Cooked (2016–…): Season 1, Episode 4 - Earth - full transcript

[Michael] All cooking is transformation,

and in that sense,
it's miraculous, it's alchemy.

[sniffs]

But of all the different transformations
we call cooking,

I think fermentation
is the most miraculous

and the most mysterious.

And that's because it doesn't involve
any applied heat at all.

This is food and drink

made strictly through the action
of bacteria and fungi.

Microbes, most of which
come from the earth,

they perform all the transformations



that normally we need heat
to make happen.

You know, I don't think people realize
as they walk through the supermarket,

or, indeed, into the far reaches
of their own refrigerator,

how many fermented foods are there.

It's the ketchup
and the hot sauce,

it's the, uh, the sake,
it's the kombucha,

it's the beer, it's the salami,
it's the prosciutto.

You know, all the way to chocolate.

A third of the food
in our diet are fermented.

In most cases, we have no idea.

[theme music playing]

[motor whirring]

[people speaking Spanish]

[Pedro in Spanish] The yuca is
a root that develops underground,



and, well...

One of its derivatives is masato,

which is a regional beverage.

Our ancestors used to
harvest and drink it,

and that is why we are
cultivating the yuca in the same way.

[Michael] You know,
we've been fermenting for a long time,

but one of the most desirable
and probably earliest ferments

is the fermentation of, uh...
of alcoholic beverages.

I mean, people have been
questing for alcohol

as long as they first
stumbled on it,

probably in a piece of rotted fruit,
uh, or a split coconut.

And you need sugar water, essentially.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae,

the yeast that's responsible for making
any alcoholic ferment, needs sugar.

So, we plundered nature
for sources of sugar

that we could turn into alcohol.

And there are ways of doing it,
still common in the Amazon,

that are ingenious.

-[lively music playing]
-[rooster crows]

[Michael] One of the most,

probably one of the earliest,
crudest alcoholic beverages is made by,

uh, taking a starchy root
called yuca or cassava,

and chewing it.

And this is done collectively,

a bunch of people will chew
and spit into a vat.

And lo and behold,
something very interesting happens.

In our saliva are enzymes,
amylase enzymes,

that break starches
down into sugars.

[in Spanish] And if you try to prepare
masato by just crushing the yuca,

and not chewing it,

it will not mature well.

It smells so bad you cannot drink it.

On the other hand, when it is chewed,
you get a tasty masato.

Chewing will ferment it.

[in Spanish] I wonder how our grandmothers
figured out how to do this.

But this is what they taught our mothers,

and our mothers taught us.

[Michael] But the secret ingredient
is saliva.

And saliva is doing the job
of, uh, of the enzymes.

[Michael] One of the things
that's incredible about fermentation

is that people mastered this

long before they understood how it worked.

I mean, that they were learning
how to corral and direct

and channel the energies of microbes
without knowing what a microbe was.

To them, it must have seemed like magic.

-[speaking Spanish]
-And indeed it is.

It's this cold fire
that can transform things,

from one state
into a very different other.

[slurping]

You know, it's generally assumed that
the creation or discovery of agriculture

was about feeding us,
it was about food.

Um, but it may well be
that it was about alcohol,

uh, and there is a "beer before bread"
hypothesis held by some anthropologists

that suggests that the real motivation
for settling down and growing grain

may have been motivated by the desire
to have fermentable crops,

plenty of them.

'Cause if you think about
collecting grain in the wild,

it's a really painstaking process.

Whereas fields of barley
or fields of other grain

that you could make alcohol from
would be very appealing.

And there is some circumstantial evidence

to suggest that it may have been
alcohol that came first.

Isaac and I, my son,
started brewing beer several years ago,

when I was starting to learn
about fermentation,

and we did it from kits
that we bought at the brew store

and that was great
and we made beer and it was drinkable.

But we discovered that
there was a person of our acquaintance,

the father of a friend of Isaac's,
who had gotten very serious about brewing.

[Shane McKay] This is crystal 16,
crystal 120.

And when we mash it,
it's getting the sugar out of this.

-[Michael] Mmm-hmm.
-That's what we're gonna be doing.

This is a barley mill,
known as the barley crusher...

[Michael] Shane McKay happens to be
one of these kind of obsessive hobbyists.

