Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (54 page)

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.

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.