The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (5 page)

FROM
The New Yorker

T
HE HOUSE AT
40 Congress Street wouldn't have been my first choice for lunch. It sat on a weedy lot in a disheveled section of Asheville, North Carolina. Abandoned by its previous owners, condemned by the city, and minimally rehabilitated, it was occupied—perhaps infested is a better word—by a loose affiliation of opportunivores. The walls and ceilings, chicken coop, and solar oven were held together with scrap lumber and drywall. The sinks, disconnected from the sewer, spilled their effluent into plastic buckets, providing water for root crops in the gardens. The whole compound was painted a sickly greenish gray—the unhappy marriage of twenty-three cans of surplus paint from Home Depot. "We didn't put in the pinks," Clover told me.

Clover's pseudonym both signaled his emancipation from a wasteful society and offered a thin buffer against its authorities. "It came out of the security culture of the old Earth First! days," another opportunivore told me. "If the Man comes around, you can't give him any incriminating information." Mostly, though, the names fit the faces: Clover was pale, slender, and sweet-natured, with fine blond hair gathered in a bun. His neighbor Catfish had droopy whiskers and fleshy cheeks. There were four men and three women in all, aged twenty to thirty-five, crammed into seven small bedrooms. Only one had a full-time job, and more than half received food stamps. They relied mostly on secondhand bicycles for transportation, and each paid two hundred dollars or less in rent. "We're just living way simple," Clover said. "Super low-impact, deep green."

Along one wall of the kitchen, rows of pine and wire shelves were crowded with dumpster discoveries, most of them pristine: boxes of organic tea and artisanal pasta, garlic from Food Lion, baby spring mix from Earth Fare, tomatoes from the farmers' market. About half the household's food had been left somewhere to rot, Clover said, and there was often enough to share with Asheville's other opportunivores. (A couple of months earlier, they'd unearthed a few dozen cartons of organic ice cream; before that, enough Odwalla juices to fill the bathtub.) Leftovers were pickled or composted, brewed into mead, or, if they looked too dicey, fed to the chickens. "We have our standards," a young punk with a buzz-cut scalp and a skinny ponytail told me. "We won't dumpster McDonald's." But he had eaten a good deal of scavenged sushi, he said—it was all right, as long as it didn't sit in the dumpster overnight—and his housemate had once scored a haggis. "Oh no, no," she said, when I asked if she'd eaten it. "It was canned."

Lunch that day was lentil soup, a bowl of which was slowly congealing on the table in front of me. The carrots and onions in it had come from a dumpster behind Amazing Savings, as had the lentils, potatoes, and most of the spices. Their color reminded me a little of the paint on the house. Next to me, Sandor Katz scooped a spoonful into his mouth and declared it excellent. A self-avowed "fermentation fetishist," Katz travels around the country giving lectures and demonstrations, spreading the gospel of sauerkraut, dill pickles, and all foods transformed and ennobled by bacteria. His two books—
Wild Fermentation
and
The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved
—have become manifestos and how-to manuals for a generation of underground food activists, and he's at work on a third, definitive volume. Lunch with the opportunivores was his idea.

Katz and I were on our way to the Green Path, a gathering of herbalists, foragers, raw-milk drinkers, and roadkill eaters in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The groups in Katz's network have no single agenda or ideology. Some identify themselves as punks, others as hippies, others as evangelical Christians; some live as rustically as homesteaders—the "techno-peasantry," they call themselves; others are thoroughly plugged in. If they have a connecting thread, it's their distrust of "dead, anonymous, industrialized, genetically engineered, and chemicalized corporate food," as Katz has written. Americans are killing themselves with cleanliness, he believes. Every year we waste 40 percent of the food we produce, and we process, pasteurize, or irradiate much of the rest, sterilizing the live cultures that keep us healthy. Lunch from a dumpster isn't just a form of conservation; it's a kind of inoculation.

"This is a modern version of the ancient tradition of gleaning," Katz said. "When the harvest is over, the community has a common-law right to pick over what's left." I poked at the soup with my spoon. The carrots seemed a little soft—whether overcooked or overripe, I couldn't tell—but they tasted all right. I asked the kid with the ponytail if he'd ever brought home food that was spoiled. "Oh, hell, yes!" he said, choking back a laugh. '"Jesus Christ, yes!" Then he shrugged, suddenly serious. "It happens: diarrhea, food poisoning. But I think we've developed pretty good immune systems by now."

