Whereas the process of fermentation is old as man—actually, who are we kidding, it’s far older—it wasn’t until recently that the way it worked was understood. For centuries, most peoples believed the ferment occurred spontaneously, or, as the Koran and the New Testament both suggest, with a little help from upstairs. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, however, the steady decline in vitalism as a belief paved the way for Louis Pasteur’s discovery of microscopic life.

Because wild fermentation has so many variables and unpredictabilities, most fermentation today is highly controlled—thanks partly to Pasteur himself, the man responsible for initiating the indiscriminate bacterial massacre that characterizes our modern food system. This is not entirely without its good points: neither botulism nor listeriosis are fun ways to die. However, the absolute intolerance for bacteria of any kind, whether good or bad, gags the advantages of wild fermentation. Control is obviously imperative in mass production, but one of the lovely things about small-scale, quality production is the authority that familiarity breeds, and the flexibility it gives one elsewhere, to variable and often delicious effect.

A recent visit with a friend who makes cheese in West Cork confirmed this. A microbiologist who spent four years on the farm concluded that the local strain of bacteria colonizing the cheese, named gubbeenensis after it, was much stronger and safer than anything else around. On native turf, it excelled far more thoroughly at keeping away toxic bacteria than the sachets of government-recommended powdered bacteria purchased from French and English labs. In fact, after ten days, the gubbeenensis had completely annihilated the store-bought bacteria, making it a fairly worthless (and expensive) purchase.

More research needs to be done in the arena of wild fermentation, both in and out of the laboratory. Pasteur’s powerful but blunted way of keeping us safe has as its downside the evaporation of natural variability in our food and the thinning of our intestinal gut flora. I’m convinced that a good part of today’s gluten, dairy, and other allergies are a by-product of a modern diet rich in industrial-strength yeasts that’s done its darnedest to expunge nature’s natural policemen, these oft-maligned bacteria, and supplanted them with antibiotics recommended rather as vitamin supplements.

So, you want to keep your immune system healthy? Here’s my advice: Eat more yogurt! Drink more beer! The health benefits will exceed the medical.