Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

by Michael Pollan

  Whew …

  Stillwaggon had single-handedly yanked Dionysus out of the world of wine, where he had been comfortably ensconced for thirty-five hundred years, and brought him into the world of cheese. (Where, surprisingly enough, he seemed very much at home.) Stillwaggon and Sister Noëlla shared large ambitions for the significance of cheese in human affairs, though I could certainly see why she might not think the world was ready for his writings. Stillwaggon’s mad Web site achieved a kind of perverse brilliance, accompanied by a handful of louche cheese photos and the occasional clipping from the French press. (Including one about a French study of human odor that found that men, when ripe, smell more like washed-rind cheese than women, who smell more like sauvignon blanc.) But I found the “Cheese, Sex, Death and Madness” so rhetorically moist and overheated that I soon clicked out of it. And made my way back to Freud, who had never before seemed quite so moderate and sane.

  True, Freud had nothing specific to say about cheese, but his thoughts on disgust were illuminating even so. For Freud, disgust is a “reaction formation” designed to keep us from indulging desires our civilization has sought to repress. We are drawn to what disgusts because it is a cover for precisely what most attracts. Freud points out that children are not in the least disgusted by feces; to the contrary, they’re fascinated by them. But they learn to be disgusted as part of their socialization. Disgust thus operates as a kind of deeply internalized taboo against desires civilization needs to repress.

  But taboos are always ripe for breaking, especially when they can be broken without doing serious harm, to either the individual or society. A cheese that stinks—of manure, of sex—offers a relatively safe way for us to flirt with forbidden desires. And even a cheese that stinks of death—one that, like a ripe Vacherin, has completely disintegrated into a formless ooze—may offer a perverse sort of pleasure. For, if the final fermentation that awaits us all is too horrible to contemplate, perhaps a little preview of putrefaction on a cheese plate can, like a gothic tale or horror movie, give us the little frisson of pleasure that comes from rehearsing precisely what we most fear.

  Freud was surely right to suggest that disgust is a learned response, mediated by culture. Anthropologists have amply documented the fact that, although the emotion of disgust is a human universal, the specific things that elicit disgust in one culture don’t necessarily disgust people in another. Cheese is the perfect example. Until very recently, most Americans found strong French cheeses repulsive. When Red Hawk was introduced a decade or so ago, there was only a handful of washed-rind cheeses made in America. Claude Lévi-Strauss writes that, after the American troops landed in Normandy in 1944, they destroyed several of the dairies where Camembert was made because they reeked—of what the troops assumed had to be corpses. Oops.

  Many Asians regard cheese of any kind as repulsive, and stinky cheeses so disgusting as to be utterly incomprehensible as food. Lest you conclude that people in Asia have more delicate noses than do we in the West, consider a few of the East’s own stinking delicacies. The Japanese prize natto, the stringy, mucilaginous ferment of soybeans that is strongly redolent of garbage. Fish sauce, used to flavor foods in many Southeast Asian nations, is the liquid secreted by dead fish that have been allowed to rot under the equatorial sun until they lose any hint of form and stink magnificently. The Chinese love their “stinky tofu,” which is made by steeping blocks of tofu in a very old, black ooze of putrefying vegetable matter. Being far too odiferous to bring indoors, stinky tofu is usually eaten as a street food, though even out in the open air it can stink up an entire city block.

  I recently had the opportunity to sample stinky tofu in Shanghai. The stink is unmistakably the stink of putrefaction, and, at least to this nose, is more disgusting than any cheese I’ve ever encountered. But, then, I am not Asian. (Surprisingly, it tasted pretty good once you got it safely past the nostrils, and I’m convinced the rich menagerie of local bacteria did much to settle a stomach discombobulated by travel.) Asians who have tasted a strong cheese like Roquefort will swear that rotted milk is much more disgusting than rotted soybeans, because the animal fats in the cheese coat the mouth, causing the flavors to linger. What makes stinky tofu superior, in their view, is that the taste, which they claim is “cleaner,” doesn’t last long. But what kind of selling point is that, for a food whose taste you supposedly like?

  Arguing over which culture has the more disgusting delicacy is never going to be very productive. What’s interesting here is that so many cultures seem to have one powerful, smelly food that they prize with as much fervor as other cultures despise it. In some places, that culturally defining food is notable for its pungency rather than its odor—think of hot chilis in Mexico or India. But many, if not most, of these iconic foods—natto, stinky tofu, cheese, fish sauce, sauerkraut, kimchi—get their power from fermentation. And, just as curiously, the devotees of these strong ferments (or spicy foods) frequently take pleasure in the fact that people from other cultures can’t easily choke them down. One of the things a food can do for people is to help define them as a group—we are the people who like to eat rotted shark. It could be that the success of this self-definition depends on other people finding the very same food inedible or disgusting. In the same way that disgust can be used to draw lines between humans and other animals, it can also help draw lines between cultures.

  Certainly it can take the full force of culture to overcome people’s resistance to the odor of rotting plants or the back end of animals in something you’re supposed to eat. This is what is meant by an acquired taste. If culture is capable of inspiring disgust, it can also help us overcome it when doing so suits its purposes. Culture is nothing if not powerful, especially when it comes to defining or defending itself.

