The Rise Of Yeast: How The Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilisation

Product Description

From breakfast toast to evening wine yeast is the microscopic thing that we cannot live without We knew what yeast did as an invisible brewer & baker long before we had a clue about the existence of microorganisms Ten thousand years ago our ancestors abandoned bush meat & wild fruit in favor of farming animals & cultivating grain Leaving the forests & grasslands our desire for beer & wine produced by the fungus was a major stimulus for agricultural settlement It takes a village to run a brewery or tend a vineyard We domesticated wild yeast & yeast domesticated us With the inevitable escape of the fungus from beer vats into bread dough our marriage with yeast was secured by an appetite for fresh loaves of leavened bread Over the millennia we have adapted the technologies of brewing winemaking & baking & have come to rely on yeast more & more Yeast produces corn ethanol & other biofuels & has become the genetically-modified darling of the pharmaceutical business as a source of human insulin & a range of life-saving medicines These practical uses of yeast have been made possible by advances in our understanding of its biology & the power of genetic engineering has been used to modify the fungus to do just about anything we wish We know more about yeast than any other organism built from complex cells like our own To understand yeast is to understand life In this book Nicholas P Money offers a celebration of our favorite microorganism