Before you sit down to tuck
into this documentary,
why don't you grab yourself a snack.
Open the fridge and peer on in.
What do we have?
Creamy yogurt, salty prosciutto,
a nice Gouda cheese,
kimchi, a six-pack of beer,
wine, soy sauce, a jar of crunchy pickles.
Each of these everyday foods and drinks
have something in common.
They are the products of two ancient
and mysterious processes,
fermentation and preservation.
Smoking, curing, and salting our foods to preserve them,
and using fermentation to harness the power
of Earth's microbes dramatically expanded our palates,
and altered the course of human history.
And to think our love of these foods all started
in our deep evolutionary past
when we were just a bunch of drunk monkeys.
(dramatic music)
For millennia, humans have sustained themselves
through a practice that they thoroughly enjoyed
but did not understand.
This was the mysterious alchemy of food preservation
and fermentation.
Author Sandor Katz has dedicated his life
to studying this magical process.
I like to refer to myself
as a fermentation revivalist.
The intentional practice of fermentation
is extremely ancient,
and of course the transformations were not clearly
understood in a biological scientific way.
But fermentation has been regarded
as a sort of magic or alchemy.
Despite its mystifying nature,
fermentation has been an utterly essential process
integral to human survival.
Almost every person in almost every part of the world
eats and drinks products of fermentation every single day.
One historian actually estimated that 1/3 of all
food that human beings put into their mouths
has been transformed by fermentation.
There's always a practical benefit to fermentation.
You take food from the season of abundance
and you use fermentation to get you through
the season of relative scarcity.
Cheese is a strategy for preserving milk.
Salamis, and hams, and cured meats,
these are all strategies for preserving meat.
Sauerkraut, kimchi, and pickles,
these are strategies for preserving vegetables.
The food is not decomposing,
and it's becoming more stable for either short
or long-term preservation.
And fermentation is valued across the world
for other reasons.
Fermentation produces powerful intoxicants,
essential nutrients,
and array of strong, alluring flavors.
Around the world you have so many different
cultural traditions, and it's part of the culinary landscape
pretty much everywhere.
And there is no greater example
of the cultural significance of fermented foods
than a 1,000-year-old favorite of Korea, kimchi.
Chef Esther Choi serves her families fermented recipes
at her restaurant Mokbar in Brooklyn, New York
I think people make fun of Koreans for eating
kimchi so often,
and I think that is sort of true.
So, it's not even like a joke when
if I don't eat kimchi with every meal I freak out.
That's because I ate it growing up every single day.
My kimchi that I make at Mokbar
is modeled after my grandma's.
We use three different types of fish sauces.
I believe that's what makes our kimchi
so flavorful and salty and delicious.
Still remember my grandma kind of feeding me kimchi
asking me how it tastes.
I guess it was just always embedded in my taste buds.
Pretty damn good.
Every one of my dishes showcase fermentation.
A lot of it is these ingredients that have
been preserved for many months.
It's so important preserving food because
it's not only that it lasts a long time,
it's so healthy for you, and it just tastes incredible.
You can almost taste the age.
These are how our ancestors survived the cold winters
by preserving vegetables, and seafood, and meats.
And now, it's just become such an art form.
Oh, yeah.
Thank you.
Some more things.
Oh, more things.
Oh yeah, look at all these different kimchis.
Mmm.
People using the power of the microorganisms,
have transformed the raw products of agriculture
into unrecognizable forms.
Mmm, they smell so different.
What has transformed those products
are yeast, and bacteria, and molds.
The microbial agents of fermentation.
Mmm, spicy but it builds slowly.
Really nice crunchiness.
Every chopstick full that I'm eating, literally,
contains millions of individual bacteria.
Probably this has as many bacteria as there are people
in New York City, possibly many, many more.
How did our ancestors,
who had no knowledge of the underlying power
of microscopic bacteria and fungi,
harness this phenomena?
It seems the answer is pure serendipity.
We forget that our food's alive.
We forget that everything we ever
eat has an ecological story.
And we forget that most of those
stories are totally mysterious.