And he's made himself
into a very good, uh...

amateur brewer.

So, when he offered
to let us brew with him,

we thought it was too good
an opportunity to pass up.

-[chuckles]
-There you go.

So, basically we're trying
to boil all the sugars

and flavor out of this, right?

[Shane] Yeah.

So, you want the right amount
of water in there.

Too little and it's too thick,

but if you have too much water,
it's too thin

and the enzymes get diluted
and they don't do their work.

And if you taste this now... it's sweet.

-[Michael] Yep.
-But in an hour, it'll be really sweet.

This is so much more intricate
than how Isaac and I started out.

Remember when we started?
We did it in the kitchen.

It was like the Duncan Hines
of beer-making.

Well, it was funny,
because when we were doing it...

we'd never, you know,
we'd never done it before

and we didn't know what to expect.
And we were just, like...

-banging pipes together...
-[chuckling]

...and funneling liquids
through other liquids,

and cooling things down

and heating them up
and cooling them down again.

But then, the moment
when we were like,

"Oh, we actually..."

-Like, "This might work a little bit..."
-[laughs]

was the next morning when we go down
and look at the carboy

and there's just this city of activity.

[Michael] The word "ferment,"
which means to boil,

is really kind of appropriate.

Because this liquid that was
just kind of inert is suddenly bubbling.

So, if you look closely,
you can actually see the bubbles forming,

you can see them
coming up to the surface.

It really is a lot of
very tiny little bubbles.

You know, this will continue
until the sugar is used up.

The yeast's taking that sugar
and turning it into alcohol,

which we want...

[Michael] And that coming to life
of something that had appeared dead,

how else would you explain that
as a gift from the gods?

And which, indeed, we thought it was.

Dionysus is the god of fermentation,

not just alcohol, but of this whole
process of transformation.

And this completely crosses
cultural lines,

the notion that fermented foods
are sacred.

In fact, ancient peoples
across South America,

Mayans, Aztecs, Olmecs,

all had rituals dedicated to
one of our most treasured ferments...

chocolate.

When you think about chocolate
and how it exists in our culture,

we have these bars of chocolate

and we have chocolate drinks
and we have candies.

We give each other chocolate on
Valentine's Day, Easter, Christmas, even.

So, we've adopted chocolate
into our modern rituals as well.

Chocolate's a big part of our culture.

And we think of it as this Western candy
that, you know, is ours.

But in fact, it's the product
of this rotten bean from the Amazon.

[indistinct]

[in Spanish]
This fruit is about two months old.

It will be ripe in the fifth month.

This is a cacao tree
that's just been harvested.

And we're selecting the ripe ones.

This is how you open a cacao.

[Michael] If you get a cacao pod
and slice it open,

uh, you will find inside
some big seeds,

but they're surrounded
with this kind of mucilaginous,

disgusting white, uh, gel,

um, that tastes nothing like chocolate.

And the beans themselves
are just bitter beyond belief.

But if you take those beans
covered with their slime

and let them ferment,

uh, an amazing transformation
will take place.

[chuckling]

[talking indistinctly]

[speaking Spanish]

[Carlos in Spanish] The process of
fermenting cacao must take place in boxes

to allow the temperature to increase.

It is also essential to cover the cacao,

to ensure the temperature rises.

As the cacao is saturated with the pulp,

the anaerobic fermentation takes place
because there's no oxygen.

First, when the temperature rises,

the grains don't germinate.

Then on day two,

we can see that the mass...

the mass is no longer cold.

We're talking four degrees more
than the first day.

On the fourth day,

the mass has to reach 50 degrees.

And the fermentation continues.

More bacteria is formed,

and acetic acid is formed.

Well, on the seventh day,

now, it has a chocolate color.

This means it has reached
the optimal fermentation

to start the drying process.

If you put the cacao on a thin layer,

the humidity comes out,
but the acidity remains.

This is the importance of
the drying stage.

Here the fermentation process ends.

[Michael] We think of fermented foods
as kind of exotic now,

but of course they were very important
before we had refrigeration.

The way you kept food was...

You had a few techniques,
but the main one was you fermented it.

That's how you got through the winter.
You fermented food in the fall.

Um, and so the taste of this food was
secondary at the beginning.

