It’s hard to say exactly when humans started eating fermented foods. That’s because fermentation is a process that occurs naturally. Possibly one of the oldest examples is fruit falling to the floor, its sugars breaking down, and producing alcohol. Fermentation is everywhere, and has been for a long time, but we didn’t always know it was healthy: it just tasted better.
“It changes the composition of food in many ways,” says Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and author of Spoonfed and The Diet Myth. Alcohol is just one example, he says, in which fruit or cereals are changed by the addition of microbes, including yeast.
“You can change coffee beans, chocolate beans, into something that’s edible; [fermentation processes] break it down and make it softer and give it a milder format,” Spector says.
The Other Processed Food
Fermented foods are actually an example of processed food. That’s because processed foods, by definition, include pretty much any food that’s undergone some sort of chemical or mechanical process — this includes milling grains, pasteurizing milk, mincing meat, among other processes — and so they’re not all bad for you. Foods that have undergone the fermentation process — once called “cold cooking, Spector says — are far from it.
