The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Marxist and is narrated by Brock Armstrong.

The Definitive Guide to Fermented Foods

Life in the Paleolithic wasn't a pristine sterile existence. There were no

fun-sized hand sanitizers or pasteurized eggs. Meats didn't come shrink-wrapped and it wasn't

stored in sub-40 degree temperature to prevent spoilage. I've never seen evidence of vegetable cleaning liquid containers at

prehistoric dig sites, nor have any tiny tubes of antibiotic ointment been discovered among

the arrowheads, flint shards, and stone spears. In fact, for the better part of human history,

man was entirely ignorant of the existence of microorganisms,

let alone the crucial role they play in our everyday lives.

Roman scholar Marcus Turencius Varro, in his first century BC book on agriculture,

wrote of, quote, certain creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which

float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose, and there cause serious diseases,

end quote. But he was just guessing. The Romans used a pseudo-soap to occasionally remove sweat and visible grime, but not for any supposed anti-microbial effects.

It wasn't until the 17th century that microorganisms were even discovered, and it took another couple hundred years for us to realize that the little guys could cause disease, and that boiling or sufficiently

heating a substance could kill or mitigate the worst of them. Like always, though, we went a bit

overboard. Deaths from the easily preventable infectious diseases plummeted, and it became an all-out

war on the sub-visual world.

Germs, bacteria, microorganisms, they were all out to get us, and totally eradicating them

from our daily lives became paramount for optimum health.

Nowadays, everything is pasteurized.

Food producers are proud to mention it, kind of like a low-fat label,

and everything that might touch a bodily orifice, hand utensil, small child, is doused in

...