Very deep larders

the non-human world and its pantry-making ways

Imagine an etruscan cook, 231 A.D, inside the dark spaces of a kitchen in a villa out among the rye fields: he’s pouring a handful of hazelnuts inside the ceramic crocks containing live dormhouses, a living pantry for his gentry.
Or imagine a small wasp, dragging a small, paralized moth to its brood and sealing it inside a cell, together with its very own pupae, until the time for the moth to be digested by their offspring will come.
Or envision a little stingless bee, carrying to her hive the bloody meat paste she scraped off a bird’s carcass lying in the forest, just nearby.
Or, again, think about a human being, covering some freshly hunted meat with molten fat in order to have it to pass the winter.
Or a European mole, dragging a live worm inside her underground storing chamber, one and a half meters below the soil. A bite to one of its extremities has paralized it: it won’t neither die or decay, nor escape, and gets consuemed in winter, when the soil hardens.

A glirarium, used to raise and fatten up dormhouses in Pompei, British Museum Images

Non-human beings manipulate their food, transform it, mix it, knead it, season it. Most especially, non-humans make their pantries too, dig their larders, and develop their very own preservation practices.
Just like us humans, they have developed techniques, recipes, and ways to make their food more digestible, durable, nutritious. Although non-humans out there might cover very different shades of self-consciousness and lack a gastronomic sense of things, some of their practices seem just as complex as some of ours are.

Some species of Melipona and Trigona bees, stingless bees commonly found in the forested regions of South America, have followed a rather unique evolutionary path: the pH of their stomachs has become more acidic, and a toolkit of enzymes specialized in the digestion of animal proteins, particularly carcasses, has flourished in their digestive systems. As so, they can swing by one dead carcass to the other, and get inhebriated by the chemicals delivered by the decaying animals. Not flowers, but rotting bodies.

However, differently from other scavanger species as carrion beetles or flesh flies, these bees not only chew off small bites of a dead body and munch it trough, but also transport it back to their hive, where the colony waits.
Much like how other stingless bees store honey or pollen, these ‘vulture bees’ have their food stock inside little waxy cellars. Many bees would store nectar and pollen and graually transform it through their enzyme and microbial flora, fermenting it and partially dehydrating it.
These bees, on the other hand, carefully collect the meat and store it in their tiny laders: hollow trunk cavities, ground niches, empty bird and mice nests, where they layer up the structure of their nest.

Necrophagous bee nest entrance as from Camargo et al.

If we briefly walk back to human history, humans gradually found out that salting, drying, and fermenting meats not only allowed the preservation of it, but also boosted its nutritional value. Halotolerant microorganisms from the butcher’s hands or on the animal’s body would ferment its meat, digesting its molecules and transforming them into easier-to-metabolize (and delicious) compounds.

In some ways, these bees have been walking a similar path: the protein paste, imbued with the enzymes that the bees produce, ends up in the storing pots. Some species knead this rotting paste with their honey, made from the sugars harvested from diverse fruits and berries, and then seal the cells, allowing it to mature for about two weeks. This time allows the meat paste to ferment and degrade into compounds that are easier to absorb for the bees and, most importantly, saves them the metabolic energy they would have used to digest it.

From the bloody honey and meat concoction, the material turns into a viscous, yellow, translucent honey-like compound. This transformation surely happens thanks to the bee’s own enzymes, secreted on the carcass to facilitate the job, but that’s far from being all: originating from the bee’s own body, inhabiting the porosity of its hive cells, or directly tracing back to the flora that thrived on the dead animal, different species of Bacillus and other microorganisms highly specialized in transforming animal proteins ferment the mixture, electing the bee as a small, winged cook.

While the bee evolved its interest for meat, its microbiome shift accordingly, as its abdomen became the house of lactic acid and acetic acid-producing bacteria that could help with digesting carrion and defending from the pathogens.

As a cheese cave nested into an alpine hill is permeated by a microbial flora that is directly tied to the cheese making practices, these bees, too, might be nourishing their very own microbial cultures, deep into an amazonian forest of Perù, hosting them in their hives and bodies and delivering food to their culture in exchange for metabolic energy.
There’s plenty of symbiotic larders out there.

As we make our pantry and preserve our foods, we’re too becoming the very own pantry of ever microscopic being inhabiting our bowels.

Trigona sp. as in Camargo et al.

Some of the resources that inspired these thoughts:

Systematics and bionomics of the apoid obligate necrophages: the Trigona hypogea group (Hymenoptera: Apidae; Meliponinae), Intenrational Journal of the Linnean Society

Nature's chefs: Uniting the hidden diversity of food making and preparing species across the tree of life, BioScience
From pollen to putrid: Comparative metagenomics reveals how microbiomes support dietary specialization in vulture bees

Edible land saga

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