This is evident in the rise of humanity's
fluffy, carby, obsession that became
the pillar of civilization.
Bread.
Many scholars believe bread-making may go back
to neolithic cooks with the oldest traces of bread
dating back to 14,000 BCE.
Prehistoric humans likely made gruel
from water and crushed grains,
and cooked it on stones by the fire.
Much like the naan, roti, or tortillas of today.
But how did we get from simple flatbread
to this fluffy loaf?
It all began with a fermented bread we call sourdough.
Historically, all breads that people were eating,
that weren't flat breads, were sourdough breads.
Sourdough bread starts somewhere in the Near East
or North Africa.
The first sourdough bread we know of, for sure,
is the sourdough bread that we see in Egyptian depictions.
When you look at Egyptian drawings,
there's a moment when all the bread goes
from being like this, to suddenly going to being round.
People, somehow, discovered the art
of fermenting flour and water to make a starter.
So when you mix water and flour there are a bunch
of microbes that suddenly get access to everything
they need to grow.
And those bacteria are what makes sourdough bread sour.
So, it's kind of this whole ecosystem.
When wheat is planted,
it is sure that whatever may be the setbacks,
there will soon be bread.
People named their starters.
They passed them from grandparent to child to grandchild.
Some starters are hundreds of years old.
And so, there's this great way in which our human
stories are embedded in the story of the bread.
Ecologist Dr. Rob Dunn launched a worldwide
initiative to examine the mysteries behind humanity's
oldest and most revered form of bread.
He called it The Sourdough Project.
So, I'm an ecologist.
Being an ecologist, a lot of my life focuses
on the biology of daily life,
and recently, it's a lot of bread.
I want to know the histories.
When you make a starter out of water and flour,
where are the microbes that are making that ferment
coming from?
Where did they come from in the fertile crescent
when breads were first made?
And how do we unpack all of that story?
Rob and his team of scientists
have collected sourdough samples from
bakers around the world.
They are sequencing the starter's DNA to unravel
the microbial history of each loaf.
So, we have 1,000 samples from bakers around the world.
And we've identified which fungi and bacteria
are in there in sort of a simple way.
But these are 100 of the most interesting samples.
I want to know the histories.
I want to pull those apart.
But I also wanna know how do we take advantage
of the histories and the rules of ecology
to make better bread.
In Copenhagen, renowned baker,
Lars Petersen, is famous for his sourdough.
The secret of good bread is a lot of passion.
I just love eating bread.
I've been raised on bread.
The sourdough starter here is six years old.
We got to remember it's a live thing.
Working with sourdough and bread-making.
So, you have to put a lot of effort and passion into it.
You have to nurse it everyday.
Make sure its happy.
See how it develops,
and then you have to be able to adapt the whole time.
So, the dough has its own life.
It's really a challenge, but that's the only way
you get a perfect bread.
It's really great that we're going back
in time now and taking all the skills adapting
them into this busy lifestyle we have these days.
Using a mill to grind your own flour,
it's amazing and I love it.
(laughs)
We're nearly there.
I have to move them around a bit.
The first I look at the bread is the crust,
is it nice and dark?
And you can just smell the fresh grains.
Freshly milled.
It has a lot of flavor.
Beautiful scoring, color is just beautiful.
More or less the perfect sourdough bread.
Awesome.
Bread-making is one of the oldest examples
of humans getting microbes to work for us.
But this fermented, fluffy delight was not alone.
It was perhaps even matched in historical importance
by powerful elixirs like beer and wine.
And predilection for strong drink may predate
our own species.
Ten million years ago the ancestors of apes and men
began to explore life on the ground.
There we found overripe fruit that had fallen
and begun to ferment.
This transformation, a result of naturally-occurring yeast,
produces ethanol or alcohol.
It as a taste homo sapiens evolved to love.
The idea that early humans were fermenting things
seems pretty likely or sniffing out things that
were a little bit fermented.
We know that humans have a bunch of genes
for dealing with alcohol that other primates don't.
And we know that the first of those genes
turns up really early in human evolution,
and so it's possible pretty early we were
looking for some funky stuff.
This gene from deep in our evolutionary
past paved the way to one of our favorite pastimes.
Boozing.
(upbeat music)
Our management of fermentation, I think,
probably goes back to the origins of agriculture
or just before.
So, what we're looking at here,
we have two different varieties of barley.
And barley, I think, is something we don't think about
a ton now, but it's one of the first domesticated crops.
Domesticated in the Zagros Mountains
at the edge of Mesopotamia.
Early agriculture would enlighten
humans to the potential of fermentation.
Farmers figured out if you put this in water
with some magical microbes,
and a few other ingredients,
you could make beer.
Imagine yourself in a small community,
you're making some kind of morning porridge out of barley
and you leave it out too long,
and it starts to get a little hoochy.
Maybe most people wouldn't then say I'm gonna try it,
but someone's crazy uncle did.
He would've called a neighbor over
and said, hey I just drank a bunch of this stuff
and I feel fantastic.
And so, at some early point that gruel started
to be made intentionally.
The desire to produce beer was one
of the catalysts of the agricultural revolution.
And beer was far from alone as the quencher
of our alcoholic thirsts.
In Georgia, 8,000-year-old earthen jars of wine
have been discovered in the deep recesses of caves.
The Egyptians made at least 17 types of beer,
and at least 24 varieties of wine.
In ancient Mexico, the people drank a mild wine
name pulque, fermented from the sap of the agave plant.
But our preference for fermented beverages
wasn't purely as a social elixir and provider of merriment.
The other thing that would have emerged pretty quickly
is that people who were drinking beer were
less likely to get sick,
because the process of making the beer
was fermenting the grain.
It becomes a drink that's not full of pathogens,
that you can make lots of and store up.
And it's a way of water treatment
before water treatment was available.
Soon it was being produced in huge quantities.
It was a kind of money, it was a bartering chip,
it could be moved from place to place.
And civilization transformed around it.
And so beer is a kind of a foundation stone to good living.
And time has done nothing
to dull our taste for beer.
In the small town of Vlezenbeek, Belgium
lies a shrine to the ancient tradition of brewing.
I'm Dirk Lindemans, sixth generation
of this family-owned brewery.
It all started in 1822 when one of my grand-grandfathers
married the daughter of the brewer-farmer of this building.
Belgium is one the world's most renowned
beer-brewing nations with traditions going back centuries.
Lambic is the oldest beer in the world.
Before people understand that yeast was responsible
for fermentation they already used this method.
It's based on spontaneous fermentation.
So, we do not add yeast.
We use, in fact, the nature.
We use the air from nature to inoculate sugar-rich extract
from the grains in order to ferment the sugar into lambic.
My name is Peter.
I'm the brewmaster at Lindemans.
I work now about 18 year.
My father worked here all his career,
more than 50 years.
So, lambic is in our blood.
There's a big difference between a normal brewery
and lambic brewery.
In a lambic brewery every window, every door is open.
The wild yeast is the most important thing
in the old brewery.
In here there are 86 different microorganisms.
And the most important are those two,
the Brettanomyces bruxellensis and lambicus.
In the beginning they do nothing,
but after six months they start to do their job.
In the worts there are sugars,
they will eat the sugars and they will transform
the sugar into alcohol.
And alcohol gives a taste to your beer.
That's magic.
A lot of people who are drinking lambic
for the first time, they will be overwhelmed
by the complexity of the lambic.
But if can define all those tastes,
then we will appreciate it.
It's like tasting a good wine, in fact.
To this day, beer is still one of the world's
most popular beverages.
In 2016, the global consumption was
about 300 billion bottles of beer.
The lambic is such a story.
You're drinking history, let's say.
Yet, there are only nine lambic breweries
left in Belgium.
And families like Lindemans are guardians
of the flavors of a bygone age.
The Oude Gueuze, the mother of all beer.
That is a perfect thirst quencher in the summertime.
It's well-balanced.
The sourness.
Very sparkling.
Very refreshing.
Cheers.
Bread and beer.
I think we kind of think of together.
They changed our daily life, right?