Kimchi's a great example
of a fermentation

that is used to preserve food
for a very long time.

And in Korea, people in the fall
will take their harvest of cabbages

and add spices to flavor it,

and add salt and then
they bury it in crocks in the earth

to keep it at a certain temperature.

The lactic acid produced
by the bacteria is a preservative

because it kills the bad bacteria,

so they can eat that food
all through the year.

And not only did the fermentation
preserve that food,

it actually improved the food.

I mean, it made the flavors stronger
and more appealing, at least to Koreans.

Uh, but it also changed the nutrients.

The bacteria in the fermentation
are producing vitamin B12, for example.

There's lots of vitamin C
when you make sauerkraut or kimchi,

so you actually end up
with a substantially more nutritious food

than you had before.

And we have the bacteria
to thank for that.

You can't talk about fermentation without
looking at the phenomenon of disgust,

and, um, a great many ferments
are disgusting, at least to one culture.

[Andrew Zimmern] Stinky tofu with
thousand-year-old egg salad.

Oh.

[Gordon Ramsay] This is an amazing
delicacy from Iceland.

It's basically rotten shark.

Now, one, two, three.

[retching]

Yeah, watch the American guy
eat the fermented shark.

Oh, man.

This is probably the single worst thing
I have ever put in my mouth.

It seems to me that fermented foods

are one of the ways
we build cultural identity.

"We're the people who like this food."
And it's always an acquired taste.

These are not like
the taste of sugar or salt.

This is the taste of decay.

Everything that dies gets broken down.

Its ultimate fate
is to be reused ecologically.

And the earth teems with
microbes and microorganisms

that will begin to digest
any living thing that dies,

whether it's a fruit
or a human body or an animal body,

any kind of biomass.

And one of the lead decomposers
are yeasts.

They're everywhere.

And that's why when you
start a ferment, like kimchi,

you don't have to add any microbes.
They're there.

[Ben Wolfe] We're looking at
a cabbage leaf

from kimchi in a petri dish.

Fermentation is what
we like to call "delicious rot."

-[chuckles]
-So, just like a log rotting in a forest

is being broken down
by the microbes slowly over time,

a wheel of cheese,
you know, a link of salami,

all these things are rotting.

And what we're doing is
we're using variables like salts,

we're using variables like time,

we're using other variables like moisture
to control that rot.

[Michael] Rachel Dutton and Ben Wolfe
are both microbiologists

with an unusual interest.

They're studying the ecology
of the cheese rind.

[Rachel] We spend
most of our time on cheese,

but there are all of these
really interesting communities

in other fermented foods.

Kimchi has a slightly different
set of microbes

than the cheese we were looking at.

So, we're gonna take
a little bit of this juice from the kimchi

and try and get a look at it
under the microscope.

-It's a wonderland of...
-Ah!

-...lactic acid bacteria.
-I love it.

[Ben] Probably some kind of plant cell,

or maybe even some
of the spices that were added,

and then all these
small little rods that are floating by,

um, those are the bacteria,
the lactic acid bacteria.

[Rachel] So here's another cluster

-with a lot of plant material and...
-[Ben] Excellent.

[Rachel] ...red pepper, oils.

It's just amazing, this whole world
that is alive in the food.

[Ben] These are microbes
that originated in a farm field.

[Rachel] Yeah.

[Ben] And you're eating them.
You're amplifying them.

It's like you're photocopying them,

growing them up over and over again
as you create this environment,

-and then you eat them.
-Yeah.

So, you know, this is a native,
amazing process that happens

and has been happening
for hundreds of years.

[Rachel] Yeah.

[Michael] Humans have been using
and working with

and being victim of microbes
for a very long time

before they knew what was going on.

It was Louis Pasteur who identified
microbes, bacteria and yeast,

and gave us the germ theory of disease,

the idea that there were
certain diseases

caused by certain bad bacteria.

Although Pasteur's understanding
of bacteria was more nuanced,

what we took away from his work
was this germophobia...

uh, that most of us grew up with.

The idea that because germs
could kill you and carry diseases,

all germs were bad.

But in fact, a great many germs
are incredibly beneficial and important,

and we couldn't live without them.

But the legacy is just fear of bacteria

and I think it has taken us
this long to reconsider that.

