Part 17 (1/2)

III.

Coda: Meet Your Wheat

The morning before I toured the mill in Woodland, I paid a visit to one of the growers that supply wheat to Community Grains. The Rominger family plants a dozen or so different crops, and runs sheep, on seven thousand acres of rich, dark bottomland a few miles down the road from Woodland, near the town of Winters. They use wheat as a rotational crop, planting it in November, before the winter rains, and harvesting it in the scorching heat of July.

I had never set foot in a wheat field before. Yet the sight of one is so iconic that the landscape feels immediately familiar, weirdly so. Standing in a field of wheat, it is impossible not to think about Flemish painters like Brueghel or van Ruisdael, or van Gogh. The wheat itself has changed-modern breeders have made the plant shorter in stature and its seed head fatter-but from a distance the overwhelming impression of ripe golden bounty, of nature's grace and sufficiency, remains indelible. The Romingers' wheat crop was still a few weeks away from harvest, almost but yet not completely dried to gold in the sun. If you looked closely at the leaves, there were still streaks of gra.s.sy green.

I picked a stalk of wheat. A wooden stake planted on the edge of the field said it was a variety called Red Wing. This, it would turn out, was the variety in the sack of flour I got from Joe Vanderliet. Up close, a wheat plant looks like a particularly buff and muscular gra.s.s, handsome, but perhaps just a little over the top, like a bodybuilder. The spike formed an intricate ladder of seeds arranged around the stem in a stepped, herringbone pattern, each with its own elegant golden needle reaching for the sky. I rubbed the seed head between my palms. The light jacket of chaff came free from the kernels and blew away, leaving a small handful of seeds. I bit into one of the fresh kernels. It was still slightly soft, and though not quite ripe it already tasted wheaty and sweet. The complexities and possibilities contained within this inconspicuous speck, this seed, were hard to imagine, but there they were: everything needed to produce a wheat plant. And much more than that. With enough of these seeds, and the knowledge of how to process them into bread, you had most of what is needed to grow a person. Or for that matter a civilization.

From where I stood, the field stretched west to the bluish ridge of the Coast Range, a s.h.i.+mmering blond avenue of lawn. If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, a few weeks from harvest, it's not hard to imagine you're looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But of course this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.

Part IV

EARTHFERMENTATION'S COLD FIRE

”G.o.d made yeast, as well as dough, and loves fermentation just as dearly as he loves vegetation.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

”The taste for partial spoilage can become a pa.s.sion, an embrace of the earthy side of life that expresses itself best in paradoxes.”

-Harold McGee

”No poems can please long or live that are written by water drinkers.”

-Horace

Ferment I.

Vegetable

Consider, just for a moment, the everyday proximity of death. No, not the swerve of the oncoming car or the bomb in the baby carriage. I'm thinking more of the bloom of yeast on the ripe fruit, patiently waiting for a breach in its skin so that it might invade and decompose its sweet flesh. Or the lactobacillus loitering on the cabbage leaf for the same purpose. We, too, carry around invisible microbial shadows: the Brevibacterium breeding in the saline damp between our toes, or the enterococci lurking in the coiled dark of the intestine. Everything that lives, it seems, must play host to the germ of its own dissolution. Whether a fungus or a bacterium, these invisibles come wielding precisely the right kit of enzymes to take apart, molecule by molecule, life's most intricate structures, reducing them, ourselves included, to simple foods for themselves and other living and incipient beings.

Plants stave off decomposition with st.u.r.dy cell walls constructed of cellulose or lignin, carbohydrates too complex for most microbes to penetrate. We humans rely on our various membranes: our skin, of course, and then an even larger interior membrane made up of epithelial cells that, at least when we are well, can hold most of the bugs at bay. This second, gastrointestinal skin lines our digestive tract and is painted with a protective layer of mucus made from carbohydrate-rich glycoproteins that the microbial mob cannot easily breach. If you could spread out the lining of just the small intestine, it would completely cover a tennis court. These thin, tenuous membranes are all that stand between us and the microbes' ultimate objective: to ferment us.

Not terribly appetizing, I know, especially in a book about food. You probably don't want to identify too closely with the cabbage when making sauerkraut, but sometimes you can't help it. Here, deliciousness is the by-product of decay, as the funky scent will occasionally remind us. As one of the primary processes by which nature breaks down living things so that their energies and atoms might be reused by other living things, fermentation puts us in touch with the ever-present tug, in life, of death.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses ...

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.It is the earth-the earth as understood here by Walt Whitman in ”This Compost”-that breeds and shadows every fermentation. Earth into grapevines into wine, barley seeds into beer, cabbage into kraut or kimchi, milk into cheese (or yogurt or kefir), soybeans into miso (or soy sauce or natto or tempeh), rice into sake, pig into prosciutto, vegetable into pickle: All these transformations depend on the fermenter's careful management of rot, on taking the decomposition of those seeds and fruits and fleshes just so far and no further. For, left to its own devices, the stain of corruption would continue and dilate and deepen until the life form in question-the ”fermentation substrate”-had been broken down completely and returned to earth, an increment of humus. Most of our fermentations are instances of rot interrupted, dust-to-dust delayed. And in fact some of the microbes that do this work for us, the bacilli and fungi, are denizens of the soil, on temporary loan to the aboveground world. They splash onto leaves, find their way into milk, drift onto seeds and flesh, but ultimately they are on a mission from the soil, venturing out into the macrocosm-the visible world of plants and animals we inhabit-to scavenge food for the microbial wilderness beneath our feet.

All cooking is transformation and, rightly viewed, miraculous, but fermentation has always struck people as particularly mysterious. For one thing, the transformations are so dramatic: fruit juice into wine?!-a liquid with the power to change minds? For another, it has only been 155 years since Louis Pasteur figured out what was actually going on in a barrel of crushed grapes when it starts to seethe. To ferment is to ”boil,” people would say confidently (”to boil” is what the word ”ferment” means), but they could not begin to say how the process started or why this particular boil wasn't hot to the touch. Most other kinds of cooking rely on outside energy-the application of heat, mainly-to transform foodstuffs; the laws of physics and chemistry rule the process, which operates on the only formerly alive.