 

To most cooks, a kitchen is a kind of battle zone—a stainless steel arena devoted to the systematic destruction of bacteria. We fry them in oil and roast them in ovens, steam them, boil them, and sluice them with detergents. Our bodies are delicate things, easily infected, our mothers taught us, and the agents of microscopic villainy are everywhere. They lurk in raw meat, raw vegetables, and the yolks of raw eggs, on the unwashed hand and in the unmuffled sneeze, on the grimy countertop and in the undercooked pork chop.

Or maybe not. Modern hygiene has prevented countless colds, fevers, and other ailments, but its central premise is hopelessly outdated. The human body isn't besieged; it's saturated, infused, with microbial life at every level. "There is no such thing as an individual," Lynn Margulis, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me recently. "What we see as animals are partly just integrated sets of bacteria." Nearly all the DNA in our bodies belongs to microorganisms: they outnumber our own cells nine to one. They process the nutrients in our guts, produce the chemicals that trigger sleep, ferment the sweat on our skin and the glucose in our muscles. ("Humans didn't invent fermentation," Katz likes to say. "Fermentation created us.") They work with the immune system to mediate chemical reactions and drive out the most common infections. Even our own cells are kept alive by mitochondria—the tiny microbial engines in their cytoplasm. Bacteria are us.

"Microbes are the minimal units, the basic building blocks of life on Earth," Margulis said. About half a billion years ago, land vertebrates began to encase themselves in skin, and their embryos in protective membranes, sealing off the microbes inside them and fostering ever more intimate relations with them. Humans are the acme of that evolution—walking, talking microbial vats. By now the communities we host are so varied and interdependent that it's hard to tell friend from enemy—the bacteria we can't live with from those we can't live without.
E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus,
and the bacteria responsible for meningitis and stomach ulcers all live peaceably inside us most of the time, turning dangerous only on rare occasions and for reasons that are poorly understood. "This cliché nonsense about good and bad bacteria, it's so insidious," Margulis said. "It's this Western, dichotomized, Cartesian thing ... Like Jesus rising."

In the past decade, biologists have embarked on what they call the second human-genome project, aimed at identifying every bacterium associated with people. More than a thousand species have been found so far in our skin, stomach, mouth, guts, and other body parts. Of those, only fifty or so are known to harm us, and they have been studied obsessively for more than a century. The rest are mostly new to science. "At this juncture, biologists cannot be blamed for finding themselves in a kind of 'future shock,'" Margaret McFall-Ngai, an expert in symbiosis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote in
Nature Reviews Microbiology
two years ago. Or, as she put it in an earlier essay, "We have been looking at bacteria through the wrong end of the telescope."

Given how little we know about our inner ecology, carpet-bombing it might not always be the best idea. "I would put it very bluntly," Margulis told me. "When you advocate your soaps that say they kill all harmful bacteria, you are committing suicide." The bacteria in the gut can take up to four years to recover from a round of antibiotics, recent studies have found, and the steady assault of detergents, preservatives, chlorine, and other chemicals also takes its toll. The immune system builds up fewer antibodies in a sterile environment; the deadliest pathogens can grow more resistant to antibiotics; and innocent bystanders such as peanuts or gluten are more likely to provoke allergic reactions. All of which may explain why a number of studies have found that children raised on farms are less susceptible to allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. The cleaner we are, it sometimes seems, the sicker we get.

"We are living in this cultural project that's rarely talked about," Katz says. "We hear about the war on terror. We hear about the war on drugs. But the war on bacteria is much older, and we've all been indoctrinated into it. We have to let go of the idea that they're our enemies." Eating bacteria is one of life's great pleasures, Katz says. Beer, wine, cheese, bread, cured meats, coffee, chocolate: our best-loved foods are almost all fermented. They start out bitter, bland, cloying, or indigestible and are remade by microbes into something magnificent.

Fermentation is a biochemical magic trick—a benign form of rot. It's best known as the process by which yeast turns sugar into alcohol, but an array of other microorganisms and foods can ferment as well. In some fish dishes, for instance, the resident bacteria digest amino acids and spit out ammonia, which acts as a preservative. Strictly speaking, all fermentation is anaerobic (it doesn't consume oxygen); most rot is aerobic. But the two are separated less by process than by product. One makes food healthy and delicious; the other not so much.