One of the biggest surprises to me,
learning about cooking,

was how much I came
to love bacteria [chuckles]

and fungi to some extent.

And one of my teachers in that...

in learning to love bacteria,
was Sister Noella.

[nuns singing in Latin]

[Michael] And she is a nun
and a microbiologist

at an abbey in Connecticut.

[nuns continue singing]

[Sister Noella]
I'm Sister Noella Marcellino,

and I've been
in the abbey for 42 years

and I have a doctorate in microbiology.

[singing]

[Sister Noella] Well, the motto of
Benedictines is "ora et labora,"

pray and work.

And that really sets the tone
and the rhythm of our life.

[cows mooing]

We have a 500-acre farm.

We have a beef herd, a dairy herd.

[nun clicking tongue]
Come on, let's move up.

-And we try as best we can...
-Come on.

...to grow our own food.

Come on, Firelily.

[Michael] "The Cheese Nun,"
as she's known,

makes a version of a French cheese
called Saint-Nectaire.

Sister Noella's cheese is a raw milk,
uncooked, natural rind cheese

made strictly according
to ancient techniques

that have been practiced in France
for hundreds of years.

This is Bethlehem cheese
and it's about ten days old,

and we're looking at these fungi.

[Michael] My first impression
of Sister Noella

was a woman decidedly more earthy
than spiritual.

But I soon came to see that, for her,
the miracles of Christ were many,

and could be witnessed
in the unlikeliest of places.

What I'm doing right now
is making a wet mount.

It's a quick way to look at...
especially fungi.

People would say, "Why aren't you
studying theology as a nun?"

But for me... and I think for many of us,
as Benedictines,

in seeing creation the way we do,

you have to enter it
in a very specific entrance point,

which for me is microbiology.

Then I stand back.
I'm not afraid of science.

I stand back in wonder at this creator.

[bell tolls]

I think sometimes people think
a cloistered community

is closed off from the world.
You see we have a grille.

We are separated,
but we are not closed off.

Come on, girls!

Come on.

[Sister Noella] When you first come in,
you have a chance to try many things,

to see if there's something
you've never had a chance to do

and perhaps you're good at it.

So for me...

I fell in love with a cow named Sheba,

and milked her,
and then started making cheese,

and that was something that I discovered
would become very important in my life.

[Michael] Learning how to make cheese
from Sister Noella

reveals the process at its most elemental.

Her method and approach
are so old-world,

that she has no need
for commercial bacterial cultures.

She relies only on raw milk,
rennet, salt,

and naturally occurring
bacteria and fungi.

[Sister Noella] This is starting
to cool off on top, you know?

[Sister Takeri] Yeah.

[Sister Noella] So I think
we should add some more water.

[Sister Takeri] You have to have
a surprisingly tough body for it.

I mean, I do all kinds of
things that would be considered...

huge, hard labor,
but then this is actually...

It takes a lot more of a
certain kind of strength of the body.

[Michael] One disadvantage
of learning from Sister Noella

is that her approach is so labor-intensive
and outside of the mainstream,

that it really doesn't represent
how most cheese is made today.

[Sister Noella] Michael Pollan,
he did very well.

We weren't too hard on him.

-He has bigger hands, too.
-[chuckles]

But I think he saw that
it was labor-intensive.

I could never have dreamed
of this technique, unless...

[chuckles] Lydie had taught me.

We were trying different cheeses
in our dairy, from a book,

and we really weren't happy with them.

So, I was praying for
an old French woman to come

and teach me how to make cheese.

Two days later,
a young French woman came.

Her name is Lydie Zawislak
and she was from the Auvergne.

And she shared with me a recipe

that her grandmother taught her.

In the Auvergne, for centuries
they used a wooden vat

to make Saint-Nectaire.

And she felt the wood
was critical to that process.

So, basically they would take,
uh, the morning milk...

they would not add
lactic acid cultures,

but they would add rennet,
coagulate the milk, break up the curd.

You're separating curds and whey.
It's as simple as that.

And the environment of the barrel,
she said,

"Keep it like the cow's body."
That's what she told me.

What amazed me is that you can pick it up.
This was liquid milk a few hours ago.

[Michael] So, she starts
making her cheese.

