Life / Agriculture & Food

Fermented food and drink

Early farmers learned to ferment grain, grapes and milk into beer, wine and cheese, preserving food with invisible microbes.

Chemical traces in pots from Jiahu in China (about 7000 BC) show a fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit; grape-wine residues from Georgia date to about 6000 BC, and milk fat in perforated pots in Poland (about 5500 BC) points to cheese-making. Fermenting grain, fruit and milk stored calories and made food safer, and people did it for thousands of years before knowing that yeasts and bacteria were responsible. Pasteur's study of fermentation in the 1850s and 1860s opened the door to microbiology.