  In South Korea recently, I watched classes of kindergarteners marched through a kimchi museum in Seoul, one of two in that city and many more in that country. There were dioramas of women rubbing spice into cabbage leaves, and displays of kimchi urns. The schoolchildren were being gently indoctrinated in the culture of the national dish, learning its history and trying their hand at making it. As a docent explained to me, “Children are not born loving kimchi.” That is, it is something they have to learn. Why? To become fully Korean. A sweet red strawberry just wouldn’t have done the trick. If a food is going to help forge cultural identity, it must be an acquired taste, not a universal one. Surely that explains why fermented foods have so often and so reliably played this role.

  The taste of fermented foods is the taste of us, and them.

  During my first visit to the Abbey of Regina Laudis, Sister Noëlla invited me to attend the morning mass. Mass takes place on a wooded hillside above the abbey in a building that, from the outside, looks like a plain old New England barn, but inside reveals itself as a soaring wooden cathedral, flooded with light. I took a seat way in the back. I could see Sister Noëlla and Stephanie with the other nuns behind the grille of black bars behind the altar, where a lanky young priest was presiding. Two by two, the nuns in their flowing black habits floated up to a little teller’s window in the grille to take communion from Father Ian, taking first the wafer on their tongue and then a sip of wine from his cup.

  By now, I subscribed wholeheartedly to Sister Noëlla’s possibly heretical notion that cheese deserved a place alongside wine and bread in the Eucharist. Cheese seemed easily as good a symbol of the body as bread, maybe better: Certainly it offered a sharper, more poignant reminder of the flesh’s mortality. “Everything about cheese reminds us of death,” she had told me. “The caves in which they age are like crypts; then there are the smells of decomposition.” Though you could also see why the early church fathers
might have rejected cheese, as perhaps a little too reminiscent of the flesh in a ritual that was, after all, not just about transformation and death but transcendence too.

  As it happened, Father Ian’s sermon that morning was on the subject of fermentation. The day’s text was the exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees. What was Jesus’s attitude to the covenant of the Old Testament? He did not seek simply to reject it, Father Ian said. “No one who has been drinking old wine desires new,” Jesus tells the Pharisees. Tradition, like an old wine, is too precious to throw out. And yet Christ’s gospel did introduce something new and transformative, the result of a process Father Ian likened to fermentation. In the same way that “fermentation releases energy in the process of breaking down the wheat, grape juice or curds; so Jesus is saying that his interpretation and revelation of the covenant is a life-giving and transformative mediation of the covenant. …”

  I wasn’t sure how hard Father Ian wanted to push the analogy of Jesus as a fungus breaking down the Old Testament in order to create the New. And if the Old Testament was already such a fine old wine, then why ferment it again? Yet to figure spiritual faith as a kind of fermentation—a transformation of the substrate of nature or everyday life into something infinitely more powerful, meaningful, and symbolic—well, that seemed to me exactly right. It offered us a way, as Father Ian said in closing, “to transform what is old in us, the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, into something new.” Just barely, I could make out the silhouette of Sister Noëlla in the pews beyond him, her wimple nodding slowly up and down.

  Ferment III.

  Alcohol

  But if by some chance the Pope were ever actually to heed Sister Noëlla’s suggestion, and revised the Catholic liturgy to make a place in it for a nice, stinky cheese, I do hope it doesn’t come at the expense of the wine. The fermentation that gives us alcohol, by transforming plant sugars into a liquid with the power to alter our experience of consciousness, is just the sort of miracle on which whole faiths can rest. And indeed wine—or beer or mead—figured prominently in religious ritual for centuries before Christ made use of its magic to convince his followers of his divinity.* The belief that alcohol gives people access to a divine realm—whether of gods or ancestors—is shared by a great many cultures, and it’s not hard to see why. In the absence of a scientific explanation, how else could such a miraculous transformation be explained if not as a gift from the gods? And what else could these altered perceptions and visions signify if not the astounding fact that a glimpse of another world, one infinitely more vivid and interesting, had somehow sailed into view?

  Of all humankind’s fermentations, alcohol is the oldest and by far the most popular, consumed in all but a small handful of cultures for all of recorded history and no doubt for a long time before that. If milk and vegetable ferments divide one culture from another, fermentations of fruit juice or honey or grain unite them. A single, shimmering single-celled blue-brown yeast by the name of Saccharomyces cerevisiae is responsible for all these ferments, producing some twenty billion liters of wine, beer, or distilled spirits every year, which comes to about three liters for every man, woman, and child on earth. Can you name another species that has given us quite so much? And this tally doesn’t include the alcohol fermented for fuel and other industrial purposes (usually going by the name of ethanol) or, for that matter, all the chance spontaneous fermentations that S. cerevisiae performs on fallen or split fruit, wet seeds, and tree sap, ferments that redound mainly to the benefit of animals.

