Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation > Status Update

To ferment your own food is to lodge a small but eloquent protest against the homogenization of flavors & food experiences now rolling like a great, undifferentiated lawn across the globe. It is also a declaration of independence from an economy that would prefer we remain passive consumers of its standardized commodities rather than creators of idiosyncratic products expressive of our ourselves & the places we live.

As I learned from Sandor Katz and Sister Noëlla and Chad Robertson, and all the other fermentos I met, ***mastery is never more than partial or temporary***. (“Dude, I don’t make this beer, the yeast make the beer. My job is just to feed them really well. If I do that, they’ll do the rest.”)

These [foods] are not just products- in fact are not really ‘things’. Most of what presents itself in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves & all other species on which we depend. Eating & drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways the industrial economy, with its long & illegible supply chains, would have us forget.

The economic and ecological lines that connect us to the distant others were now rely on for our sustenance have grown so long & attenuated as to render both the products and their connections to us & the world utterly opaque. You would be forgiven for thinking- indeed, are encouraged to think!- there is nothing more behind a bottle of beer than a corporation and a factory, somewhere. It is simply a “product”.

This plasticity and its effect on us explains why alcohol is so widely accepted as a recreational drug: intoxication is remarkably susceptible to cultural prescriptions & proscriptions, from Bolivia to Tahiti. It’s clear that societies are better able to channel & regulate the response of individuals to alcohol, making the drug more socially useful and less threatening than some others.

A funny thing about alcohol: almost anything you can say about it is true, and so is its opposite. The same molecule can make people violent or docile, amorous or indifferent, loquacious or silent, euphoric or depressed, stimulated or sedated, eloquent or idiotic. It affects many different neural pathways and so is plastic in its effects, person to person, group to group, even culture to culture.

Cheese that stinks of manure (or sex) offers a safe way for us to flirt with forbidden desires; even a cheese that stinks of death offers a perverse sort of pleasure. For, if the final fermentation that awaits us is too horrible to contemplate, perhaps a little preview of putrefaction on a cheese plate can, like a Gothic/horror movie, give us the little frisson of pleasure that comes from rehearsing what we most fear

Learning about cheese making- its skin of decomposed milk as a vibrant ecological community- emphasizes just what a weird & wonderful achievement cheese is: how our ancestors figured out how to guide the decomposition of milk so it might be arrested & then defended; deftly deploying rot against rot, fungus against fungus, to suspend milk’s inexorable slide into putrifaction just long enough to enjoy a tasty cheese.

A cheese is an ecological system, and the cheesemakers techniques operate like forces of natural selection to determine which species will succeed, thereby creating the cheese’s specific flavors & aromas & textures. In this, a cheese is much like a sourdough bread culture, except that its microbial community is even more complex & long lived. Indeed, it is still living when we eat it (bread culture dies in baking).

Taken together, the microflora may function as a kind of sensory organ, bringing the body the latest information from the environment, as well as the new tools needed to deal with it. The bacteria in your gut are continually reading the environment and responding; they’re a molecular mirror of the changing world. And because they can evolve so quickly, they help our bodies respond to changes in our environment.