He is nothing if not a participatory researcher into his subject, and one with a winning sense of humour. Home-brewing does not quite have the wholesome connotations of healthy lockdown living that home baking does, but the biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake cheerfully owns up to having been heavily into moonshine from his undergraduate days, and he ends this book by fermenting some over-ripe fruit, just as our forebears did, in order “to let it modify my perceptions of the world” – or in other words, get smashed. According to the satisfyingly named “drunken monkey hypothesis” in evolutionary theory, our attraction to (and physiological tolerance for) alcohol dates back to a time when our primate ancestors were happily getting off their faces on boozy windfall apples. What did yeast ever do for us? Well, apart from bread, it also enables fermentation. Now supplies are back to normal, it might be a good time to give thanks for this humble lifeform’s effect on our lives. At the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, the nation’s home bakers stockpiled all the country’s yeast, so that one could no longer acquire any for love nor money.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |