Cooked - A Natural History of Transformat Part 21

Disgust, as an emotion exclusive to humans, also helps put distance between us and the rest of nature. It is a crucial component of the civilizing process. Rozin points out that anything that reminds us that we are in fact still animals can elicit feelings of disgust. This includes bodily secretions,* s.e.xuality, and death. But for Rozin it is the third term here that is the most important.

"The prototypical odor of disgust is the odor of decay," he points out, "which is the odor of death." Thus disgust can be understood as a defense against our fear of death, another emotion that happens to be unique to our species Rozin says that people who score high on psychological tests for "disgust sensitivity" also score high on tests measuring the fear of death.

Putrefaction is repulsive to us because it reminds us of our ultimate fate, which is to have the n.o.ble and intricate form of our bodies disintegrate into a suppurating, stinking puddle of formlessness, then to be returned to the earth as food for the worms. This work of decomposition will be performed by bacteria and fungi, and the method they will deploy will be fermentation. Oddly, it is this process of decomposition that disgusts us, not the final result of that process: Rotting flesh is disgusting, but skeletons are not.

So why should we ever be attracted to the very processes and products that, for the very good reasons Rozin gives, repulse us? Surely this is perverse. Yet if disgust is in fact one of the ways humans draw a line between themselves and the other animals, then to deliberately put ourselves in situations that elicit disgust may allow us to underscore and enforce that distinction. Perhaps we "enjoy" the experience of disgust for the flattering things the reaction implies about us-the wrinkling of the nose a visible index of our superiority and refinement.

I became curious to know what Stillwaggon would have to say on the subject, and in the middle of my journey through the literature of disgust, I went looking for him online. Something had raised my antennae-didn't smell quite right-when Sister Noella told me he hadn't published. Stillwaggon didn't sound like a man who could keep his views under a bushel basket even if he tried. When I searched his name, I found no books or Web sites, but I did find a Facebook page, and there on its wall a URL. Bingo: In large type the words "Cheese, s.e.x, Death and Madness" popped up on my screen, above a photo of an ap.r.o.ned man stirring a copper vat of milk, next to a photo of a particularly hideous cheese oozing yellow from its broken crust.*

The Web site, half in French and half in English, was itself an aromatic ferment of truly wild ideas about, well, s.e.x and death and cheese, which Stillwaggon defined as "nature imperfectly mastered." This struck me as a pretty good definition for fermentation in general. (If not for the entire human enterprise.) He went on to describe cheese as "an incarnate Pa.s.sion Play, unfolding in its lifetime (briefer, in general, than our own) all the characteristics of the newborn, of juvenility and adolescence, of maturity and of decrepitude." Cheese was flesh, heir to all its glories and mortifications. On the home page I clicked on "Attraction & Repulsion" and found this soaring, overripe, and ungrammatical flight of cheesy exegesis:

"Cheese shares the same ambiguity of attraction/repulsion which marks and characterizes our genital and a.n.a.l zones as pa.s.sage from the scrubbed and well-aired exterior toward the organic, unsurveyed and uncontrolled interior: infernal microcosm fermenting, composting, the seething haven of impersonal microbiota. ...

"In both domains-the cheese and the s.e.x-we are drawn to the limits of our comfort zone. Both zones of experience therefore invite us to exceed our limits, to test, to uncover, to abandon our reserve, to relativize our notions and principles-of limit, of desirable, of good & bad, of attractiveness and hideousness. The direction of this discovery is from pure and simple toward impure and complex, from a formal, cared-for aesthetic toward a formlessness, an aesthetic of abandon and degradation."

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 Noella 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, s.e.x, 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 s.e.x-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 doc.u.mented 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 Levi-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 a.s.sumed 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 j.a.panese 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 dis...o...b..bulated 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 cla.s.ses 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 ident.i.ty, 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 Noella invited me to attend the morning ma.s.s. Ma.s.s 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 Noella 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 Noella'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 att.i.tude 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 a.n.a.logy 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 Noella 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 Noella'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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds? 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, s.h.i.+mmering 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 quant.i.ties 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 b.u.mp 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 gra.s.s 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 princ.i.p.al motivation was the alchemist's: I was from an early age obsessed with metamorphosis, and this was not the first time I had tried 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 s.h.i.+ps were still powered by coal-fired boilers, and at the beach I would occasionally find s.h.i.+ny 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 s.h.i.+nier 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 b.u.mper crop of dark-purple berries, hanging in dense, downy cl.u.s.ters. 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.

