Zymology, imagine our world without fermentation.

Our modern civilisation relies on technology. Who could imagine our world without fire, the wheel, or books? More recently, the internal combustion engine, aeroplanes, and mobile internet? In the future, AI looms. All are milestones in human ingenuity; where would we be without them? However, in this article, I would like to ask you to imagine the world without Zymology. We depend on it, yet taking it for granted is easy.

What is Zymology?

Zymology is an applied science that studies the biochemical process of fermentation and harnesses its practical uses. Fermentation occurs naturally but relies on the action of microbes such as yeasts, moulds, and bacteria.

Furthermore, the most common fermentation is converting sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide by yeast enzymes. The simple chemical formula is:

C₆H₁₂O₆ → 2C₂H₅OH + 2CO₂

Ethanol, of course, is the alcohol in drinks such as beers, cider, wines and spirits.

Louis Pasteur discovered how this chemistry worked in 1857. He was the first scientist to connect the essential presence of microbes as enablers of this chemical reaction. Hitherto, the process appeared to occur as if by magic. In so doing, Pasteur became the first Zymologist and kick-started an entire field of biochemistry. Along the way, he also gave us vaccination and Pasteurisation. His legacy is a profound one that changed our world completely. From here on, humans could control fermentation with technology rather than rely on natural occurrences.

Imagine our world without Zymology.

Now clearly, fermentation by yeasts and bacteria are entirely natural processes which do not need human intervention. Furthermore, you don’t need to understand the fermentation process to harness it. After all, wild Elephants deliberately get drunk on fermenting fruits. Humans used fermentation for millennia without understanding the science behind it.

One way of appreciating Zymology is to imagine what our world might be like if fermentation didn’t exist.

Zymology and drinking

Let’s start with the most obvious: drinking alcohol. Alcohol has been a part of almost all human cultures since Neolithic times. Brewing likely helped people change from hunter-gatherers into farmers growing cereals thousands of years ago, and wine-making is probably as old.

However, Zymology allows for far greater control and precision in the creation of alcoholic drinks. For example, winemakers can now access selected yeasts to ferment higher alcoholic strengths and impart distinct flavours. Temperature control allows for the retention of aromatics and tannin management. There would be no stable fizzy or sweet wines without the ability to stop, restart, or prevent further fermentation. Controlling the second fermentation, when bacteria turn malic acid into softer lactic acid, is also key to many wine styles.

Without fermentation, there are no alcoholic drinks.

Without fermentation, alcoholic beverages would not exist — no wine, beer, spirits or alcohol-based cocktails. At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s a significant cultural and social impact! No celebrations or festivities as we know them. Symbols of national or regional identity are gone. No religious or ritual use, no pubs and bars in which to socialise and bond. No drinks industry or related employment. Alcohol punctuates our lives. It’s present from the cradle to the grave. Perhaps for the committed teetotaler, an absence wouldn’t matter or is a desirable solution for the problems alcohol can cause.

All human societies use intoxicating substances, with alcohol being the most common. Moderate, unproblematic drinking is the norm in most cultures. We have written and unwritten rules about drinking patterns. Different drinks can also say things about us, such as status, power, and etiquette.

As a result, Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote this about alcohol. “It makes an intelligible, bearable world. Much more how an ideal world should be, instead of painful chaos threatening all the time”.

Zymology and eating

But what about food? Fermentation is just as important. Food fermentation converts carbohydrates (including sugar) into alcohol, organic acids and carbon dioxide.

Bread

Bread is the most famous food based on fermentation. Carbon dioxide from fermentation makes it rise. It’s one of our oldest foods and, once again, its many forms go back to antiquity. Like alcohol, it’s both a staple of our society and prominent in daily life.  How many innovations are “the best thing since sliced bread”?

The earliest examples relied upon airborne yeast to enable spontaneous rising. But beer and wine have long usage as “starters”, and sourdough uses bacteria. So, you can forget about leavened bread in a world without fermentation. Half the world would starve or riot. All there would be is unleavened flatbreads like matzos, tortillas and roti.

Cheese

As for cheese, without zymology, forget it. For all of cheese history, makers have relied on naturally occurring lactic acid bacteria to curdle milk. These days, the dairy industry relies on starter cultures and Pasteurisation. Check out The Oxford Companion to Cheese for complete details.

Many other foods

Moreover, there are many other foods where fermentation makes acids that work as a preservative. Sauerkraut, crème fraîche and yoghurt, for example, rely on lactic acid formed by bacteria as a preservative. You may not mind about a lack of Sauerkraut. However, Koreans would miss all the 187 different types of their national dish, Kimchi. As would most London Hipsters.

You should also forget about vinegar for your fish ‘n’ chips or pickling. Bacteria ferment ethanol into vinegar’s acetic acid.

Other widely eaten fermented foods include olives. Raw olives are bitter when picked and inedible. Fermentation removes a bitter phenolic compound known as oleuropein.

And what about chocolate? One of the most popular foods is only possible because of fermentation. Cacao Tree seeds are so intensely bitter they must undergo fermentation first. As for coffee, fermentation separates the coffee bean from the rest of the fruit before roasting. Some specialist teas also rely on fermentation by moulds!

Other fermented foods worldwide use beans, vegetables, fruit, honey, fish and meat. There’s a long list, so here are a few examples:

• Soybeans: Soy sauce, Miso and Tofu
• Fish: Swedish Surströmming (Herring), Norwegian Rakfisk (Trout) and Icelandic Kæstur Hákarl (Shark)
• Meat: Chorizo, Pepperoni and French saucissons
• Peppers: Tabasco
• Marmite. It’s based on spent yeast from breweries.

Zymology – ever more applications

To summarise, in this imagining, without fermentation, our diets would be unbelievably dull. And unwholesome. We can speculate as to whether restaurants could even exist.

There’s more.

These days, industrial quantities of biofuels and agricultural feeds rely on fermentation. Fermentation even digests our waste, as a visit to a sewage work demonstrates.

However, controlling fermentation has also transformed medicine. The most famous example is the mass production of the Penicillin antibiotic from the Penicillium mould. Only in the 1940s could fermentation make it on a sufficiently large scale. This discovery was just in time for D-Day. Post-war developments then enabled a range of similar antibiotics like streptomycin and tetracycline. These have saved countless millions of civilian and military lives.

Consequently, our biotechnologies are now multi-million-pound industries. They nearly all rely on controlled fermentation of yeast, bacteria and fungi to enable mass production. Similarly, Insulin, Statins, or Interferon wouldn’t be readily available.

Finally, human digestion relies on fermentation, too. We need our gut bacteria, which I’ll leave to your imagination. As Shrek once said, “Better out than in.”

And Finally

If you pass Arbois, a lovely wine town in France’s Jura region, visit Pasteur’s house. It’s now a museum of Zymology. Without it, our lives would be even nastier and brutish. And probably shorter, too.

Location
Louis Pasteur Museum
83 rue de Courcelles,
39600 Arbois
France

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