It's delicious.
She gets really good at it,

and the health department
takes a look at how she's doing it

and says, "We've got to shut you down.

You can't make cheese
in wooden barrels."

Now, you have to understand,
if you're the average sanitary engineer

or health department person,
wood is your enemy,

because bacteria can hide in wood.

Stainless steel,
you love stainless steel.

But this recipe said
use wood and raw milk in the cheese,

and this is milk
that hasn't been pasteurized,

which can be dangerous
if it's not handled properly.

If you're gonna make cheese,

you have one of two options
to assure its safety.

Number one, you can either pasteurize
the milk intended for cheese-making,

or you can age the cheese
that you make for 60 days.

[Michael] Like many Pasteurians,

microbiologist and food safety expert
Cathy Donnelly

had her own conversion experience

when she first encountered
Mother Noella's raw milk cheese.

[chuckling] I did refuse to try it.

Looking back on that now,
how rude of me,

but, um, but again, you know,
I was worried about listeria

and that surely looked like a cheese
that could harbor Listeria.

[Sister Noella] In the late '80s,
uh, there was an outbreak

of Listeria monocytogenes in California
that killed many people.

It was in a soft Mexican cheese...

and what had happened was some raw milk
was added to pasteurized milk.

So at that point,
the inspectors in every state

had to go to each place and see
what are they doing in these dairies.

[Nathan Myhrvold] There's some
very serious illnesses

that can be, uh, transmitted through milk.

I'm not talking about
just a little bit of spoilage,

"Oh, the milk went sour."

I'm talking about
some really nasty pathogens.

[Michael] Because it contains
lots of sugars and proteins,

milk is the perfect
breeding ground for bacteria.

In the 19th century, as cities grew,
milk became one of the main ways

that diseases like tuberculosis
and typhoid were spread.

It's not really surprising
that milk was so badly contaminated then.

In the days before refrigeration,

milk couldn't be shipped in
from the countryside.

Instead, cows were brought to the city.

They were crammed
into dark, dirty cellars

and milked by poor people who were
forced to live in similar conditions,

conditions that were ripe
for the spread of infectious disease.

The reason we first began
pasteurizing milk

is because raw milk
was killing lots of people.

Pasteur showed that heat
would kill these microorganisms,

and that's the basis of pasteurization.

[Sister Noella] As cheese-making
became more industrialized,

especially after World War II,
and for safety factors,

many cheesemakers, most,
pasteurized their milk,

so they're destroying
the microorganisms in the milk,

then they're adding back pure cultures,
commercial cultures of bacteria.

[Michael] Starting with a clean slate
has its advantages.

The cheesemaker can decide
which bacteria to introduce,

and there will be few surprises.

That's why blank slate ferments
are now the rule,

and not only in cheese-making.

Most brewers and winemakers
work the same way.

However, some say that the gain in
control of the process comes with a loss,

a loss of the complex flavors that you get
when you rely on wild microbes.

When you take enormous care,

you can have unpasteurized milk
that's perfectly safe,

and there's people who argue it's better.

People have been making
unpasteurized milk cheeses

for a very long period of time.

They're delicious.

In France, no one tries
to outlaw unpasteurized milk cheeses.

France firmly believes the best way
to assure the safety of food products

is very strict hygiene.

And so, when you go to France
and you watch cheese-making,

and you go into processing plants,
they're meticulous.

You know, the French understand,
number one,

if you want to make
a good-quality safe cheese,

you have to start
from the best milk possible.

What do we do here in the United States?

Well, milk that doesn't meet
the standards to be pasteurized

to go into fluid is called
"manufacturing-grade milk,"

which is destined for cheese-making.

So, just a totally different approach.

[Sister Noella] Any way you look at it,
you have to start with clean milk.

Every step of the way,
you have to be careful.

Pasteurization is not a panacea
for food safety.

So, after there was a listeria outbreak
in the Mexican cheese,

the state inspectors,
they saw that we had a wooden barrel

and they wanted us to replace it
with a stainless steel barrel,

which we did.

Lo and behold, very soon,
we started having E. coli in our cheese.

I, at the time, was taking
Introductory Microbiology

at UConn Waterbury.

And as one of her class projects,

she does an experiment
for the health inspector.

