Taming Rot: The History of Cheese - Episode 14

Aleksandra Ganeva: I want you. Picture something. A glass of milk, fresh, cold, completely ordinary, the kind of thing you pour into your tea or your cereal or your coffee without thinking about it once. Now I want you to hand that glass to an adult human being from 7,000 years ago. Not to a child. Children were fine with milk, they always have been, to a healthy, capable, fully grown adult, a Neolithic farmer on the coast of what is now Croatia, or a wealthy official in Egypt, or a warrior on the Mongolian stepi. And I want you to watch their reaction. They would not drink it. Not because they didn't want to, because they couldn't. Because to the overwhelming majority of adult humans who have ever lived, a glass of fresh milk was a digestive problem. The genetic mutation that allows most adults today to digest the lactose, the sugar, and milk is called lactase persistence. And it is not ancient. It's a relatively recent development in human biology, and it spread scientists think precisely because of something people had already figured out how to do with milk before their bodies evolved to handle it raw. They figured out how to rot it, carefully, on purpose, in a way that transformed it into something completely different. Something that unlocked the nutrition of an animal's milk without the digestive disaster that came with drinking it straight. something that could be stored and transported and traded. Something that may have reduced infant mortality, allowed populations to expand, and helped humans colonize parts of the planet that would otherwise have been too harsh to survive in. They invented cheese. And cheese was not, I want to be very clear about this from the start, a luxury. It was not a treat invented for dinner parties, it was a survival technology, one of the most consequential food technologies humans have ever developed. And the story of where it came from takes us to places the standard cheese story never goes. I'm Aleksandra welcome to the Hidden Life of Things, Everyday History for anyone who's ever looked at something ordinary and wondered, how did this actually get here? Let me explain the lactose situation properly because I think it's the most counterintuitive fact in the whole history of food and it completely reframes everything that follows. All mammal babies, including human babies, produce an enzyme called lactase. Lactase breaks down lactose, the sugar in milk, so infants can digest their mother's milk. Completely logical, essential for survival. But in most mammals, including most humans, throughout most of history, lactase production stops dramatically after weaning. grown now. You don't need milk, we're turning this off. Lactase persistence, keeping that enzyme running into adulthood is a genetic mutation. And it's not old. Geneticists think it spread significantly in certain human populations only in the last few thousand years in response to the availability of dairy animals. Which creates a situation that I find strange. were keeping goats and sheep and cattle, milking them regularly for potentially thousands of years before most adults had evolved the ability to drink that milk without problems. So what were they doing with it? They were fermenting it, letting bacteria work on it, removing or breaking down the lactose through Microbial action before they consumed it. The fermentation process that produces yogurt, kefir, and cheese dramatically reduces the lactose content. The bacteria involved in cheese making essentially do the digestive work that the human gut couldn't do itself. Cheese is, in a very literal sense, pre-digested milk. The microbes break down the sugars so you don't have to. So the people making cheese 7,000 years ago weren't making a delicacy, they were solving a biological problem. Finding a way to access the fat, protein, and calcium of an animal's milk without the consequences of drinking it raw. And here's funny part, they didn't know any of this. They didn't know what lactose was, they had no concept of bacteria, they couldn't explain why the fermented version didn't cause problems when the fresh version did. They just noticed that when milk was stored in certain conditions, it changed, solidified, became something else, and that the something else was edible and kept them well and lasted longer than the fresh milk. They discovered a technology they had no language to describe, and they passed it on anyway, because it worked. So when do we first actually have evidence of this? Where does the archaeological record start? In 2008, researchers published findings from two Neolithic sites on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, places called Pokrovnik and the Nilobitin. They have been analysing residue inside 7,200-year-old pottery fragments, and what they found on three out of four pottery sieves tested were chemical traces of dairy. Not fresh milk, fermented, processed, separated dairy, the molecular fingerprint of cheese. A sieve is not a storage vessel, a sieve is a processing vessel. The specific thing you need a sieve for in dairy production, the thing that requires straining, is separating curds from whey, which is cheese making. These people's 7,000 200 years ago