Not a very eagle-y eye, apparently. Because I have no recollection of the plastic container beginning to bulge, slightly at first, and then cartoonishly, as the carbon dioxide built up inside it. What I do remember, with a pained clarity a half century later, is coming home with my parents late one evening and flicking on the lights to find the white walls and ceiling of our living room evenly spattered with splotches of dark purple. Some were just smears of purple pigment; others drooled jagged slivers of grape skin like wet confetti. Ecstatic fruit flies were everywhere, and the living room had acquired an unmistakable new smell. It smelled like wine!

"Plenty were drunk with nectar," Plato writes, referring to mead, or fermented honey, "for wine was not yet invented." Wine made from honey was probably the first alcoholic beverage humans fermented on purpose. (And when we read of the ancients' fondness for nectar, we can safely a.s.sume they're talking about fermented nectar.) Alcoholic fermentation depends on sugar, and, at least before the advent of agriculture, the sweet nectar that bees concentrate into honey was the richest and most readily accessible source of sugars in nature. In the hive, however, honey is so completely saturated with sugar that nothing can live in it, yeasts included. The hydrostatic pressure will promptly suck the water out of any microbe that falls into it. This of course is exactly what the bees want. But I read (in Sandor Katz's book) that as soon as honey is diluted with water it will spontaneously begin to ferment.

I was curious to find out if making mead was really that simple, and, if it was, to sample what the very earliest alcoholic beverage might have tasted like. I happen to be blessed, or cursed, with a ready supply of honey: My friend Will Rogers keeps bees in a neighboring town, and I seldom visit him without coming away with yet another pint jar of the stuff. By now I had an entire shelf of honey jars in the pantry. It's a delicious, cosmopolitan sort of honey, a distillation of the diverse riot of flowering plants that, here in the East Bay, are in bloom every month of the year.

So I diluted a pound or so of Will's honey in a gallon jug of water, one part honey to four parts water, and fitted the jug with an airlock. This is a cork attached to a curvaceous piece of plastic piping with a little reservoir of water at the bottom of a bend that keeps oxygen from getting in but allows carbon dioxide to escape. Every day I checked in on my jug, examining it for fizz or escaping gas bubbles, but the pale-gold liquid gave no sign of life. It might as well have been a lump of coal under a Tensor lamp.

I was tempted to add some yeast to get things going. That's what Will had suggested, as had the fermentos down at the Oak Barrel, the local home-brewing supply store where I purchased the airlock. But after spending time with Sandor Katz, I was attached to the idea of a wild fermentation using local yeasts. So I e-mailed Sandor for advice.

"What I would have recommended that you do differently," he wrote back, "is to leave the diluted honey in an open vessel for a few days and stir frequently until bubbling becomes evident, and only then move to an airlock." It seems that the aeration stimulates the yeast, the spores of which might be in the air or in the honey itself.

His advice was based on an unusual fact about the particular yeast I was trying to entice. Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a microbe that can operate equally well aerobically and anaerobically, employing a completely different metabolic pathway depending on the conditions in which it finds itself. In evolutionary terms, this dual metabolism is a newish development for S. cerevesiae. Before the advent of the flowering plants (and their fruit) some eighty million years ago, the yeast's ancestors relied strictly on an aerobic mode of metabolism to generate energy. This system was highly efficient, and, among yeasts, nothing out of the ordinary. After the angiosperms arrived on the scene, however, S cerevesiae acquired a new bag of metabolic tricks that gave it a tremendous edge over its compet.i.tion: the ability to survive in the airless conditions deep within a fruit or nectar, and, once there, to transform sugars into alcohol. This new metabolic pathway is a less efficient way to generate energy-the alcohol produced by it still has plenty left to burn-yet it has the considerable advantage of expanding the yeast's habitat and poisoning its compet.i.tion-not to mention endearing itself to some of the higher animals, notably including ourselves.*