And she gets a batch of milk,
um, from her cows, raw milk,

and she puts half of it
in the wooden barrel

and she puts half of it
in a stainless steel vat.

And something really remarkable happens.

We were surprised to see that, um,

in the cheese made
in this little wooden vat,

the E. coli went down...

and in the stainless steel
it just stayed the same.

We're not gonna see bacteria, of course,
because they're just too small.

But we get an idea of the texture.

You can tell that there's
a lot going on there.

[Michael] The lactobacillus
that are living in the wooden barrel,

they go to work
digesting the lactose

and transforming that milk.

And they turn the lactose
into lactic acid.

And the acid in the milk
kills the E. coli.

So, this kind of folk recipe,
using this wooden barrel,

was actually making the milk safer.

And that, in a sense,
the people of the Auvergne

for hundreds of years
have been practicing

a kind of folk microbiology,
uh, learned strictly by trial and error.

Um, and, um... [clicks tongue]

the health inspector was convinced
and he backed off,

and she continues to make her milk
in this wooden barrel.

[nuns singing in Latin]

[speaking indistinctly]

[Michael] Though the transition from milk
to solid curd is dramatic to watch,

it's the second fermentation
in the cheese cave

where the cheesemaker
cultivates the microbes

that create the flavors
of a mature cheese.

[Rachel] What you do
with that fresh cheese

can lead to this huge diversity
in flavor, in texture,

in aroma, in appearance that you have
in the wide world of cheese.

[Ben] So, one thing you can do is
you can heavily inoculate that cheese.

Add a lot of mold to that cheese

and that becomes
a bloomy rind cheese.

And that'd be a Camembert or a Brie,

are two really great examples
of bloomy rind cheeses.

This cheese is made
from pasteurized cow's milk

and the name "bloomy"
comes from the fact that

as this fungus, Penicillium,
grows during the aging process,

it blooms,
it becomes really fluffy,

and the cheesemaker actually has to
pick it up and pat it down,

um, throughout the process
to control the growth.

Another thing you can do is
you can wash the surface of the cheese.

As the cheese is aging,

it's washed repeatedly
over and over again

with a salt solution,
usually about two times a week,

depending on the cheese.

And it creates this very disturbed,
sort of constantly mixed system

that encourages the growth
of these particular microbes.

And examples of wash rind cheeses
would be Limburger,

um, and Taleggio,

these sort of stinky, often orange,
or sometimes pink cheeses.

[Rachel] Often with these cheeses,

you actually get the cheese
kind of liquefying,

because all of the protein is being
completely digested inside the cheese.

[Ben] And that's happening right there.

[Rachel] Yeah, so it's, like,
super ooey-gooey.

The final thing that you can do
is not a whole lot.

You sort of just let
the cheese sit on a shelf,

and you flip the cheese occasionally
to make sure it has proper drainage,

but you don't really do anything dramatic
to the outside of the cheese.

[Sister Noella] People used caves

because it could get a cheese
close to the earth.

And the microorganisms
were in the earth

and they grew on the cheese.

This is alive.

So, it's hard to control

and it's going to be
the environment that controls it.

So, you have to spend a lot of time
observing, smelling.

And I smell, by the way.
[sniffs]

You just have to smell everything.

If you have smelled
a strong cheese...

especially a cheese
that has Brevibacterium,

you might think it's dirty socks.
It's the earth.

You don't really want to talk about
what cheese reminds you of

because it reminds you
of these earthy places

even in our own bodies.

The bacteria that makes
a stinky cheese stinky is

in the same family
as the bacteria that is

between your toes
or under your, in your armpits.

Um, it's B. linens,
Brevibacterium linens.

So, when people talk about, um...

You know, the French describe...

[stutters] They love stinky cheeses,

and they say that it has
the smell of "pieds de Dieu,"

you know, "the feet of God,"

which is a weird way
to compliment something, you know.

"It smells like foot odor, but foot odor
of a really exalted kind." [laughing]

That's what they're saying.
Um...

It's not an accident.

Some people love the smell of B. linens,
others find it offensive.

And still others are repelled
and attracted to it at the same time,

captivated by what might be called
the erotics of disgust.

Disgust is one of
the primary human emotions,

an instinctive reaction to something
that offends our sense of taste

and could be dangerous.

