Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

by Michael Pollan

  Ferment II.

  Animal

  A dairyman I know from Wales, a man who with his son produces a remarkable cheddar, once told me that “everything” affects the quality and flavor of his cheeses, up to and including “the mood of the milker.” This struck me as a nice romantic conceit, until I pressed him to explain how that might actually be so. “Well, it’s really quite simple. If the milker is calm, the cow is calm. And a calm cow doesn’t shit as much in the milking parlor, which means her milk will likely be cleaner. This is why the milk is always better when women do the milking.”

  Several things about this little story came as news to me, not least the disturbing fact that there might be any shit in milk, ever. The cheddar my friend makes is an organic raw-milk cheese, and I was a little alarmed by what seemed like his cavalier attitude toward sanitation. Yes, you wanted as little manure in the milk as possible, he was suggesting, but the reality of a dairy farm is such that milk will never be perfectly sterile—and that isn’t necessarily a wholly desirable outcome in any case. One of the reasons cheese makers swear by the superiority of raw-milk cheeses is the complex flavors contributed by the richly diverse bacterial cultures living in them. Where in the world did I think those came from?

  In the intensifying struggle between the Pasteurians and post-Pasteurians, raw-milk cheese has emerged as perhaps the single most fiercely contested terrain. I have not given my friend’s name here because his candor on the subject of shit-in-milk would probably bring the full force of the health authorities down on his little dairy farm. Live-culture sauerkraut and kimchi makers have not had reason to fear predawn raids from the Pasteurian police, but, rightly or wrongly, people selling raw milk and raw-milk cheese now do—they are bearing the full brunt of the war on bacteria. Raw-milk cheese makers are subject to predawn raids by the FDA, with SWAT teams brandishing guns showing up on farms unannounced, pouring cans of fresh milk out onto the ground.

  Milk was the first important food to be subject to “pasteurization” by law, beginning in Chicago in 1908. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that milk and cheese would become ground zero in the clash of worldviews between the public-health authorities—whose authority was founded on Pasteur’s discovery of an invisible realm of disease-causing microbes—and those who would seek to renegotiate our relationship to the microcosmos.

  In fact, both sides in this struggle have a compelling case to make, yet at the same time both sides seem blind to serious defects in their own arguments. As Pasteurians are quick to point out, the reason we first began pasteurizing milk (that is, heating it to 145°F for thirty minutes, or 161°F for fifteen seconds, in order to kill bacteria) is very simple: Raw milk was killing lots of people. Rich in sugars (such as lactose) and proteins (such as casein), milk is a perfect breeding ground for bacteria, and in the nineteenth century it became one of the principal vectors for the transmission of tuberculosis and typhoid. Pasteurization has saved thousands of lives.

  Ah, but that was then, the post-Pasteurians reply. It is not at all surprising that milk was so badly contaminated in the nineteenth-century metropolis. In the days before refrigerated storage and transportation, fresh milk typically came not from cows in the countryside but from cows brought into the city. Here, they were confined to dark, dank cellars, where they were fed on brewery wastes and milked by wretchedly poor people carrying infectious diseases. No wonder raw milk could be lethal! Pasteurization is an industrial Band-Aid applied to an industrial problem. As long as cows are given a proper diet and good husbandry, it is unnecessary.

  Yet even today, the Pasteurians respond, when most cows once again live on farms, their milk can be contaminated with pathogenic microbes, including such deadly (and novel) ones as E. coli 0157:H7 and Listeria monocytogenes. The fact is that raw milk, and the cheeses made from it, continue to kill a handful of people every year, and sicken a great many more. So why take chances when we have a proven technology to ensure the safety of our milk?

  Reply the post-Pasteurians: People are also sickened by cheese and other milk products that have been pasteurized, a process that offers no guarantee of safety. Milk and cheese can be contaminated after pasteurization, and often are. Also, the cleanliness of dairying has only gotten worse under the regime of pasteurization; since dairy farmers know their milk will be sterilized after it leaves the farm and gets mixed with milk from countless other farms, they have less incentive to be scrupulous about hygiene.

