Cooked (2016–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - Air - full transcript

[people speaking Arabic indistinctly]

[dishes clattering]

[Zineb in Arabic]
We add a little bit of salt.

Then we mix it together.

Add some sugar, Mom.

[Zineb] No, you can't do that.

[grunts]

Oh, son, I'm tired already.

We make bread every morning.

Homemade bread is best.

It's much better than
any bread from the store.



But making bread is hard work.

It's impossible to live without bread.

Water and bread are the same.

You can't live without water,
and you can't live without bread.

You just can't.

Tell the baker to put the bread in
the oven as soon as you get there.

-Now?
-Yes.

[Zineb speaking Arabic]

Take your time.

Be careful.

[theme music playing]

[Michael] Of the four elements,
air is the most elusive

because we can't see it.

Which is, I think, what makes it special.



There's something very magical about it.

One of the ways we transform food
is by getting air into it.

Think of the soufflé,
think of the loaf of bread.

These things are elevated
by the fact that they now contain air.

They're no longer earth-bound.

They're ethereal.

I don't know if there's
another food I like

quite as much as bread,
I have to say.

Oh, it's such a simple food.
It's, like, three ingredients.

Flour, water, a little salt.

Why do we like air in our food?

It's lighter, obviously,

but also, all those air pockets
have gas in them.

And so, there is flavors that come up
through the back of your mouth

into your sinus cavities,
and they're tasted there.

And that's why crackers
aren't as good as bread,

and why flour isn't
as good as bread.

[faucet running]

Well, when I thought
about baking bread,

I thought it was like
learning rocket science.

You know, you'd need a scale
calibrated in grams,

[chuckles] you have to know
the metric system. It's--

Even if you're an experienced cook,
it's very intimidating.

And I think, of all the things
I learned how to do,

I was probably most intimidated by,
uh, by baking bread.

When I was interviewing
a food scientist at Davis

named Bruce German,

he told me something I didn't realize.

That if I gave you
a bag of flour and water,

and you had nothing else to live on,

you could live on that for a while,
but eventually you would die.

But if you take that same
bag of flour and water

and bake it into bread,

you could live indefinitely.

So, what happens?
What is happening to that flour

that we're turning
what won't keep us alive

into something that can keep us alive?

That made me realize that the technique,
the technology of baking bread

represented this revolutionary
advance for our species.

[indistinct talking]

[Michael] Bread requires a civilization.

I mean, you need people
to grow the grain,

you need people
to harvest the grain,

you need people to mill the grain
and shape the dough.

And it's a cooperative venture.

[Omar in Arabic] Planting wheat
begins in the month of October.

You wake up early and
you work until the sun burns you,

then you return back home.

Then you go back again in the evening

for an additional
one or two hours of work.

I have lived on this farm
since I was a boy.

I inherited the land from my father.

Agriculture is very important to us.

Even Prophet Muhammad spoke about it
when he said,

"Sow in order to eat."

It is also important because
we don't buy grain in the store.

We get everything from here.

I take all of the grain
to a traditional miller

to get a good result.

[mill stone turning]

[Simohammed in Arabic]
Before we begin,

we have to divert the river
to add more pressure.

[Omar] It's working.
Carry on what you were doing.

Yes.

[Simohammed in English]
The mill turns by water.

There is a channel of water
that we divide from the river.

This mill has between 100 and 150 years.

And it still always works, you know.

Omar, he farms.

He brings his grain here to make flour.

[in Arabic] It's okay like that.

[in English] People from the villages
bring their grain, grind it here,

and after they don't pay by money.

They pay me by 10% of the grain.

From the 10%,
we take what we need for family

and the rest we could
sell it in the market.

Or we could barter with other things
that we need.

I'm the fourth generation
to work in the mill.

To be a miller,
I learned it from my father.

When I was young, I watched my father
when he did work in the mill.

He was all the time busy
with the grain, with the flour.

He loved his work.

[pots clattering]

[Simohammed in Arabic]
Everybody, come eat before you leave.

[Simohammed's wife in Arabic]
Sarah. Abdellah. Come.

[Simohammed in English] The breakfast,
we could start by honey, butter,

olive oil, tea and bread.

Every meal, we eat bread.

It's sacred food.
You could say that.

[Michael] Bread is hugely important
to many cultures.

In fact, in Morocco,
it's forbidden to take a knife to bread

because it is considered
too violent an act.