Cheese reconnects us
with a very earthy side of life,

and about decay and decomposition.

It's this sense that
we're eating decomposition,

break-down products.
You could call it death.

To me, it's a taste of that,
but a promise of something delicious.

So, I think it's almost a subconscious way

of being prepared for death
and facing our own mortality.

And for me, that analogy of...

really, a death, a decomposition...

creating this wonderful flavor,
it's a promise of something better.

I experience that over and over again

when I look at cheese,
when I smell cheese,

and when then I look at
the microbial ecology of cheese.

That's the wonder for me,
that it's a promise of life beyond death.

What I'm doing right now is just...

I'm looking directly
at the surface of the cheese

using a portable, handheld microscope.

When we first decided to look
at the development of the rind

using an electron microscope,

we didn't know if it would work.

But we took samples of the cheese
throughout the ripening process.

So, on the left screen,
we're looking at images

from my light microscope,
magnified 40x.

And on the right, we're looking at images
we obtained with our study

using an electron microscope.

So, this is 500x the surface
of our cheese at day zero.

Just looks, kind of, nothing going on,
it sort of looks like the moon.

This is what appeared 48 hours later.

And these were yeasts
that were embedded in that cheese rind.

What we saw was that
it was really the microorganisms

that developed the rind.

This was amazing to us
because this would just be day four.

At this moment, what we see on the cheese,
to the naked eye, are white hairs.

These microorganisms are eating
the byproducts of the population before.

Then they die off and...

for me, it's an incredible analogy

of what happens in terms of generations,
of nurturing the next one.

[Ben] If you've had the opportunity
to look at a field

go from a field to a forest
in New England,

it's very similar to what's happening
on a cheese rind.

As soon as a farmer abandons a field,

really early on there's a bunch
of weedy species that get in there

and they grow really quickly
and take up the space.

And in cheese, that'd be the yeasts
and some of the early colonizing bacteria.

And what happens then is they set
the stage for later colonizing organisms.

And if you can imagine
standing in that field for 50 years,

you'll see it go from weeds
and sort of herbaceous plants

to some shrubs
and some really small trees

and eventually it'll become a forest.

And if you look at
Mother Noella's cheese,

you'll see a very similar progression
from these early colonizing microbes

to sort of a middle stage, where you get
some of the mold starting to come in,

and eventually that really old
scraggly-looking cheese

is very similar
to a fully-developed forest.

And then, during that process,
it's not just happy interactions.

It's war and peace
on these cheese rinds.

So, microbes are helping each other,

they're changing the environment
to allow other microbes to grow.

They're also fighting with each other.

They need similar kinds of foods,

and in some cases
when they're fighting for food,

they produce compounds
that hurt their neighbor.

So, it's really a nuanced, dynamic process
that changes over time.

[Rachel] You know, if you make the analogy
to a field becoming a forest,

that happens over
maybe a hundred years or so.

On cheese, it happens in about two months.
So... [chuckles]

Um, as biologists,
if we're interested in understanding

what are the interactions
between species that have to happen

to allow you to form
a complex ecosystem,

we can do that
on a much shorter timescale.

[Michael] The advances in microbiology

that have allowed us
to sequence human DNA

have also revealed
a previously unknown universe of microbes

living on and around us.

This discovery represents a vast shift
in our understanding of human health,

with fermentation both inside
and outside the body at its core.

[Ben] Just like these fermented foods
have their own collection

of microbes or microbial communities,

we ourselves, our own bodies,
are microbial landscapes.

So, on the palm of my hand,
in-between my toes, in my gut,

where I'm digesting food
from lunch right now,

there are microbes and they are
part of the human microbiome.

[Michael] Microbiologists
were surprised to discover

that nine of every ten cells
in our bodies belong not to us,

but to microbes,
most of them residents of our gut.

But the complexity of the gut microbiota
is supremely difficult to comprehend.

[Rachel] What we're usually trained
to do as microbiologists

is isolate an organism
from its environment

and study how it behaves.

But microbes in the human microbiome

can be very difficult to grow
outside of the human body.

So, the work in my lab
really started as a way

to try and use cheese
as a model ecosystem.

[Ben] And we're learning much more
about who's there,

in terms of the microbes
that do colonize us,

and also what they can do.