  Nowadays, the post-Pasteurians can cite in their support the hygiene hypothesis. This is perhaps their most devastating argument, though it, too, has unacknowledged weaknesses. According to the argument, the problem is not so much with the bacteria in the milk, which they’re prepared to concede, but with the compromised immune systems of us milk drinkers—compromised (need it be said?) by years of misrule by the Pasteurians themselves, with their antibiotics, sterilized food, and sanitized child-rearing regimes. The Pasteurian drive for absolute control of the microbial realm has led to new vulnerabilities, reflected in antibiotic-resistant microbes and lethal new pathogens.

  Instead of technology, the post-Pasteurians want us to put our faith in the microbes themselves and in striking a healthier, more tolerant relationship with them. They cite studies demonstrating that children who grow up drinking raw milk are measurably healthier than other children, with markedly lower rates of allergy and asthma.* Some of these children live in environments teeming with deadly pathogens, including E. coli and listeria, yet they don’t get sick from them. The post-Pasteurians further point out that the best protection against bad bugs in milk or cheese is not the heavy hand of pasteurization but, rather, the countervailing influence of various “good” bugs, which pasteurization indiscriminately kills off. Milk and cheese are complex ecological systems that can, at least to some extent, defend and police themselves.

  This proposition, I was about to learn, is by no means crazy. Sister Noëlla Marcellino is a cheese maker and microbiologist who would probably describe herself as a post-Pasteurian (though with an important caveat I will get to). In fact, one of the reasons she went back to school to become a microbiologist (she was in her thirties at the time and already an accomplished cheese maker) was so that she could scientifically test that very proposition.

  The cheese nun, as she is inevitably called in the numerous profiles about her that have been published and broadcast, has been making a Connecticut version of a Saint-Nectaire since the late 1970s. Named Bethlehem, for the rural Litchfield County town that is home to Regina Laudis, her Benedictine abbey, Sister Noëlla’s cheese is a raw-milk, semihard, fungal-ripened cheese made strictly according to ancient techniques that have been practiced in the Auvergne region of France since at least the seventeenth century. Sister Noëlla learned the techniques, which are usually closely held family or village secrets, from Lydie Zawislak, a third-generation French cheese maker who visited the abbey in 1977 at the invitation of the Abbess. Sister Noëlla had been attempting to make cheese from the abbey’s surplus of milk, but found cheese making was a craft you couldn’t learn very well from a book.

  “So I began praying for an old French lady to come teach me,” she recalled. Her prayers were answered when Lydie came to visit. (Lydie wasn’t old, however.) Monasteries have historically been places where traditional food-making techniques, many of them involving fermentation, have been scrupulously perfected and preserved; Lydie was willing to entrust her family’s Saint-Nectaire recipe to Sister Noëlla and the abbey.

  Several things about that centuries-old recipe were guaranteed to give an American health inspector conniptions; indeed, the raw milk may have been the least of it. No, what gave the health inspector fits was the old
wooden barrel in which the milk is curdled, and the wooden paddle used to stir the curds, which was carved (with two cutouts in the shape of a cross) from beech wood by a craftsman in the Auvergne. Cheese in America is always made in stainless-steel vats with stainless-steel tools. Easy to clean and disinfect, stainless steel is the Pasteurian’s material of choice. Once scrubbed, its perfectly smooth, machine-tooled surface gleams, offering an objective correlative of good hygiene. Wood on the other hand bears all the imperfections of a natural material, with grooves and nicks and pocks where bacteria can easily hide. And indeed the inside of Sister Noëlla’s cheese-making barrel wears a permanent cloak of white—a biofilm of milk solids and bacteria. You could not completely sterilize it if you tried, and part of the recipe for Saint-Nectaire involves not trying: Lydie told Noëlla that between batches the barrel should only be lightly rinsed with water.