The word "bread"
is also the word for "life."

[Simohammed in English] Khadija,
when she was 12 or 13 years old,

she started to make bread.

[Michael] There's no written record
of the discovery of bread

or the invention of bread,
but as best as we know,

it starts in ancient Egypt
about 6,000 years ago.

There was a bowl of
pulverized grain with water, of porridge,

and it was off in a corner
and neglected for a couple days,

and some yeast
from the air got into it,

and it began to bubble.

And somebody had the idea of,
"Let's cook this.

Let's put this in the oven
and see what happens."

And it got even bigger.

And there was the first loaf of bread...

which looked like this miracle
of creating more food from less.

The discovery of bread
marked a big advance from porridge,

since bread was so much tastier
and more nutritious.

The knowledge of how to make bread
spread quickly to neighboring regions,

like present-day Morocco.

But it takes a whole new
division of labor to make it work.

[man speaking Arabic]

[Michael] Hard to imagine bread
evolving in a hunter-gatherer culture

without the sophisticated division of
labor to do all those different jobs.

So bread is, in that sense,
the product of civilization

as well as an enabler of civilization.

The work of the farmer, the miller,
and the families who mix and knead dough

ends with the baker.

In places like Egypt and Morocco,

there's an ancient tradition
of bringing dough to a community oven

where the baker cooks the loaves
for the entire neighborhood.

Since people did not have
their own ovens,

the baker played
a crucial role in the community.

[baker in Arabic]
We can make about 1,000 loaves a day.

We start at midnight and finish
around 9:00 or 10:00 a.m.,

depending on the workload.

I have been a baker since 1974,
both here and other places.

I'm a baker because I didn't go to school
and my parents were poor,

but long ago,
this profession had a high value.

People would say,
"Oh, this girl, she married a baker!

This is good,
because she will have enough bread.

It is an honorable profession."

A lot of things have changed
in this profession.

People are no longer interested
in learning it.

We don't make as much money as before.

There's not enough demand because
most people buy bread from stores.

[Michael] So, when we discovered bread,

and that this one grass called wheat
was the way to make it,

uh, wheat then takes off,

and it becomes
the most important grass we plant.

Today, wheat is planted
more widely than any other single crop,

more than 550 million acres worldwide.

And it all started in a region
of the Middle East and North Africa,

formerly known as the Fertile Crescent.

Although wheat has its origins here

and bread is still
the staple food in these countries,

the Fertile Crescent is no longer
the bread basket it once was.

The countries that make up
this region today, from Egypt to Iraq,

can no longer harvest enough wheat
to feed their growing populations.

So they have to import it from places
that have surpluses,

like Russia, Ukraine, Australia
and the European Union.

This imbalance creates
a complex global wheat economy,

in which countries like Morocco

must rely on wheat
harvested thousands of miles away.

[brakes screeching]

[grain rushing]

[Muhammad] Every day,
we get 300 metric tons of grain,

that become 240 tons of flour.

When we receive the grains,

we clean it, we mill it, we sift it

and we have different types of flours
that we sell.

Our flour is bought by bread makers,
by hypermarkets

and by other sellers.

The flour is very important
in the stability of the society.

When the yields are bad
for Moroccan wheat,

we can work with international
and with other countries' grains.

Right now, the grain comes
from five countries,

from Lithuania, France, Germany,
Ukraine and Morocco.

And every year it depends on the economic
and political situation of every country.

For example, last year
we didn't have Ukrainian wheat

because of the political situation there.

[Michael] We're all connected
by this price of bread.

If you have a shortage in Australia,
it may be felt in Saudi Arabia.

And the agricultural policies
of one country

end up affecting another.

And governments work very hard
to keep the price of bread down,

because they all know,
every political leader knows,

you can lose your head
if the price of bread goes up too fast.

[protestors chanting in Arabic]

[reporter 1] Tunisia remains under
a state of emergency this morning

following yet another
outburst of food rioting.

[reporter 2] Angry mobs rampaged
through the poor sections--

[protestors chanting]

[reporter 3] ...an early help,
dropped swiftly and with meager funds,

is only bread.

[Michael] The French Revolution
was tied to a spike in the price of bread.

The Arab Spring, there was
a wheat shortage that led to food riots.

[protestors chanting in Arabic]

Whenever the price of bread spikes,
there will be political unrest.

And the reason is that
that is the bedrock food.