Because aerobic metabolism gives the yeast the maximum amount of energy from its food, oxygenating the liquid in question is a good way to kick-start a fermentation. So I started a new batch of mead, diluting the honey with four parts water and leaving it out on the kitchen counter for several days, uncovered. I had read that mead was often flavored with various herbs and spices, in order to contribute a bit of acidity, some tannins, and nutrients for the yeasts, so I added a bay leaf, some cardamom seeds, a star anise, and a few tablespoons of black tea. (Mead to which such herbs and spices are added used to be called "metheglin.") And just in case I lacked for wild yeasts, I dropped in an overripe, split fig from the garden that I figured must be crawling with them.

Every time I pa.s.sed the bowl of honey water, I gave it a vigorous stir with a wooden spoon, working a little more air into it. After about a week, I noticed a fizz of tiny bubbles on the surface. Day by day, the bubbles got a little bigger and more vigorous. When I thought I could detect the faintest smell of alcohol, I poured the liquid into the jug and plugged it with the airlock. The very next day I had the satisfaction of watching a nice fat bubble of carbon dioxide shoulder its way through the pocket of water in the airlock. Fermentation!

The jug perked along for a week or so, rhythmically emitting a bubble every several minutes, and then seemed to grow quiet. A shake of the jug would enliven things for a few hours, but after a while the fermentation had subsided for good. It was time for a taste. So I pulled out the airlock and poured some of the liquid into a wine gla.s.s. It was golden but cloudy, like a pale, unfiltered cider.

I could smell the alcohol and the sweet spices. The mead had a light fizz on the tongue and tasted like a mulled wine, sweet and a bit heavy. So this was metheglin. It wasn't half bad, I decided. Definitely interesting. But perhaps a little too sweet to drink in any quant.i.ty. Clearly the wild yeast had thrown in the towel before completely fermenting all the sugars in the honey.

Apparently this is often the case with wild yeasts. They will ferment a sugary liquid only up to about 5 percent alcohol, at which point they "c.r.a.p out," as Kel Alcala, the young guy behind the counter at the Oak Barrel put it. It seems that 5 percent alcohol-or ten proof-is fairly standard for a fermented beverage in nature. This could explain why alcoholism doesn't appear to be much of a problem in the animal world. Also, honey presents special challenges to yeast, since it contains various antimicrobial compounds to prevent it from spoiling; from a bee's perspective, fermented honey is spoiled honey. Kel recommended that, for my next batch, I try some champagne yeast, and he sold me a packet. "I call it the killer yeast," he said. "It'll ferment anything you throw it at, until it's pretty much bone dry."

I was curious to try it. But, honestly, I was impressed with what my local wild yeasts had accomplished on their own, completely free and voluntary. They had made me a jug of mead after all, Beowulf's drink of choice. It was low proof, true, but an alcoholic beverage just the same. By the time I finished the gla.s.s of mead, I felt a pleasant buzz in my brain, a mild and agreeable lightness. This mead might not impress the boys at the Oak Barrel yet, but as my first home brew (not counting the living-room-ceiling cuvee of my childhood) it felt to me like an achievement.

Figuring out how to make something like my mead was a development of inestimable value to our ancestors. Leaving aside for a moment the blessings of intoxication-which were mixed, it's true, but on balance a boon-fermented drinks offered a great many other benefits to early humans. Mead and beer and wine were safer to drink than water, since the alcohol in these drinks (and the fact that some of them, like beer, had been boiled) killed off any pathogens in the water. As in the case of so many other fermentations, the process itself rendered the original food or drink more nutritious, less perishable, and more interesting than it had previously been. The yeasts that fermented my honey water also contributed vitamins (B-complex), minerals (selenium, chromium, copper), and protein (the multiplying yeasts themselves). Some anthropologists believe that beer making, which began in earnest around the same time that farming did, helped the early agriculturists compensate for the decline in the nutritional quality of their diet as they turned from hunting and gathering a great many different foods to a monotonous diet of grains and tubers. The B vitamins and minerals in beer, for example, helped compensate for the loss of meat from their diet.