  So it happened that in 1985, after raw-milk cheese was implicated in the deaths of twenty-nine people in California, the state health inspector demanded that Sister Noëlla get rid of her wooden barrel and replace it with stainless steel.

  Sister Noëlla regarded her wooden barrel and paddle not merely as quaint antiques, but as essential elements of the traditional cheese-making process. The fact that the wood harbored bacteria was actually a good thing. She preferred to think of them not as contaminants but “more like a sourdough culture.” So Sister Noëlla designed an experiment for the benefit of the health inspector. From the same raw milk, she made two batches of cheese, one in the wooden barrel, and the other in a stainless-steel vat. She deliberately inoculated both batches with E. coli.

  What happened next was, at least to a Pasteurian, utterly baffling: The cheese that had been started in the sterile vat had high levels of E. coli, and the cheese made in the wooden barrel had next to none. Just as Sister Noëlla had expected, the “good bacteria” living in the barrel—most of them lactobacilli—had outcompeted the E. coli, creating an environment in which it couldn’t survive. As had happened in my sauerkraut, the good bugs, and the acids they produced, had driven out the bad. The community of microbes in the raw-milk cheese was, in effect, policing itself.

  Sister Noëlla had eloquently made her point: The traditional makers of something like Saint-Nectaire have, without realizing it, been practicing a kind of folk microbiology, developed over generations by trial and error, and it works to help keep them safe. Wood, and the bacteria wood harbored, formed an indispensable part of this process, and, ironically enough, introducing a more hygienic material only made the process less hygienic.

  Presented with the results of this elegant little experiment, the health inspector relented, allowing Sister Noëlla to keep her wooden barrel. More than a quarter century later, she is still making cheese in it.

  Sister Noëlla has become something of a hero to the post-Pasteurians. A nun’s habit and a Ph.D. in microbiology—the abbey sent her to the University of Connecticut so that she might better be able to defend her cheese, both from pathogens and from public health authorities—are an unbeatable combination, and, so far at least, the FDA has thought better than to mess with Sister Noëlla, even as the agency has come down hard on many other raw-milk cheese makers. Yet when I visited her at the abbey recently, hoping to learn from her how to make cheese, she was more equivocal on the subject of raw milk than I expected.

  “I’m not quite the champion of raw milk that people think I am,” she explained, as she showed me how to use the notorious wooden paddle to gently corral pearly white curds into a mass. “People say, Raw milk was fine for our grandfathers so why not for us? Because you are not your grandfather, and those are not your grandfather’s microbes. Some of them have gotten much nastier. We’re dealing with a different reality. So we can’t say a raw-milk cheese is automatically safe. It has to be made with care.”

  What Sister Noëlla was suggesting was that many of the post-Pasteurians were in fact pre-Pasteurian in their assumptions, harking back to a biologically more innocent time, when people were hardier and the bugs more benign. We have no choice but to take account of history—including the impact of the Pasteurian regimen on our immune systems and on the microcosmos.* The techniques of traditional cheese making still offer a measure of protection, but America’s cheese culture is fairly young, and not everyone making cheese has mastered them.

  Sister Noëlla and I were working together in the cheese room, which sounds grander than it is: a low-ceilinged kitchen with a few extra work sinks and a bulk tank for milk, in the back of a clapboard house on the grounds of the abbey. In the fenced pasture behind it, the abbey’s Dutch Belted cows were lounging on the ground, looking very much like exceptionally fat Oreo cookies. I had spent the night at the abbey, sleeping, or trying to, on a microscopic sliver of bed in a microscopic cell upstairs in the stoplight-red converted barn that houses the tiny number of men in residence—altar boys, interns, and guests. Except when the nuns were at work—in the garden tending vegetables, in the barn caring for the cattle, in the shop working wood or leather or iron, or in the dairy making cheese—they were supposed to have no contact with men. I had spotted Noëlla earlier that morning at mass, where she and the sisters were singing some of the most hauntingly ethereal music I’d ever heard, from behind the grille of bars that symbolizes their detachment from men and the outside world.

