Edible land saga
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©2024 Nicolò Pagnanelli
Holy rotten, Holy waste
Edible treasures hide in
decay
First came the microbes, and they inhabited the world. After them, a billion years later,
came the plants, evolving in a sea of microorganisms, the historical main recyclers of corganic matter, with their toolkit of enzymes required to hydrolyze macromolecules and extract metabolic energy from them. Plants, then, became the energy suppliers for the future evolution of microorganisms and animals.
In a crowd of microscopic entities, the evolutionary forces nudged the plant world into developing defensive strategies.
As such, undigestable lignin and cellulose was born with the means of separating their organs' dense, nutrient-rich layers from the aggressors, safeguarding their resources.
At the same time, phitochemicals diversified and gave every species their chemical identity.
Microbes engaged in relationships with the other species and, evolving into their niches, used the resources that plants and animals provided.
In between microorganisms and their biological substrates (fruit, leaf, fish,
animal, seed), there were different shades of edibility mediated by taste, flavour and smell.
Indole, scatole, cadaverine, dimethyl disulfide, methanethiol: when the spark of life empties a living creature and leaves it behind, a multitude of other critters join forces and starts to sing a very special chemical song.
In an extasis of microbial diversity, fungi, scavangers, beetles and tens of other invertebrates ignite the dance of hydrolysis and decomposition. To us, men, the chemical messages exaling from a carcass are signalling the potentially dangerous presence of pathogens ready to invade another organism, the factor of inedibility.
In a similar way, a pumpkin that lays on the ground will end up in the hug of the microbial biodiversity that waits all around. Yeasts, molds, bacterias and other living entities will quickly decompose its structure with their tiny and wonderful cutting tools, the enzymes.
Apart from composing this song of death exalations, microbes, fungi and other animals also generate attractive aromas, flavours, consistencies, and even change the properities of the matter. While methabolizing the molecules of a toxic plant, for example, they deactivate toxic compounds that were there to prevent us from consuming a fruit. When we’re lucky, they even gift us inebration and pleasures through the generation of intoxicating molecules like alcohol.
We have always been entangled with microorganisms. They have been pathogens and competitors, as they’ve been been saviours and edible pleasures. Here lies the prime intersection between microbes and humans: where theunavoidable cycle of life and death found an equilibrium, and provided an opportunity for the sustenance of men, tradition and food culture raised from the generative power of experimentation and necessity.
The root of our relationship lies in casual discoveries, in the primal exploration of what’s edible and what’s not. Our ancestors carried that burden, as they risked their way through the outer world, unlocking resources and weaving biocultural diversity whereever they moved or stayed.
There has been combs of wax and honey from a swarm of wild bees falling into a puddle of water and fermenting into an alcoholic concoction. There has been the ocean water in a rocky pool, slowly evaporating by the power of sun and wind, isolating fish, seaweeds and other gasteropods in an increasingly salty solution. In such pool, the enzymes in their intestines would have self-autolyzed their molecules, leading to savoury, umami-rich liquids. Some of our ancestors might have dipped their hand into that pool. In a similar way, one of our progenitors might have had the chance to dig into the body of a recently dead, young mammal, discovering the flavour of curdled milk on its way to being digested and metabolized, still wrapped in its stomach. Indonesian dwellers might have realized how much more digestible nutrient soy was when entangled and pre-digested by the hyphae of Rizphous.
Fermentation is a living phenomenon that humans learn to observe and replicate. Just as the different preservation techniques were born at the interface between us and our resources, the long-lasting interaction between us and
microorganisms developed outside and inside our bodies.