What Fermentation Teaches Us About Civilization
Hunter-gatherers do not ferment. Settled peoples must. The chemistry that turns surplus into shelf-stable food is also the chemistry that turned humanity into a civilization, and forgetting that has cost us more than we tend to admit.
A hunter-gatherer band moving across a landscape eats what it kills, gathers, or finds, and what it cannot finish in a day or two it leaves behind. There are exceptions — caches of dried meat, buried roots, the occasional skin pouch of milk that turns into something interesting on the road — but the pattern is mostly forward: forward motion, forward consumption, no accumulation. A settled village does the opposite. It plants, it harvests, it stores, and then it has to keep on eating from the store through a winter or a dry season that lasts months. The pile of grain in the granary at the end of harvest must, mechanically, last until the next harvest, and the milk that comes from a milked animal must be turned into something that does not spoil overnight, and the cabbage taken from the field in autumn must somehow remain food in February. Fermentation is the chemistry that answers this problem. It is the chemistry of staying still. A nomadic life does not need it. A settled life cannot exist without it.
The historical timing supports this almost too neatly. The Neolithic transition, the period running roughly from 10,000 to 5,000 BCE during which scattered human populations across the Fertile Crescent, the Yellow River basin, the Indus Valley, the Mexican highlands, and the Andes independently moved from foraging to settled agriculture, is also the period during which every major category of fermented food and drink appears in the archaeological record. Bread requires both wheat agriculture and leavening, and the oldest known leavened bread, found in a stone hearth at Shubayqa in northeastern Jordan, dates to around 14,000 BCE — pre-agricultural, but already past the line at which a foraging culture is building permanent ovens. Beer appears in the Sumerian record by at least 4,000 BCE and was almost certainly older, with chemical residues consistent with fermented grain beverages found in pottery shards at Jiahu in central China dated to roughly 7,000 BCE. Cheese, requiring both dairy animals and the patience to wait for milk solids to coagulate and ripen, is documented at the Polish site of Kuyavia around 5,500 BCE through milk-fat residues trapped in perforated ceramic strainers. Fermented condiments — fish sauce in the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia, soybean pastes in East Asia, fermented vegetable preparations across the Eurasian temperate zone — follow the same arc. The technology is universal because the problem is universal. You cannot ferment what you eat the same week, and once you have surplus you cannot afford not to.
What is harder to see, at this distance, is that each ferment carried cultural baggage that the food itself could not be separated from. Sumerian beer was made and dispensed largely by women, but the institutional control of beer production passed quickly to the temple priesthoods, who used grain stores, brewing labor, and beer distribution as instruments of social organization. The standard ration recorded in cuneiform administrative tablets from the third millennium BCE — a daily allotment of beer measured in 古代の単位 of approximately one liter per worker — was simultaneously food, wage, and ritual material. The priest who controlled the beer controlled the labor of the city. I have written about this dynamic at greater length in Beer as Wages: Ancient Egypt's Ingenious System, and the Egyptian case is in many ways a direct inheritance of the Sumerian one: same problem, same solution, same political consequences. Cheese in medieval Europe was almost entirely a monastic product, made under the rule of one or another monastic order — the Trappists, the Cistercians, the orders that descended from the rule of Saint Benedict — and the great surviving European cheese traditions (Munster, Gruyère, Parmigiano in its earliest forms, dozens of others) were established within abbey walls before they entered commercial life. The monastery's vow of stability — the requirement that a monk not leave the house he had joined — was, among other things, the labor structure that made a long-aging cheese possible. Someone had to be there, every day, for a year, turning the wheels.
The point I want to make is not that fermentation is interesting, although it is. The point is that fermentation is the technology that defines what we mean by civilization. The settled storage of surplus food, the social organization of the labor that processes that surplus, the priestly or monastic or guild structures that grew up around the processing, the eventual taxation and trade of the processed product, and finally the cultural identity that attaches itself to a particular ferment in a particular place — bread in Egypt, beer in Sumer, cheese in France, miso and soy and sake in Japan — all of these are downstream of the underlying chemistry. A society that ferments is a society that has chosen to live in one place long enough to wait for the food to change. A society that cannot or does not ferment cannot, in any robust sense, accumulate. The two facts are connected at the level of the cell.
This is, in essence, the argument I make in The Taste of Time, and writing that book was the experience that forced me to take the connection seriously. I began the project thinking of fermentation as a craft tradition, a set of beautiful old techniques to be respected and continued. I finished it convinced that fermentation is the most underrated piece of infrastructure in human history — older than the wheel by some measures, older than writing, older than every form of government that has ever existed, and the actual material precondition for the kind of life that allowed writing and government to develop at all. The dependency runs in one direction. You cannot have a Sumerian temple complex without a steady supply of beer to pay the workers who built it. You cannot have an Italian medieval city without a hinterland of cheese-aging monasteries to feed it through the winter. You cannot have a Japanese castle town without the koji rooms that turned the surrounding rice into miso and soy sauce and sake to support its population.
Modern food culture has forgotten this almost completely, and not by accident. The twentieth-century industrialization of food storage — refrigeration, freezing, canning, vacuum packing, the entire cold chain — replaced fermentation as the dominant preservation technology, and within two generations a craft that had been the backbone of every settled human society for ten thousand years had become a hobbyist curiosity. The supermarket sells fermented foods, but it sells them mostly as flavor products rather than as preservation products. The miso on the shelf is there because miso is delicious, not because anyone in the chain still needs miso to survive a winter. The bread is fermented overnight rather than over three days because the bakery has a cold room and a freezer and does not need the long ferment to control spoilage. We have kept the taste and discarded the function, and the discarded function turns out to have been carrying a great deal of cultural weight that the taste, alone, cannot carry.
What I want for the reader of this essay is small and specific: the next time you eat a piece of bread, a slice of cheese, a spoonful of miso, or a sip of beer, notice that you are eating a piece of the chemistry that made it possible for human beings to stop walking. Everything that followed — the cities, the writing, the law, the music, this article you are reading — sits on that foundation. The microbe was the first civic engineer. We have not yet built anything that replaces it.