were making specialized pottery equipment for cheese production. Cheese was important enough to them that they developed dedicated kitchenware for it. This is the earliest documented evidence of cheesemaking in the Mediterranean 7,200 years ago. And here's the detail that makes it even more interesting. The researchers also analyzed the DNA of the people in this region, and the adults were lactose intolerant. They were making cheese specifically to work around a biological limitation they had no scientific understanding of. They had arrived at the solution through observation and trial and repetition alone. Now, how did they figure it out in the first place? Nobody was sitting down and designing a process, so what happened? The most widely accepted theory, and I want to be clear that this is a theory, a very good one with strong support but not a confirmed historical event, is the animal stomach bag. Nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples across Central Asia and the Middle East carried liquids and containers made from the organs and stomachs of slaughtered animals. It sounds alarming by modern standards, but it was completely practical. Animal stomachs are watertight, flexible, light, and available wherever you're killing animals anyway. And here's the key. The stomach lining of a calf or a lamb contains rennet, enzymes that in the living animal help the newborn digest its mother's milk. If you fill one of those stomach bag containers with fresh milk and carry it on a warm day, the heat combined with the residual rennet in the lining curdles the milk. It separates into a solid mass and a liquid. You open your container expecting a drink and find something completely different, something you've never seen before. Does someone try it? Almost certainly, eventually, someone does. Maybe out of hunger, maybe out of curiosity, and finds that the solid lump is edible, doesn't cause the problems that fresh milk causes, and actually keeps, stays good for days, weeks even, in a way that fresh milk absolutely does not. accident, or something very much like it, is probably where the whole story starts. This is the part where we go to Egypt, and this is the part where cheese stops being just a food story and becomes something much stranger. The year is around twelve ninety or twelve thirteen BCE. The city of Memphis, the capital of law Egypt at the time, one of the most powerful cities in the ancient world, a man named Fdames lived here. And he was not a minor figure, he was mayor of Memphis, of staff, overseer of the royal treasury, royal scribe under not one but two pharaohs, Seti I and Ramesses II. Eventually, after his death, he was elevated to high priest of the god Amun. Thamas was, in the language of his time, an extremely big deal. His tomb was first found in 1885. Treasure hunters got there before archaeologists, as they often did, and took most of what was valuable. And then the desert did what deserts do, the sands shifted, the tomb disappeared. It was lost for over a century, not misplaced in an archive physically swallowed by the Egyptian desert. In 2010, it was rediscovered, and during excavations in 2013 and 2014, Archaeologists found something the original looters had completely missed. Broken jars buried in the sand, and inside one of them a solidified off-white crumbly mass wrapped in canvas fabric. They analyzed it using mass spectrometry, a technique that identifies substances by their molecular composition. A team of Italian and Egyptian researchers identified it as cheese made from a mixture of sheep and goat milk, possibly some cattle milk too. Well the solidified remnant of what had once been cheese, three thousand two hundred years of desert heat and alkaline sand had altered the chemistry considerably. It is the oldest solid cheese ever found. Not traces of cheese in a pottery sieve, not molecular evidence of cheese making. Actual physical, you could theoretically hold it solid cheese, 3,200 years old. Missed by grave robbers, lost under sand for a century, found in the tomb of one of the most powerful officials in ancient Egypt. This is extraordinary enough on its own, but here's where it gets a little bit dark. When the researchers looked more carefully at the proteins in the sample, they found something else Evidence of a bacterium called Brussella melitensis. Brussella mellitensis causes brucellosis, a disease that spreads from animals to humans through unpasteurized dairy products. The symptoms are specific and horrible. Recurring waves of fever that come and go for months or years, drenching night sweats, severe joint and muscle pain, profound fatigue. In the ancient world, without any way to treat it, brucellosis could be completely debilitating, recurring and relentless. And here's the detail that I think lands hardest. Brusella micensis is so dangerous that the United States Army, during the 1950s Cold War period, actually investigated it as a potential biological weapon. They developed it at a facility called Pine Bluff Arsenal. The bacterium found in a 3,200-year-old Egyptian tomb cheese was later classified by the US military as a candidate bioweapon. Now, I want to be appropriately careful. The researchers themselves noted this was based on peptide