If you can't afford meat
and you can't afford vegetables,

you can usually still afford bread.

[sniffs]

Now it will essentially rest
for 45 minutes.

If you look at the size of it,
in the bowl, it's, you know,

only coming up about a third.

And as the day goes on,
it's gonna rise.

Bread-making is a kind of
ingenious technology

for the conversion of grass seeds

into a really nutritious
and delicious food.

You know, in a way, it's one of the first
food processing technologies.

This is our master baguette,
I think it has some really nice...

These were just baked
a couple of hours ago, but...

[Nathan Myhrvold] It's fashionable
to call some foods "natural"

as a form of goodness.

But let me tell you,
bread is unnatural.

Bread does not grow anywhere.

Bread is, of course,
made of natural ingredients like grain,

but a loaf of bread
and a pile of wheat

couldn't be more different.

[Michael] We went to see
Nathan Myhrvold,

former Chief Technology Officer
for Microsoft

and founder of Modernist Cuisine,
a food science laboratory in Washington,

to get a closer look
at the science behind bread-making.

[Nathan] Bread like this is largely air.

Now, if you got rid
of all of the air,

it'd be a lot smaller.

And I hate to do this
to beautiful bread,

but... this shows you
how little is actually there.

Now, in a big rustic loaf like this...

it's a little harder to squish it...

but it's still mostly air.

And if you look inside,

you can see that
there's bubbles everywhere.

Air is mostly what you're eating
when you eat bread.

Bread is a fascinating combination
of cooking and biology and physics.

Biology is involved because
bread is alive before you bake it.

If you take a bunch of flour,
uh, of almost any grain,

and you mix it with some water
and you let it sit out on the counter,

in somewhere between
a couple hours to a couple days,

it'll be bubbling like crazy.

And you will have a community
of microorganisms making carbon dioxide.

So, a good way to think about
the process of bread rising

is you've got bacteria blowing,

or farting, if you prefer,
into balloons.

And the more
they fart into those balloons,

the bigger those balloons get,

leading the bread to double
or even triple in size.

What acts as the balloon?

The best material
anybody has found

in the context of bread
is something called "gluten."

[crackling]

At our lab here,
we take bread, or dough,

and freeze it, and break it,

and look at it
under an electron microscope.

And you can see the little network
of these gluten molecules,

and it's almost like a fishnet.

[Michael] Gluten is basically
two proteins.

And when you moisten flour,

these two proteins,
they kind of mesh together.

And when they do, they form a substance
that's very stretchy, extensible,

but it also will return
like a balloon.

The head chef
at Modernist Cuisine

took a ball of dough
and washed it in water,

stripping away the starches,
and leaving nothing but pure gluten.

He blew it up like a balloon
to simulate what happens

on a much smaller scale
during fermentation.

The reason gluten
is important to bread is that

those little bubbles of gas
would just go off into the air

if there weren't gluten to hold them.

And actually, air is one of the reasons
we love bread.

Biologically, there's this
very interesting phenomenon

of retronasal olfaction.

The fact that we smell in two ways.

I mean, we smell things outside
through our nose,

and then we smell things
in the back of our throat.

The gases, the aromatics come up

and it deepens the kind of flavors
that's available to us.

And it's all due to gluten.

[Nathan] A variety of things
have caused interest in gluten

to expand enormously.

Lots of people have written books
demonizing gluten, and saying,

"Oh, my God, gluten is responsible

for almost every bad thing
you can imagine.

It's cancer, it's insanity, it's all..."

Doesn't matter what it is,
someone has claimed gluten causes it.

And so you see these
ridiculous things, uh...

Ice cream shops in Greenwich Village
all have signs saying,

"gluten-free ice cream."

Well, there was never
any gluten in ice cream!

[Michael] By some estimates,
30% of Americans today

make an effort to avoid gluten.

The trend is undeniable,

which is why Nathan wants to make
the best gluten-free bread he can.

So, this is a regular, uh,

gluten-free brioche
next to our actual brioche loaf.

Both of these are based
on our master recipe.

[Nathan] So, this is the real deal.

So, the gluten-free brioche,

-it's not as stretchy.
-Mmm-hmm.

[Nathan] It's got a texture that's
a little bit more like a pound cake.

The challenge
in making gluten-free bread

is, "How do I make a dough
that will trap the air bubbles

and yet have a texture
that I wanna eat?"

