat, all of the plants and all of the animal products that make up our food are populated by elaborate communities of microorganisms. Everything we eat has many different kinds of microorganisms that are part of them. And microbiology also illuminated the fact that our bodies are the host to vast populations of microorganisms.
You know, every human adult is the host to somewhere around one trillion microorganisms. Now, these bacteria and other organisms outnumber our bodily cells by something like ten to one. So in a way we are bacterial super-structures.
And we are not alone in this regard. Every vegetable, every grain, every animal, all of the things that make up our food are populated by similarly elaborate communities of microorganisms. The perspective of evolutionary biologists is that all life is descended from bacteria.
And the other side of this reality is that no multicellular form of life has ever lived without bacteria. And we all are dependent on bacteria for many aspects of our existence and our functionality. And what fermentation is, is the transformative action of these microorganisms.
Now, not every transformative action of microorganisms results in something delicious that people want to put into our mouths; and, in fact, most of us are familiar with the transformative action of microorganisms from, let's say, cleaning out our refrigerators and the decomposing food that we inevitably find stuck in the back of the refrigerators. And we don't call this kind of food fermented. We have a different vocabulary to talk about that.
We call it rotten food or spoiled food, and we reserve this word "fermentation" to describe intentional microbial transformations or at least desirable microbial transformations. But I think that the fact that we all inevitably encounter unappealing, decomposing food in the back of the refrigerator gives us some insight into the inevitability of microbial transformation of our food. As I mentioned earlier, everything we eat is populated by many different kinds of microorganisms, so really, the primary objective of fermentation is to guide that microbial development so that we encourage the growth of certain kinds of organisms, and at the same time we discourage the growth of other kinds of organisms, and we do this by manipulating environmental conditions.
So the practice of fermentation really amounts to manipulations of environmental conditions in order to encourage the growth of certain organisms and simultaneously discourage the growth of other kinds of organisms. There's always a practical benefit to fermentation. The food is not decomposing, and we are creating alcohol.
We're making food that is more stable than the raw product of agriculture that we began with. We're creating something that is more delicious. We're creating something that's more easily digestible.
We're creating something where some toxic compound in the food is broken down, and the otherwise dangerous food is made safe. And the other great practical benefit that's being revealed to us, really for the first time in our lifetimes, is the benefit of eating the bacteria themselves. You know, because all of us have lived our lives in the midst of the "war on bacteria," which includes antibiotic drugs, and antibacterial cleansing products, and chlorinated water, these are all chemical compounds designed to kill bacteria.
And when we have contact with these compounds, which we all inevitably do, it has the effect of narrowing the diversity of bacteria in our intestines. If they were to kill all those microorganisms, we couldn't possibly exist because we rely on these microorganisms for our digestion. We rely on these microorganisms that are part of our body for what we call our immune systems, our ability to withstand disease.
And new research in the last few years is revealing that our brain chemistry, serotonin and other chemical compounds that determine how we think and how we feel are regulated by bacteria in our intestines. And yet, this chemical exposure that we all inevitably have narrows biodiversity inside of us. Typically, people think about biodiversity as a phenomenon that affects the forests and the oceans, and certainly that is important, but we have to recognize that biodiversity also exists within us.
And our health and our well-being are related to the health and diversity of bacterial populations in our intestines, and one of the greatest benefits that we can get from eating fermented foods and drinking fermented beverages is the bacteria themselves. Now, of course, not all fermented foods or beverages have live bacteria. If they're cooked or heat processed, the bacteria perish due to heat.
But with growing recognition of this, many people are seeking out living fermented foods, fermented foods that have not been cooked or heat processed, precisely in order to ingest bacteria. Generally, we're ingesting elaborate communities of bacteria. And this is what is commonly called probiotics.
It's really a strategy for helping to restore biodiversity in our intestines. Fermentation is also used in a metaphorical sense. And I just want to talk for a moment about the word "fermentation.
" Fermentation comes from the Latin fervere, which means "to boil. " And it's because the visible action of fermentation is bubbles, bubbles of carbon dioxide that will rise in your fermenting beer or your fermenting wine. Bubbles remind people of the bubbles that rise in boiling liquids.
So fermentation has always been viewed as a form of cold boiling or cold cooking; transforming food and producing these bubbles without using heat. But when people talk about fermentation in a metaphorical sense, where they're talking about the fermentation of a culture or political fermentation or intellectual fermentation or spiritual fermentation, they're also talking about bubbles, except that instead of literal bubbles of carbon dioxide rising in liquids, they're talking about bubbles of excitement when people are excited about ideas and they want to share those ideas. People get bubbly; they want to talk about them.
They want to share the ideas that are making them excited with their friends and with their families. To conclude, I just want to point out that in addition to being this important mode of transformation of foods and beverages which enables people to make effective use of the food resources that are available to them, fermentation is also an engine of social change, and all of us are the starter cultures. Thank you.
