Humanity's oldest food technology, from cheese and bread to kimchi, fish sauce and beer. How microbes shaped cuisines on every continent.
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Korea first wrote about the chili in 1614 and called it poisonous. Chili kimchi took another century and a half to fill the cookbooks, and red napa-cabbage kimchi is younger still.
The oldest bread found so far was baked by hunter-gatherers about 14,400 years ago, thousands of years before farming. From there it runs through Egyptian ovens, Roman handouts and a Missouri bakery.
Nobody knows who made the first cheese, but milk-fat residue on pottery from Poland puts cheesemaking at about 5500 BCE. Here is what the evidence shows, and what the legends add.
The oldest chemical trace of a fermented drink sits in 9,000-year-old jars from a Chinese village. Here is what the evidence shows, from garum to kimchi to Pasteur.
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