Food Processing

In our modern times, we have difficulties to admit that bacterias thrive in our daily food. And hopefully they do, since we are ourselves involeved in a symbiosis with the bacteria living in our guts or on our skin. We simply could not live without these "good" bacteria, which explains why an excess of "hygiene" often results in health problems.

So bacteria thrive on our vegetables, meats and milk products. Some of them are responsible of the rippening process, but other can be used to help to preserve and process our food, and to improve some of its nutritive qualities. These techniques, which are in fact often very subtle, involve a lot of complex and fragile mechanisms which are difficult to reproduce in the standardized context of industrial food. For this reason big food companies try to ban these modest but subtle techniques, and to impose their brutal chemical process.

Most of the ferments discussed below do not enter in the framework of the Codex Alimentarius. In many countries, it is forbidden to trade them, and sometimes just to give them.

Ancestral biotechnologies:

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