Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation > Status Update

Cheese that stinks of manure (or sex) offers a safe way for us to flirt with forbidden desires; even a cheese that stinks of death offers a perverse sort of pleasure. For, if the final fermentation that awaits us is too horrible to contemplate, perhaps a little preview of putrefaction on a cheese plate can, like a Gothic/horror movie, give us the little frisson of pleasure that comes from rehearsing what we most fear

Learning about cheese making- its skin of decomposed milk as a vibrant ecological community- emphasizes just what a weird & wonderful achievement cheese is: how our ancestors figured out how to guide the decomposition of milk so it might be arrested & then defended; deftly deploying rot against rot, fungus against fungus, to suspend milk’s inexorable slide into putrifaction just long enough to enjoy a tasty cheese.

A cheese is an ecological system, and the cheesemakers techniques operate like forces of natural selection to determine which species will succeed, thereby creating the cheese’s specific flavors & aromas & textures. In this, a cheese is much like a sourdough bread culture, except that its microbial community is even more complex & long lived. Indeed, it is still living when we eat it (bread culture dies in baking).

The big problem with the western diet is that most food has been overly processed to be readily absorbed, leaving nothing for the lower G.I. It turns out that one of the keys to health is fermentation in the large intestine. We have changed the human diet in such a way that it no longer feeds the whole super-organism, only our human selves. We’re eating for one, when we need to be eating for, oh, a few trillion.

Most of our fermentations are instances of rot interrupted- the bacilli/fungi on temporary loan from soil to the aboveground world. Here, deliciousness is the by-product of decay, as the funky scent reminds us. As the primary processes by which nature breaks down living things so that their energies & atoms might be reused by other living things, fermentation puts us in touch with the ever-present touch of death.

Consider for a moment the everyday proximity of death. The bloom of yeast on ripe fruit, or lactobacillus loitering on a cabbage leaf. Whether fungus or bacterium, these invisibles come wielding the right kit of enzymes to take apart, molecule by molecule, life’s most intricate structures, reducing them- ourselves included- to simple foods for themselves & other living (& incipient) beings.

You cannot fractionate the seed without ruining the flour. As soon as you separate the bran from the germ, that’s it, it’s all over, the germ will turn rancid. Nature made a perfect package when it made the seed: there are antioxidant compounds in the bran that protect oils in the germ from oxidizing. But only if they are kept together! Once you break apart the seed you can never put Humpty back together again.

By now the public is aware of & wanting the benefits of whole grain, but modern mill machinery has been expressly designed to get the whitest possible flour, splitting off germ at first break. Milling white flour & selling off the nutrients is more profitable than selling it whole. To leave the germ in the flour would literally ‘gum up the works’. The engineering & nutrition are pulling in opposite directions.

White flour was easier to bake with & more portable, consolidating & industrializing the milling industry. However nutrient deficiencies fostered by widespread white flour/bread consumption became a problem, so industry & gov’t decided to fortify white bread. Here was a classic capitalist “solution”: rather than address a problem at its source, the milling industry could now sell the problem AND the solution.

Another reason modern milling pushed towards white flour: bran (its impact on dough)- taste & aeration.
Bran tends to be bitter, so whiter flour meant sweeter bread.
Milling the whole grain cuts the bran into microscopic shards, which are like tiny knives that pierce the gluten strands & impair its ability to hold air & rise.
Those tiny bran knives are relatively heavy too, making it more difficult to raise a loaf.