It's really hard to do.

A lot of gluten-free bread, as a result,
tastes like a kitchen sponge.

My personal philosophy is,

"No one should eat food
they don't wanna eat."

By the same token,
if someone says,

"Oh, you shouldn't eat gluten.
It's terrible for you,"

I would say, "Well, prove it."

And unfortunately, there's not been
a whole lot of proof in that respect.

[Michael] There are a lot of people
who struggle with gluten.

Some of them have celiac disease,
which is, like, a real allergy to gluten.

That's one or two percent
of the population.

And then a much larger group,
uh, report gluten intolerance.

And this is a bit of a mystery

given that this has been the staple food
for our species for a very long time.

What happened?

You have to put it in the context of,

you know, we have a history
of demonizing one nutrient

and celebrating another nutrient.

And we tend, especially in America,

to think in terms of this black-and-white,
cold war of nutrients.

An example of another nutrient
that we demonized really badly,

beginning in the '60s and '70s,
is fat.

Dietary fat was
the great evil nutrient.

[announcer 1] Introducing Philly Free.

It's fat-free.

[Michael] It explained heart disease,
it explained overweight,

it explained everything.

And we've since come to realize,
you know,

there's very little evidence to correlate
fat intake with heart disease,

uh, as it turns out.

Now, the focus
has switched to carbohydrates.

And today, gluten happens to be getting
the really bad rap.

There's something going on, clearly,

but my guess is
it's a sign of something else.

It may be the changes
in the way we make bread

that are contributing to this problem.

'Cause the bread you buy
in the supermarket,

in that package,
that Wonder Bread, um...

is very different than
what bread was for most of history.

You know, there used to be
an official definition of bread.

The FDA had these standards of identity
for all products.

And bread was, uh,
you know, flour, water, salt.

And so, once you industrialize bread,
and make things like Wonder Bread,

the industry petitioned the FDA
to loosen things up

so they could move
to this commercial thing.

This bread is three ingredients,
basically,

and commercial bread
is 31 or 37 ingredients.

And so they redefined bread
to admit these other 30 ingredients.

Um, so, is it the real thing?

The FDA says it's the real thing,

but historically, no, it's not.
It's a real novelty.

Sometimes as a species,
we're a little too smart for our own good.

We industrialized bread
for the reason

we industrialized so much
about food production,

which is to make it cheaper.

[narrator on TV]
When the wheat grains are clean,

they go to the roller mills.

These machines separate the coarse part
of the grains from the fine parts

through very fine silk cloth.

[Michael] When we moved from whole grains
ground on a stone to white flour,

really white flour,
on a roller mill,

this was a major change,

and it looked like a great boon
to civilization and to economics.

White flour is non-perishable,

which allowed mills
to produce it on a larger scale

and ship it all around the world.

Roller milling made white flour
cheaper and more widely available.

People loved white bread,

and there was a great prestige
attached to white flour.

And suddenly you could make
really white flour

that everybody could afford.
It seemed like a great thing.

[narrator] Delicious bread,
fresh and clean,

brought every day to the neighborhood
food store for you and for me.

[Michael] But all of a sudden,
people started getting sick

because we had removed
the most nutritious part of the flour

without even realizing it.

And it's fine to try things,
but when you recognize they don't work,

you go back
and you pick up the thread.

And we didn't do that with white flour.

[announcer] Here's how to help
build strong bodies eight ways.

Eat Wonder Bread.

Wonder Bread every meal
gives you eight elements you need.

As much muscle-building protein
as roast beef.

As much calcium
for bones and teeth...

[Michael] Instead of realizing
we should go back to whole grain flour,

the government, working with bakers,
pioneered the idea of fortifying flour.

Let's put vitamins back in.

And they sold this as
something better and brand new.

[announcer] Because
Wonder Soft Whipped Bread

is made from batter, not dough,
it has no holes.

Get Wonder Soft Whipped.

And this is really how
capitalism usually works, right?

It creates a problem,
and rather than fix the problem,

it creates a new business
to solve the problem.

You know,
industrialization's not inherently evil.

It can be done well or done badly.

But often in the rush
to make something cheaper,

we overlook the reason why it was done
in this somewhat more painstaking way.

And in the case of bread,
what we may have overlooked

is the importance of a long,
slow sourdough fermentation.

A lot of us think of sourdough
as a style of bread,

but what sourdough is
is the traditional way all bread was made

until only about a hundred years ago.