Making peace with microorganisms has its risks, of course.
E. coli
can kill you. Listeria can kill you. Basic hygiene and antibiotic overkill aren't hard to tell apart at home, but the margin of error shrinks dramatically in a factory. Less than a gram of the bacterial toxin that causes botulism, released into the American milk supply, could poison a hundred thousand people, the National Academy of Sciences estimated in 2005. And recent deaths and illnesses from contaminated beef, spinach, and eggs have persuaded food regulators to clamp down even harder. While Katz's followers embrace their bacterial selves, the Obama administration has urged Congress to pass a comprehensive new set of food-safety laws, setting the stage for a culture war of an unusually literal sort. "This is a revolution of the everyday," Katz says, "and it's already happening."

 

When Katz picked me up in Knoxville at the beginning of our road trip, the back seat of his rented Kia was stacked with swing-top bottles and oversized Mason jars. They were filled with foamy, semiopaque fluids and shredded vegetables that had been fermenting in his kitchen for weeks. A sour, pleasantly funky aroma pervaded the cabin, masking the new-car smell of industrial cleaners and off-gassing plastics. It was like driving around in a pickle barrel.

Physically speaking, food activists tend to present a self-negating argument. The more they insist on healthy eating, the unhealthier they look. The pickier they are about food, the more they look like they could use a double cheeseburger. Katz was an exception. At forty-eight, he had clear blue eyes, a tightly wound frame, and ropy forearms. His hands were callused and his skin was ruddy from hours spent weeding his commune's vegetable patches and herding its goats. He wore his hair in a stubby Mohawk, his beard in bushy muttonchops. If not for his multiple earrings and up-to-the-minute scientific arguments, he might have seemed like a figure out of the nineteenth century, selling tonics and bromides from a painted wagon.

Katz was a political activist long before he was a fermentation fetishist. Growing up on New York's Upper West Side, the eldest son of progressive Polish and Lithuanian Jews, he was always involved in one campaign or another. At the age of ten, in 1972, he spent his afternoons on street corners handing out buttons for George McGovern. At eleven he was a campaign volunteer for the mayoral candidate Al Blumenthal. When he reached sixth grade and found that one of the city's premier programs for gifted students, Hunter College High School, was only for girls, he helped bring an antidiscrimination suit that forced it to turn coed. He later served on the student council with Elena Kagan, the future Supreme Court justice. "The staggered lunch hour was our big issue," he says.

At Brown as an undergraduate, Katz became a well-known figure: a bearish hippie in the Abbie Hoffman mold, with a huge head of curly hair. His causes were standard issue for the time: gay rights, divestment from South Africa, U.S. out of Central America (as a senior, he and a group of fellow-activists placed a CIA recruiter under citizen's arrest). Yet Katz lacked the usual stridency of the campus radical. "I remember a particular conversation in 1982 or '83," his classmate Alicia Svigals, who went on to found the band the Klezmatics, told me. "We were standing on a street corner in Providence, and I said, 'Sandy, I think I might be a lesbian.' And he said, 'Oh, I think I might be gay.' At the time, that was a huge piece of news. It wasn't something you said lightly. But his reaction was 'How wonderful and exciting! How fantastic! This is going to be so much fun!' The world was about to be made new—and so easily."

After graduation, Katz moved back to New York. He took a job as the executive director of Westpride, a lobbying group opposed to a massive development project on the Upper West Side. (The developer, Donald Trump, was eventually forced to scale down his plans.) As the AIDS epidemic escalated, in the late eighties, Katz became an organizer for ACT UP and a columnist for the magazine
OutWeek.
His efforts on both fronts caught the eye of Ruth Messinger, the Manhattan borough president, who hired him in 1989 as a land-use planner and as a de facto liaison to the gay community. "He was a spectacular person," Messinger told me recently. "Creative and flamboyant and fun to be around. He just had a natural instinct and talent as an organizer of people." Messinger was thinking of running for mayor (she won the Democratic nomination in 1997, only to get trounced by Rudolph Giuliani), and Katz's ambitions rose with hers. "I would fantasize about what city agency I wanted to administer," he recalls. Then, in 1991, he found out he was HIV-positive.