markers and that further analysis would be needed For full confirmation. So it's a strong finding, not a certainty. But even as a possibility, it tells you something important about what ancient cheese making actually was. It was not a safe or well-understood process. It was a high-stakes gamble between nutrition contamination, between preservation and infection. The same microbial activity that made cheese safe to eat, that broke down the lactose, that prevented the rapid putrefication of fresh milk, could also, if the wrong bacteria got involved, produce something that would make you seriously ill. Ancient cheesemakers were navigating this without any concept of bacteria, without any understanding of germ theory, without pasteurization. They were managing microbial communities through observation and tradition alone. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes the mayor of Memphis's favorite cheese was killing him. Let's go somewhere completely different now. From Egyptian tombs to the windswept steppe of Central Asia, the Mongol cavalry under Genghis Khan and his successors was the most terrifyingly effective military force the medieval world had ever seen. They conquered an area stretching from the Pacific coast of China to the borders of Eastern historians have spent centuries trying to explain how. The bows were extraordinary, the tactics were brilliant, the horsemanship was incomparable. All of that is true, but one of the most important and least discussed reasons was logistics. Specifically, the Mongols had almost no supply lines. Most medieval armies were slow because food was heavy. You have tens of thousands of soldiers who need to eat every day, which means supply wagons full of grain, which are heavy and cumbersome, which means the army can only move as fast as it slows the wagon. The Mongols had a different solution entirely. Every warrior carried his own food, and the food he carried was cheese, specifically aaruul dried curd made from mare's milk, pressed into dense hard cakes and dried in the sun until it was rock solid, almost completely shelf stable. Extraordinary calorie dense. Light, no cooking required. We know this because Marco Polo documented it directly. He recorded that a Mongol cavalryman could go ten days without cooking food, subsisting on ten pounds of dried milk curd, two liters of fermented mare's milk and some cured meat. Ten days without stopping, without lighting a fire, without supply wagons slowing their advance. Think about what that means tactically. An army that doesn't need to stop to cook can move at the speed of its horses. An army that doesn't need supply wagons can cover ground. that supply dependent armies simply can't follow, the Mongols could travel ninety to a hundred kilometers in a single day in some conditions, roughly double what European armies of the same period could manage. A single piece of aaruul chewed slowly while riding at full gallop, delivering fat and protein and calcium for hours without any preparation, cheese as a military technology, cheese as a strategic advantage. aaruul is still made in Mongolia today, still the same basic process, curdled milk, pressed, sun dried until it's hard as stone. It's eaten as a snack given to children, kept in homes through generation. It tastes sharp, intensely sour, deeply dairy, and it has been made essentially the same way for at least eight hundred years. Next time someone tries to tell you cheese is just a dinner party thing, you can tell them it helped conquer Eurasia. And you'll be completely correct. Here is a myth I want to deal with directly because it comes up constantly and it isn't quite right. The myth: cheese is a Western thing. East Asian food cultures don't do dairy. Chinese cuisine, in particular, has no tradition of cheesemaking. This is broadly true for the dominant mainstream food traditions across much of East Asia complex historical reasons. But it is not universally true. And the exception is so interesting, so specific, and so little known outside China that it deserves its own moment. In the Yunan province in southwestern China, the Bai people have been making cheese for at least several centuries, with oral traditions and written records suggesting the practice goes back to at least the Tang dynasty, which ran from 618 to 907 CE. That's over a thousand years of continuous cheese making in China, Not as a recent import, not as a Western influence, as a genuine, locally developed, culturally embedded tradition. The origin story they tell is an accident which fits the pattern honestly. A farm hand named Zhang Zhi, working for a village headman, accidentally combined fresh and sour milk in a cooking vessel and caused it to curdle. He stretched the resulting curds over a bamboo frame and dried them. What emerged was the prototype of Rushan. The legend is probably not literally true, but it reflects something real about how these things tend to begin. Rushan translates as milk fan, which describes its shape. Fresh cow's milk curds are pulled and stretched while Hot the way mozzarella is worked until they become elastic and smooth. Then they're stretched into thin sheets and wrapped around long bamboo sticks hung until they're dry and slightly leathery. And