Sourdough is the proper way
to make bread.

You can feel the difference from
an hour or so ago,

which is that it feels billowy.

I started this bread last night,

and then it takes about four hours
of bulk fermentation.

And I taste it...

at every stage

to really find out how
my fermentation is going.

And it should get more sour
as the day goes on,

but if it gets too sour,
you know, you've over-fermented,

so you have to keep an eye on that.

One of the masters of sourdough baking
that I sought out in my education

was Richard Bourdon.

Richard's obsession is nutrition
as much as anything.

He's kind of a mad scientist,

and he really believes
that fermentation is key to health.

He's doing it the old-fashioned way.

[machinery whirring]

[Richard] I come from a farm country,
uh, northwestern Quebec province.

I come from a family of ten...

and, uh, food was a big part of our lives.

My mother, she baked her own bread,

and I was always
my mother's little helper,

carrying the bag of flour inside,

and I actually asked her
to teach me how to bake a few things.

I used to make a little dessert
on Sunday morning.

That was my specialty.
I would make that for the family.

I kind of took a personal commitment
to saying, like, at 21 years old,

to say, "I'm gonna bring
better food to this world."

And I actually put an ad in the paper
for a farmer or a baker.

Whoever calls first
is what I'm going to do.

The baker called first.

-I'll load these, uh...
-Yeah.

...peasant French in about
five minutes, okay?

-[man] All right.
-All right, that's it on that one?

-Yep.
-Okay.

Where are we at?
Seeded rye here?

I prefer when they go in one at a time.
I'll show you why.

They come out nicer
if you hold them back just a little bit.

You know, I came into it
with the question of, like,

you know, "What is bread?

And what is it about it
that's worth doing again?

What is it about it that gives sustenance?

What is it about it that keeps you alive?"

It's taking this kernel of grain

and transforming it
into something that's more.

You free the nutrients out of the seeds.

I'd like to call myself more of
a grain processor than a baker.

I process grain. I process them in a way
that they become digestible.

That's really my goal.

In a kernel of grain,

there's everything
to support a whole life.

Carbohydrates, minerals, proteins.

And it's locked up real tight, like, uh...

I like to use the example
of a Batmobile, you know.

And it's all--

Uh, you've seen the movie, I'm sure,
where it's all, you know,

you hit the clicker
and the thing locks up.

If you just take the seeds
and start chewing on them

without doing anything,
it's not gonna go well.

It's very difficult to digest.

All grains need to be fermented,
where you use a culture of bacterias.

They're everywhere.

From the air...

They're just always there,
omnipotent, omnipresent.

[Michael] Sourdough culture is this
mixed ecosystem of bacteria and yeast

that were used
to ferment bread for millennia.

You expose some wet flour
to the air and stir it,

and you will get a sourdough culture

that transform the wheat into
a very nutritious substance.

This, by the way, is exactly
how the ancient Egyptians

accidentally learned
how to leaven bread.

When someone left out
that bowl of wheat porridge

and it started to bubble,

that was one of the world's
first sourdoughs.

[Richard] Building a culture
is kind of like the art of baking.

This is where it becomes
the skill of the orchestrator.

Working with natural starters is difficult
because it has a mind of its own.

It changes all the time.
It's a live process.

But it's essential.

If you don't do this,
you don't get the nutrients out of it.

[Michael] Wheat,
even in the form of milled flour,

is hard for our bodies to digest.

One of the advantages
of the long sourdough fermentation

that Richard has mastered

is that it allows bacteria
to fully break down the carbohydrates

and the strong, stretchy gluten
in the dough.

It also releases
the healthy minerals in the grain

so that our bodies
can more easily absorb them.

The sourdough fermentation has
all the variables of any natural system,

too many of them to manage
on a large scale.

So to simplify the process,

food scientists came up
with a reliable shortcut,

in the form of fast-acting
commercial yeast.

We isolated the yeast...

and we bred the yeast to get
the biggest rise as fast as possible.

And we overlooked the rest
of what was going on in fermentation.

As it turns out,

that represents one of those
simplifications of industrial food

that had unintended consequences
that we're dealing with right now.

I think we're gonna turn the heat on
on these ciabattas.

[beeping]

People ask me this, like,
"Why don't you use yeast?"

The problem is that
when you use the yeast,

you have no fermentation here,
you have no acidic breakdown.