Because we came to appreciate them.
We came to think they were wonderful.
And they were all a way of storing food
a little bit longer.
They were a way of extending our ability
to move and carry food with us.
Ancient Rome couldn't have been ancient Rome
without bread and beer.
And so, they allowed empire.
We could connect a vast civilization with food,
and that wasn't possible before.
Our harnessing of these invisible
microscopic yeasts and bacteria not only
transformed our food,
it transformed our culture.
Since the dawn of agriculture,
bread and beer were staples of the human diet.
But humans cannot live on carbs alone.
Fruits, vegetables, and proteins are needed to survive.
And one of humanity's greatest challenges
has always been the inevitable decay of the food
we caught, collected, or grew.
Fermentation is just one way to extend self life.
There were other, equally important, methods
of food preservation.
Historically, foods have been preserved any one
of a number of ways.
You can dry food, and you can salt it,
you can put some sort of an acid on it,
and that's pretty well it.
In the frozen parts of the world,
inhabitants understood that by keeping their food cold
it would last longer.
Dry curing with the power of the sun, or smoking,
are the oldest of our traditional methods of preservation
dating back, at least, 12,000 years.
Pickling dates back, at least, 4,000 years
to people preserving cucumbers in the Tigris Valley.
But there was one chemical commodity indispensable
for food preservation and flavor.
Salt.
Salt, I think, is best seen as an essential ingredient
because it was a preservative.
Without it, food would've just spoiled everywhere.
Salt was essential for preserving meats.
Without salt you can't make cheese,
so you can't preserve milk products.
So, salt would've been ubiquitous everywhere.
Salt was essential.
Humans need salt to survive.
And our love of this tasty mineral affected the world
in greater ways than just our nutrition.
It became central to economies as well.
Salt was one of the first things that was widely traded.
Because people couldn't live without salt.
So, salt was used as a currency because you knew
that a pound of salt was worth X-amount of money.
Salt routes crisscrossed the globe.
From Morocco to Timbuktu,
from Egypt to Greece,
salt traveled and wealth followed.
One of the important things to remember
about the spice trade
is what you're transporting.
The advantage of transporting salt, for example,
is you can put it on a ship,
you can put it on a camel,
you can put it on an ox cart,
and you can transport it for six months, a year,
and it doesn't spoil.
Consequently, things like salt, and silk, and jewelry
were the first things that could be used
in long distance trade.
Trade and exploration began
to explode in the 1400s.
Men began to sail historically unfathomable distances
in search of salt and spices.
It was this blossoming desire for new flavors
that propelled humankind into a new era
of culinary expansion, and an age of exploration.
Award-winning chef JJ Johnson uses his kitchen
to express culinary traditions expanded
by the age of exploration.
His dishes have been inspired by ingredients
and tastes from all over the world.
My mom's mom is from Puerto Rico.
My dad's mom is from North Carolina.
I learned the majority of my cooking from my mom's mom
that's Puerto Rican.
A lot of those flavors like cumin, coriander,
pink peppercorns, a lot of spices.
Things that when you would walk through the kitchen
you smell it and be like, oh what's that,
and what's cooking?
With influences from Ghana, Barbados,
Puerto Rico, and Harlem,
JJ uses food to tell his story.
My philosophy comes from the melting pots of the world.
Migration impacts the way people cook.
I'm pulling from these hubs of the world.
People that have lived together for over hundreds of years
and have created this unique cooking style.
But the one thing that brought everyone together
was the one common language which is cooking.
In this bowl I have some black bass,
some egg whites, chilies, cilantro, ginger, garlic.
In my dredge if some rice flour, some smoked paprika,
and then Jamaican curry.
And I'm just gonna get this mixed up really nice.
I cook with a lot of spices,
and I think that helps bring that melting pot together.
It's a huge part of culinary history,
and I think people really forget about it.
What we consider everyday spices,
actually have long and complicated histories.
The quests for these spices were hugely influential
in the history of human exploration and economies.
What Europeans refer to as the age of exploration,
begins in the 15th century as the
European countries went west.