[Michael] We're learning
that what goes on in the gut

influences our mood,
our stress levels,

and things like that
may be mediated by bacteria.

These creatures we were taught
as kids to fear and detest

may be essential to our well-being.

There's no question
that the war on bacteria

that inadvertently was launched
by Pasteur has saved millions of lives.

It's helped conquer
many infectious diseases.

But I think it's safe to say
we've kind of gone overboard

in the war on bacteria,

and we have created
what is literally an antibiotic culture.

Everything from hand sanitizers
that are ubiquitous,

to giving our kids antibiotics
at the drop of a hat,

to giving antibiotics
to most of the food animals we eat.

[Rachel] Antibiotics have been
a huge help for treating diseases,

but they also completely disrupt
our microbial ecosystem,

um, in the human body.

[Sister Noella] So, there's a lot
of research going on at this point.

How can we keep the diversity

or also reintroduce it through foods
and then other techniques?

[Ben] And so now we're seeing
another cultural shift

in how we perceive microbes.

Are the microbes in fermented foods

a source of microbes
for the human microbiome?

When we eat that jar of kimchi
or that salami or that cheese,

what happens to all those viable,

those living microbes
that are in those foods?

Are they interacting
with our gut microbiome?

Are they changing
our gut microbiome?

The French just published a paper
describing potential designer cheeses,

where you can imagine creating
a cocktail of microbes on a cheese

that may, in some way,
affect your immune system beneficially

to help reduce inflammation,
for example.

So, you can imagine
this is sort of the future we're going,

in terms of thinking about the link

between food microbiomes
and our human microbiome.

[Michael] We're coming around
to the astonishing realization

that we have to think about
not just feeding our cells,

but feeding all those other cells
that we move through life together with.

When you look at food,
whether it's kimchi or chocolate,

it's not just a thing,
it's not just a product.

It's a relationship
with other species in nature.

And it's far too easy to forget that now.

The food chain is so long and so opaque,
and kimchi comes in a jar,

bread comes in a wrapper,

but all these things involve

these quasi-miraculous engagements
with the natural world.

Human ingenuity
over tens of thousands of years,

learning how to transform
the gifts of nature

into these achievements of culture.

And that's what cooking is.

We are very much
creatures of the flame.

We are a product of cooking.

These transformations go really deep.

[Michael] Smells really good, eh?
[Shane] It sure does.

-All right, so...
-[all] Cheers!

To Mama's Boy,
as Isaac has labeled the beer.

Oh, is that Mama's Boy?

-Yeah, I think so.
-What do you think?

-I like it, I like it.
-Good.

-Cheers. To Mama's Boys.
-[chuckling]

[Michael] So, I wanna just wrap up
by reading a quick passage.

"As you can gather by now,
I think that, um...

to cook or not to cook
is a consequential question.

Though I realize that is putting
the matter a bit too bluntly.

Cooking means different things
at different times to different people.

Seldom is it
an all-or-nothing proposition.

Yet even to cook a few more
nights a week than you already do,

or to devote a Sunday
to making a few meals for the week,

or perhaps to try every now and again

to make something
you only ever expected to buy..."

[inaudible]

"...even these modest acts
will constitute a kind of vote.

A vote for what, exactly?

In a world where so few of us
are obliged to cook at all anymore,

to choose to do so is to lodge
a protest against specialization."

-Thank you, dear.
-Okay.

-Have a nice day.
-Thank you.

"Against the total
rationalization of life.

Against the infiltration
of commercial interest

into every last cranny of our lives.

To cook for the pleasure of it,
to devote a portion of our leisure to it,

is to declare our independence

from the corporations seeking to organize
our every waking moment

into yet another occasion
for consumption."

-Oh, yeah, man.
-[man] Oh, yeah.

[Michael] "Cooking has
the power to transform

more than plants and animals.

Cooking, I found, gives us the opportunity
so rare in modern life

to work directly in our own support
and in the support of the people we feed."

[all speaking Spanish]

[Michael] "In the calculus of economics,

doing so may not always be the most
efficient use of an amateur cook's time.

It is beautiful even so.

For is there any practice less selfish,
any labor less alienated,

any time less wasted,

than preparing something delicious
and nourishing for the people you love?"

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

[theme music playing]