The bread becomes harder to digest

and when things are harder to digest,
it taxes your system.

Now we see a trend
where there's so much sensitivity,

whether it's gluten or wheat.

There are so many bad wheat products
out there,

I'm not surprised
that people are not feeling well.

I hate when I see that they promote

eating more whole grain,
so everybody gets on the bandwagon

eating, like, whole-wheat macaroni,
and, uh...

But they didn't say
fermented whole grain.

[Michael] I think we have to make
a distinction between

a properly fermented loaf
of sourdough bread

and all the other forms
in which we get gluten.

You know, I would bet that

if you took a dozen people
who claimed a gluten intolerance

and you gave them Richard's bread,
they'd be fine.

[Michael] When you bake a loaf of bread,

essentially, the loaf itself
becomes a pressure cooker.

And this thoroughly cooks the starches

in a way that makes them
delicious and digestible.

-[soft crunching]
-[Richard] You know, that sound is...

It's like walking on crispy snow
or something. It's just crispy.

It's just, uh-- And the smell.
If you crack it a little bit,

the aroma comes out, so...
[clicks tongue]

It's one of the little pleasures,
you know, that a baker might get.

You know, it felt light enough.
Just not too light, not too heavy.

Now if we look inside,
everything is, um, opened nicely.

It formed the crust.
It cooks from inside out.

And if you take the inside of the bread,

just like this, this is where
you can taste, really,

if it's well done,
if it tastes sweet as you chew it.

And the more you chew,
the deeper it becomes.

The deeper the flavor comes.

It's like a whole--

It keeps changing.
It keeps becoming more.

You take a bite
of this bread that's a little sour

and the first thing that will happen is
it will make you salivate.

This process is essential
to trigger digestion.

If you chew a piece of yeasted bread,
you typically need

something to wash it down.

You know, it kind of, like...
It doesn't make you salivate.

You start with wheat.
If you smell wheat flour and, um...

after the whole process of fermentation,
it doesn't smell like wheat anymore.

It doesn't smell like, uh...
It smells like something new.

[Michael] Richard points out that
we're not the only creature that ferments.

You know, I had thought
we were the cooking animal,

and that we're the only ones.

We have a monopoly on this technology.

But Richard convinced me that there is...
There are exceptions.

[Richard] Most people think a dog
buries a meat to go hide it,

but the real reason
that they do this is actually

to let their meat ferment.

They can't eat fresh protein.

Birds know how to sprout seeds
to get food,

to be able to break the seed down.

Instinctively, if you look at nature,
nature knows what to do.

Nature knows what to eat.

We are also part of nature.

[Michael] You know, one of the values of
traditional foods made in traditional ways

is they... they've worked
for a very long time.

And they're the product
of a kind of cultural evolution.

[Simohammed in English] The mills,
they are always close to the river,

and we've had problems with floods.

When the snow melts,
the level of water becomes too high.

When there is rain in summer,

the soil is so dry that
it doesn't absorb the water,

and it becomes a big problem.

Twenty years ago,

it would last
seven or eight years between floods.

Now there are more and more floods.

Five months ago,

we had water inside the house,
a meter and a half high.

Part of the mill was falling down,
and we had to build it again.

Before there were 18 or 17 mills
in this valley,

but most of them were destroyed
by the river.

Now we have three or four mills.

[Michael] People who live off the land,

whose livelihoods are
at the mercy of the weather,

are most susceptible
to things like flooding,

drought, and climate change in general.

Perhaps the most vulnerable of all
are the farmers and their crops.

Crops like wheat depend on a certain
temperature range and rainfall range,

and that's changing right now.

And there will be places that were
bread baskets that won't be any longer.

I think, even this one...
I don't think that it's a good one.

But this one can be...
This one is not bad.

Can be given a chance.

Most of it is bread wheat.

Some of them were dried
because of the heat wave.

So, this has already lost
most of its leaves.

I am from the southern part of Morocco.

I am from an agricultural family.
My father used to be a farmer.

I have witnessed myself,
the drastic effects of climate change.

We are already witnessing severe droughts,
extreme heat waves,

and this has affected the agriculture.

Morocco, they are big consumers of wheat.

It is the major crop.

It's contributing 60%
of the calories in the diet.

If we cannot produce enough,
then I think we are in trouble.