then it gets cooked. Rushan is grilled over charcoal until it softens and browns or deep fried until it turns golden and puffy. Sweet ventures in Yunnan serve it on skewers, sometimes coated with sweet rose petal jam. The province is famous for its roses, or with chili and salt. It is a street food eaten walking around a market in China. A cheese on a stick over a charcoal grill sprinkled with rose jam. I find this image so unexpected and so wonderful that I want you to sit with it for a second. There is also rubing, a fermier pressed fresh cheese traditionally made from goat's milk with a texture similar to panea or firm tofu. It holds its shape when fried in a wok, which makes it ideal for cooking. It's layered with cured local ham cooked with vegetables, eaten at festivals and family gatherings. Sun of Lizhu, a Bai cheesemaker in Dali, who was interviewed about this tradition, said simply: rubing and rushan are integral to our daily lives, artisanal products passed down from our ancestors. The story of cheese is a global story. It was made in Croatia before writing existed. It was with one of the most powerful officials in ancient Egypt. It fueled the army that built the largest empire in history, and it has been grilled on bamboo sticks at street markets in Yunana for a thousand years, served with rose petal jam. The French caves and the Italian monasteries are one chapter, not the whole book. Let's end with the thing that I think makes cheese unlike almost anything else we eat. Cheese is alive, not poetically, literally. A piece of aged cheese contains trillions of living microorganisms, bacteria, molds, yeasts that are actively working, metabolizing, transforming the material around them. The reason an aged cheddar tastes different from a fresh one is that those organisms have had more time. The reason Rockford has that specific sharpness is the particular penicillin rock forti cultivated in its caves. The reason every batch of an artisan cheese is slightly different is that every microbial community is slightly different. When you eat cheese, you are consuming the product of a relationship between humans and microorganisms that has been going on for at least 7,000 years. A relationship that started not with understanding but with observation, with noticing that certain containers produce certain results, with passing those containers on, with maintaining those environments, with training microbial communities across generations without ever knowing. The specific bacteria in a traditional cheesemaker's cave, on the wooden boards, in the stone walls, in the air of that particular place, those microbial communities have been cultivated for centuries. They are in their own way as much a product of human culture as any recipe or technique. They were shaped by human choices even when no one understood that choices were being made. You are the beneficiary of 7,000 years of that accumulated accidental inherited knowledge. Of Neolithic farmers on a Croatian coastline pressing milk through clay seeds. Of an Egyptian official who apparently loved cheese enough to be buried with it, of Mongolian warriors packing curdled curd before a campaign that will reshape the map of the world. Of bi cheesemakers in Yunnan stretching warm curds over bamboo sticks at dawn, the way their ancestors did a thousand years ago. All of that is in the cheese in your fridge. Every single piece of it is just quietly waiting to be eaten. So next time you reach for the cheese, whatever kind, whatever occasion, just take one second. You're holding a technology older than the wheel, one that changed human biology over thousands of years, one that carried an ancient army across a continent, one that was buried with an Egyptian official and found 3,000 years later with a Cold War ear bioweapon inside it. One being grilled over charcoal and bamboo sticks in Yunnan as we It started as controlled rot, it became one of the most varied, complex, culturally significant things humans have ever made. there are living things in it right now still doing the work. History isn't only in museums. Sometimes it's in your fridge and it's been there longer than you think. if this made you look at your cheese differently, perfect. That's always the point. The Hidden Life of Things is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen. A follow or a like really helps, and if you know someone who is very serious about their cheese, send this to them. They'll love knowing the full story. And here's your clue for next time. It can open the world or close it. For most of history it was handed to some people and deliberately kept from others, and the people it was kept from were told often that they simply couldn't, that it wasn't possible for them, that they should accept a smaller version of the world. A fifteen year old boy decided that wasn't true. He sat in a workshop with a pointed metal tool almost identical to the one that had taken his own sight when he was three years old, and he built a system that worked. Not just worked, was elegant. was better in its own way than what came before. The institution where he worked banded, his students learned it in secret. What did he make? Stay curious, I'm Alexandra, and I'll talk to you next week.