The expansion of Europe into Asia and the New World
which was motivated primarily merely by the spice trade,
was that very, very first moment of having
a genuinely globalized economy.
The arrival of Christopher Columbus
in the New World changed everything.
European settlers brought foods and flavors from home
to the Americas,
and new and exciting commodities flowed
from the New World to the old.
The unprecedented level of trade and immigration
would come to be known as the Columbian Exchange.
If you want to think about Europe without potatoes.
If you want to think about Africa without cassava
and without corn.
If you think of Indian cooking without chili peppers,
a native New World seasoning.
There were no cows in the New World,
so you couldn't have milk and cheese.
The Columbian Exchange was probably the single most
influential event in possibly recorded history
because it changed the cuisines and the staples
of whole continents.
I'm a child of the diaspora.
I'm made up of all these different places.
Each dish that I'm cooking represents
something of who I am.
I would say like the food of my childhood and in my travels.
I think when a dish reflects a chef,
it tastes better.
Cooking to me is tracing the roots,
when you're able to pull it all together it tells a story.
These flavors on this dish are from all around the world,
but it's right here in New York City.
I mean, that's the story that I'm telling on a plate.
With all the spices and flavors together.
Despite the tasty rewards,
the age of exploration was not an easy one
for the sailors involved.
Ferdinand Magellan's fateful voyage
is a study in the importance of food preservation
and diversity of diet.
Magellan was a Portuguese sailor who is tasked
with finding the line that divides the Spice Islands,
and the only way of doing this was to go around the world.
The huge demand for spices meant
there was the potential for great riches to be won.
Explorers and merchants risked their lives
in their quest to forge new trade routes.
The problem for Magellan and his men
was that the techniques of food preservation
had not kept up with advances in navigation.
The early voyages were,
for particularly the sailors, monstrous.
They would be on that ship for months.
Three, four, six months.
So, the inability to preserve food was a huge
impediment to voyages,
and so their diets on these ships,
particularly the longer ones, would've been horrible.
Meal options aboard his 16th century
Spanish vessels would've consisted of beer,
salted meat, and biscuits.
Intrepid sailors were threatened not only by
dangerous conditions, but their poor diets.
There were nutritional problems.
Scurvy being the most famous one.
When you had a large percentage of the population
onboard dying of scurvy for the lack of vitamin C.
You had death rates of 20-30% sometimes.
Magellan's journey also saw
a tremendous loss of life to malnutrition.
Long difficult trip starts out with five ships,
ends up with one.
They lose almost all of the people,
almost all the ships and Magellan himself.
But in the process they manage to get
a nice hold full of cloves
which they are able to sell for more money
than the whole voyage costs.
It took another 200 years until
Capt. James Cook found a defense against scurvy.
Another gift of fermentation.
Vitamin C-rich sauerkraut.
Later, it was discovered that consumption
of citrus fruits prevented scurvy.
The British were the first to utilize this knowledge.
While limes helped to eliminate scurvy in the navy,
it was responsible for a notorious nickname, limey.
Trade and exploration forever changed the diet,
tastes, and cuisines of the world to what we know today.
But age old problems of spoilage still plagued
the new ingredients being shipped across the globe.
Fermentation and the traditional preservation techniques
couldn't keep up with a newly mobile populace.
Necessity inspired new inventions.
Beginning in the 1800s, technology began to develop
at an unprecedented rate,
and over the next two centuries,
the first modern methods of preservation emerged,
canning, refrigeration, and chemical preservatives.
These are new means in a long tradition of prolonging
the life of food to sustain our own.
The food we eat is shaped by geopolitics
and governance, and the movements of people,
but it's also shaped by culture
and deep human evolutionary histories
because those are all embedded in our foods, too.
And so these are always at play.
I think that an exciting thing about food culture today,
is that we value culinary traditions more
than we did 10 years ago.
Bakers and chefs are super into it,
so there's a real opportunity to think better about it.
(dramatic music)
While ancient methods are deeply tied
to our history and culture,
food has changed more in the last century
than in the previous hundred.
Ushering in a new age, the industrialization of food.
(soft music)