You are Not Just You

How to regain consciousness of your microbiome through fermentation

You have approximately 100 trillion bacteria living in your gut.

To put that into perspective, if you were to fall into a giant blender, get turned into a pulp, then have someone scoop up a random cell, chances are it would not contain your DNA.

That’s because bacteria outnumber our own cells by more than 10 to 1.

How come?

We need them to live. (We always have).

A microbiotic dance.

At some point in the distant past, single-cell organisms and bacteria figured out ways to mutually benefit from one another. Each benefited from using the products of each other's metabolisms, and thus became co-dependent.

These mutually beneficial relationships are still with us today.

We would not be who we are now without the bacteria, fungi, and enzymes that make up our microbiota.

We share our skin with them, our mouths and our guts. In return, they help us do things we couldn’t do without them.

They protect us from invading pathogens and they break down nutrients we otherwise wouldn't be able to digest.

Much like 3rd party plugins, these microorganisms give us the ability to do things we haven't evolved for ourselves.

Between freshness and rotten.

One way we’ve coevolved with microorganisms is through fermented foods.

A natural phenomenon that people throughout history observed and learned to cultivate, fermentation is the transformation of food by various bacteria, fungi, and the enzymes that they produce.

These catalysts of change are everywhere; in the air we breath and on the food we eat.

Mix equal parts flour and water in a jar and leave it on a counter top; within a few days, you'll see signs of microbiotic life within it. Feed it some more and soon enough you'll be able to leaven bread with it.

Fermentation is a process of transformation and change.

Grapes become wine, which becomes vinegar. Milk becomes curds, which becomes cheese. Leaves and grass becomes compost, which becomes soil.

One thing becomes something else, which then becomes something else, which becomes something else.

Intertwined lives

The web of life is interrelated and we are an intrinsic part of it.

We're as much the product of coevolution as the organisms we've coevolved with. We’re not the masters and they are not our servants.

To think otherwise ignores our mutual interdependence.

Fermentation reminds us of that.

It offers us glimpses of our innate connection with the microbiome, one bubbling jar at a time.

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