[Michael] With more drought
predicted for an already arid climate,

crop yields in Northern Africa
could fall by 50% by 2020

and as much as 90% by 2100,

with small family-run farms being
the most severely affected.

Wheat, you know,
it's a very volatile commodity.

And at any given time,
there is not a lot of give in the system.

There's usually, like,
a month's supply of wheat

available around the world,

and if that moves too much or too fast,

we will see
enormous political instability.

[protestors chanting]

-[drums beating]
-[rhythmic clapping]

[Michael] In ancient times,
the granary was the physical structure

that allowed civilizations to rise,
a way to store food long-term,

to buffer against a bad crop
or political instability.

In the modern world,

we've taken the idea of the granary
to the next level,

by establishing seed banks.

[man 1] When accidents
or natural disasters or war intervened,

that was it,
they were dead as a dinosaur, extinct.

But we're going to put
an end to extinction with this vault.

It's a home for seeds
from all around the world.

[man 2] Now we have the possibility

to preserve the seeds
all over the world.

[Michael] International
non-governmental organizations

have built and maintained
these fortresses,

attempting to stockpile seeds
of all the crops we've ever raised.

But instead of storing calories,
they store information,

the genetic information contained
in small samples of every type of seed.

What we hope to achieve with these banks
is to buffer against global catastrophe,

using the information they hold
to help us breed new crops

that will thrive in a changing world.

A world of new diseases
and an increasingly hostile climate.

[Ahmed Amri] What we are trying
to do here is to screen for heat tolerance

and drought tolerance.

We are looking for
very clean leaves like this.

That's what the breeders are looking for,
to breed new varieties.

[Michael] Ahmed Amri is a leading
geneticist at a gene bank for seeds.

In 2012, he rescued wheat seeds
from war-torn Syria

and brought them into Morocco
for safekeeping.

[Ahmed] When we had a crisis in 2012,
we had to leave our premises in Syria.

We had there around 141,000 samples
of seeds in the gene bank.

It could happen that
a shell could destroy it completely.

Then we would lose everything.

So, we have to reconstruct our collection
in Morocco,

and this is what we are doing.

If we find one trait, good trait,
we conserve them for any future use.

Like this one, for example, has tolerance
to drought, tolerance to heat,

that the breeders can use today,
or can use in the future,

to overcome the challenges
of heat and drought.

[Michael] Amri works with
fellow geneticist

and wheat breeder Nasir Nasrallah.

[talking indistinctly]

You work the genes,
you isolate them

by crossing and selecting,
crossing and selecting,

until you get them
into something useful for us.

[Ahmed] The best ones
will make it to the farmers.

From 25 lines that are in this experiment,
for example,

only maybe one or two
will make it to the farmers.

With this, we will be able to overcome

most of the challenges to agriculture,

most of the challenges
posed to wheat around the world.

[Michael] A wheat seed
is an amazing thing.

I mean, it is this perfect package,
like a spaceship, you know,

heading into the future with
everything needed to sustain life.

And the challenge of bread-making
is to access all those nutrients...

and hijack them, in a way,
so they go to us.

And that's really
what bread allows us to do.

And actually, one of the things
that was a pleasant surprise to me,

was that it isn't rocket science,
and you can do it by feel.

And it was very liberating
to learn that.

And sometimes
it's better than other times.

Sometimes you get
a great oven spring and you're...

You feel like,
"God, I really know what I'm doing."

And other times, it's kind of flat,

and you don't exactly know
what went wrong.

This is called an ear.

That's a good thing, to have
a pronounced ear on a loaf of bread.

[inhales deeply] Mmm.

I would do it just for the smell.

[chuckles]

I began feeling daunted,
and I ended feeling confident,

and an enormous
sense of, uh, satisfaction.

I think of all the things
I learned how to make...

uh, making a decent loaf of bread
has been the most satisfying.

[all speaking Arabic]

[in Arabic] Here, eat it.

[Michael] All cooking is alchemy, right?
I mean, it's transformation.

But bread is the greatest alchemy of all.

Take a small amount of food
and turn it into a large amount of food

that can feed a lot of people.

Out of thin air,
literally out of thin air.

The word "spirit," you know,
comes from wind, comes from air.

And it's no accident.

The spiritual dimension is the one
that you can't really grab hold of.

It is like the breeze.

Exactly what we need
to make this wonderful food

is democratically available
to everybody in the air.

It really is a miracle.

[theme music playing]