The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell Page A
Authors: Lewis Dartnell
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new, flavorsome compounds. But cooking serves far more fundamental purposes than simply making food taste more appetizing, and it will form the crux of keeping the survivors healthy and well nourished after the apocalypse.
The heat of cooking kills any contaminating pathogens or parasites, preventing food poisoning from microbes or infection with tapeworm from pork, for example. Cooking also helps to soften tough or fibrous food, and breaks down the structures of complex molecules to release simpler compounds that are more easily digested and absorbed. This increases the nutritional content of much food, allowing ourbodies to extract more energy from the same volume of edible matter. And in some cases, such as taro, cassava, and wild potato, prolonged heat inactivates plant poisons, which in the extreme example of cassava would otherwise be lethal from a single meal.
Cooking is only one kind of processing that we apply to food before consumption. The capability to keep food safely for protracted periods beyond its immediate collection is a fundamental prerequisite for the support of civilization. It allows produce to be transported from the fields or slaughterhouses into cities to support dense populations, and enables the stockpiling of reserves for leaner times. Food is spoiled by the action of microbes—bacteria as well as molds—breaking down its structure and changing its chemistry, or releasing waste products distasteful or even outright toxic to humans. The purpose of food preservation is to prevent this microbial spoilage occurring, or at least to delay the process for as long as possible. You pull this off by deliberately modifying the conditions in the food to push them outside the sweet spot for microbial growth. We’ll come in a second to a more detailed explanation of how this is actually achieved, but you are essentially trying to exert control over the food’s microbiology: preventing any microorganism growth, or even employing some microbes to block other, undesirable strains from gaining a foothold. In some cases, fermentation from microbial growth is encouraged to decompose the complex molecules in food and make nutrients more readily accessible for our own consumption. Biotechnology, therefore, is far from a modern innovation; it is, in fact, one of humanity’s oldest inventions.
The development that first endowed us with all of these capabilities—cooking food thoroughly by boiling or frying, fermentation processing, and long-term preservation—was the innovation of firing clay into earthenware pots. This had profound ramifications for us as a species. The human digestive system, unlike the multiple stomachs of ruminants like cows, for example, is unable to break down many food types particularly well, and so we have applied technologyto supplement what our bodies can naturally do. Pottery vessels, used as receptacles for food during fermentation or cooking to release further nutrients, therefore serve as additional, external “stomachs”—a technological pre-digestive system.
Modern cuisine—the height of civilized sophistication with all its marinades, confits, and drizzles of reductions—is no more than a superficial adornment upon these fundamental necessities of stopping food from poisoning you and unlocking as much of its nutritional content as possible. This isn’t a cookbook, so we won’t go into recipes or detailed instructions, but the general principles behind preservation and processing methods are crucial knowledge for a post-apocalyptic recovery.
FOOD PRESERVATION
Preserving food takes into account the environmental conditions that microbes, and indeed all life, need to thrive. But the traditional techniques we’ll look at were all developed over long periods by trial and error, long before the discovery of invisible microorganisms causing decay (even the modern practice of canned food was adopted before the demonstration of the germ theory). These techniques were found to
The heat of cooking kills any contaminating pathogens or parasites, preventing food poisoning from microbes or infection with tapeworm from pork, for example. Cooking also helps to soften tough or fibrous food, and breaks down the structures of complex molecules to release simpler compounds that are more easily digested and absorbed. This increases the nutritional content of much food, allowing ourbodies to extract more energy from the same volume of edible matter. And in some cases, such as taro, cassava, and wild potato, prolonged heat inactivates plant poisons, which in the extreme example of cassava would otherwise be lethal from a single meal.
Cooking is only one kind of processing that we apply to food before consumption. The capability to keep food safely for protracted periods beyond its immediate collection is a fundamental prerequisite for the support of civilization. It allows produce to be transported from the fields or slaughterhouses into cities to support dense populations, and enables the stockpiling of reserves for leaner times. Food is spoiled by the action of microbes—bacteria as well as molds—breaking down its structure and changing its chemistry, or releasing waste products distasteful or even outright toxic to humans. The purpose of food preservation is to prevent this microbial spoilage occurring, or at least to delay the process for as long as possible. You pull this off by deliberately modifying the conditions in the food to push them outside the sweet spot for microbial growth. We’ll come in a second to a more detailed explanation of how this is actually achieved, but you are essentially trying to exert control over the food’s microbiology: preventing any microorganism growth, or even employing some microbes to block other, undesirable strains from gaining a foothold. In some cases, fermentation from microbial growth is encouraged to decompose the complex molecules in food and make nutrients more readily accessible for our own consumption. Biotechnology, therefore, is far from a modern innovation; it is, in fact, one of humanity’s oldest inventions.
The development that first endowed us with all of these capabilities—cooking food thoroughly by boiling or frying, fermentation processing, and long-term preservation—was the innovation of firing clay into earthenware pots. This had profound ramifications for us as a species. The human digestive system, unlike the multiple stomachs of ruminants like cows, for example, is unable to break down many food types particularly well, and so we have applied technologyto supplement what our bodies can naturally do. Pottery vessels, used as receptacles for food during fermentation or cooking to release further nutrients, therefore serve as additional, external “stomachs”—a technological pre-digestive system.
Modern cuisine—the height of civilized sophistication with all its marinades, confits, and drizzles of reductions—is no more than a superficial adornment upon these fundamental necessities of stopping food from poisoning you and unlocking as much of its nutritional content as possible. This isn’t a cookbook, so we won’t go into recipes or detailed instructions, but the general principles behind preservation and processing methods are crucial knowledge for a post-apocalyptic recovery.
FOOD PRESERVATION
Preserving food takes into account the environmental conditions that microbes, and indeed all life, need to thrive. But the traditional techniques we’ll look at were all developed over long periods by trial and error, long before the discovery of invisible microorganisms causing decay (even the modern practice of canned food was adopted before the demonstration of the germ theory). These techniques were found to
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