  Many of whom, it turns out, enjoy alcohol nearly as much as we do. According to Ronald Siegel, the UCLA psychopharmacologist who wrote Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances, insects like to get tipsy on fermented fruit and sap;* birds and bats do, too, sometimes at considerable risk to their safety. Some have been known to drop dead-drunk out of the sky. Tree shrews sip fermented nectar from flower cups held out by palms. When, in the jungles of Malaysia, a durian fruit falls to the forest floor and promptly rots, “a menagerie of jungle beasts,” including wild pigs, deer, tapirs, tigers, rhinos (and people), will swiftly converge on its alcoholic custard, fighting over it if need be. Elephants will deploy their considerable intelligence to secure the large quantities of alcohol they require in order to get drunk, whether by gorging themselves on fermented fruit (whence “they start swaying in a lethargic manner”), or simply by busting into buildings suspected of housing a still or stash of booze, as has been reported in India.

  In laboratory experiments, some animals will drink to excess, sometimes even death. Chimps faced with an open bar will maintain themselves in a permanent state of drunkenness. But some other species will judiciously moderate their intake. Rats presented with an unlimited supply of alcohol will drink much as many people do: gathering for a cocktail before dinner, taking a nightcap before sleep, and then, every three or four days, holding a raucous, drunken party. Social rather than solitary drinking seems to be the rule, among not only rats but several other species as well, and for good reason: Drunkenness makes an animal more vulnerable to predation, and there is safety in numbers.

  A biologist named Robert Dudley has proposed “the drunken monkey hypothesis” to explain why we might have evolved such a strong fondness for alcohol. Fruit formed a large part of the diet of the primates from whom we are descended. When ripe fruit is bruised, the yeasts on its skin begin to ferment the sugars in its flesh, producing ethyl alcohol in the process. These volatile molecules are light enough to float some distance on the air, and animals with a strong attraction to their odor are at a distinct advantage for locating fruit at the peak of its nutritional quality. According to the hypothesis, animals that like the smell and taste of alcohol ended up with more food, and therefore more offspring, than those that didn’t.

  Alcohol happens to be a toxin, however. The reason the yeasts produce it in the first place is to keep other creatures from competing for their food. Since most microbes can’t tolerate nearly as much alcohol as saccharomyces can, by producing lots of it, the yeast in effect is cleverly contaminating the local food supply, much like the child who licks all the cookies on a plate so he doesn’t have to share. Yet this toxin also happens to be a rich source of energy—it can fuel your car, after all—and nature won’t allow any source of energy to go unexploited for very long. Species with the ability to detoxify and metabolize alcohol were bound to come along eventually, and so they did: Most vertebrates possess the metabolic equipment needed to detoxify ethyl alcohol and burn it for fuel. A tenth of the enzymes in the human liver are dedicated to metabolizing ethyl alcohol.

  All this naturally occurring alcohol suggests that, as in the case of bread and cheese, humans didn’t so much invent alcoholic fermentation as bump into it. A beehive falls or drips honey into a hollow in a tree, rainwater collects in the hollow, and the diluted honey ferments: You’ve got mead. Or a gruel of mashed grass seeds—the wild ancestors of barley or wheat—begin to ferment: You’ve got beer. The “new and enticing sensations” (in the words of one archaeologist of alcohol) that these novelties produced in the mind of anyone who dared to drink them would have brought them back for more, and inspired them to apply their intellectual gifts to mastering the process. But though it is remarkably easy to make alcohol, I discovered that it is much harder to make it well.

  The first time I ever tried to ferment alcohol, I was only ten. My motive was not to obtain wine to drink; like most kids, I didn’t like the taste of wine, though it had occurred to me that my parents, who did, might appreciate my efforts. But my principal motivation was the alchemist’s: I was from an early age obsessed with metamorphosis, and this was not the first time I had trie
d to turn some common form of dross into something that might in some way glow. Actually, my first stab at alchemy had come several years earlier, soon after learning the astounding fact that, given enough heat and pressure and time, a lowly lump of coal would eventually turn into a diamond. Imagine: a recipe for diamonds!

  Back then, in the early 1960s, some ships were still powered by coal-fired boilers, and at the beach I would occasionally find shiny black lumps of anthracite. Surely there had to be some way to speed up the transformation process. By my reckoning, the single most powerful energy source in our house was a Tensor lamp. It looked totally high tech and gave off an unusually strong, focused beam of light. So I put a lump of coal directly in its beam and left the light on 24/7, checking each morning to see if the facets of my incipient diamond had gotten any shinier or less black.

  I had somewhat more success turning grape juice into wine. It was September, and the wild grapevines around our house were weighed down with a bumper crop of dark-purple berries, hanging in dense, downy clusters. I picked several bunches of the ripest grapes and put them in the red plastic container my mother used to mix up frozen orange juice concentrate; it had a matching red plastic screw top. I crushed the grapes right in the container, using a potato masher—skins, seeds, and all. My plan was to make red wine. I don’t recall whether I added any yeast; I doubt it. But I did screw the top on nice and tight and put the container on a coffee table in the living room, where I could keep an eye on it.