  But although life at the abbey was as hushed, solemn, and regimented as you might expect, Sister Noëlla herself exhibited none of those qualities. To the contrary: She enjoys nothing more than making people laugh, and the powerful beam of her smile is infectious. There was a lot of joking around in the cheese room, some of it fairly crude. Apart from her habit and wimple (and while at work the sisters can wear a special habit made from blue denim), there was little to remind you she was a nun.

  Noëlla grew up in a big Italian family outside Boston (her older brother cofounded the fifties nostalgia band Sha Na Na), and after a difficult year at Sarah Lawrence—she enrolled in 1969, at the height of the messy ferment of the sixties counterculture—she embarked on a quest to find a more sympathetic, and more structured, environment. She visited Regina Laudis at the suggestion of a friend in 1970, and three years later she entered the abbey as a postulant—the first step on the long road to becoming a nun.

  My first impression of Sister Noëlla was of 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, including in a barrel of milk or under a microscope. Several of Christ’s miracles rather famously involve fermentation, as she pointed out to me with a twinkle. Like bread and wine, cheese is the transformation of ordinary matter into something extraordinary, a process suggestive of transcendence.

  “I never did understand why cheese wasn’t included in the Eucharist,” she told me at one point. At first I thought she was joking, but she turned serious. As a sacrament, Sister Noëlla suggested, cheese would actually offer something that wine or bread cannot. “Cheese forces you to contemplate death, and confronting our mortality is a necessary part of spiritual growth.”

  I knew enough to know Sister Noëlla wasn’t referring to the mortal risk of food poisoning, but what exactly she was referring to with this comment, clearly heartfelt, it would take me some time in the cheese-making room, and the cave, to figure out.

  Learning how to make cheese from Sister Noëlla, rather than another of America’s rapidly growing tribe of artisanal cheese makers, has its advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, her method and approach are so Old World that they reveal the process at its most stripped down and elemental. Not only does Sister Noëlla have no use for pasteurization or stain
less steel, but she relies exclusively on naturally occurring bacteria and fungi—she adds no commercial cultures, which is virtually unheard of in modern cheese making. That brings me to one of the disadvantages of learning from Sister Noëlla: Her approach is so far outside of the mainstream that it is in no way representative of how most cheese is made today, even artisanal cheese. Yet there is one other, crucial advantage: Whereas most of the cheese makers I visited and interviewed would only let me watch them work, and then only after walking through a vale of disinfectant and donning a virtual hazmat suit, Sister Noëlla was perfectly happy to let me get my hands wet and to handle the curd.

  The work of making cheese at the abbey is carefully stitched into the daily rhythms of the place, which revolve around worship, seven times a day and once in the middle of the night. After Lauds at 6:00 a.m., the abbey’s five cows are milked, and the milk is carried, still warm, to the cheese room, where it is poured into the wooden barrel. Right before eight o’clock mass, Sister Noëlla adds two tiny vials of rennet to initiate the coagulation of the milk. While she and her sisters are at mass, singing Gregorian chants and taking communion, a complex biochemical alchemy begins to unfold in the big barrel.

  Lactobacilli present in the raw milk and the surface of the wooden barrel begin furiously to reproduce, gobbling up lactose and converting it into lactic acid. The pH of the milk gradually falls, and as it does, the milk becomes inhospitable to undesirable strains of bacteria, including any E. coli that may have found their way into it. The acidifying environment also promotes the action of the rennet, which begins magically to transform the fluid milk into a silky white gel. Returning from mass at ten-thirty, Sister Noëlla ran her index finger through the surface, cleaving open a little canyon where, just an hour or two before, there had been only liquid. It looked like a soft tofu, but it gleamed. For most of the cheese makers I’ve met, Sister Noëlla included, this is the moment of magic.