Cooked (2015) s01e03 Episode Script
Air
1 [people speaking Arabic indistinctly.]
[dishes clattering.]
[Zineb in Arabic.]
We add a little bit of salt.
Then we mix it together.
Add some sugar, Mom.
[Zineb.]
No, you can't do that.
[grunts.]
Oh, son, I'm tired already.
We make bread every morning.
Homemade bread is best.
It's much better than any bread from the store.
But making bread is hard work.
It's impossible to live without bread.
Water and bread are the same.
You can't live without water, and you can't live without bread.
You just can't.
Tell the baker to put the bread in the oven as soon as you get there.
- Now? - Yes.
[Zineb speaking Arabic.]
Take your time.
Be careful.
[theme music playing.]
[Michael.]
Of the four elements, air is the most elusive because we can't see it.
Which is, I think, what makes it special.
There's something very magical about it.
One of the ways we transform food is by getting air into it.
Think of the soufflé, think of the loaf of bread.
These things are elevated by the fact that they now contain air.
They're no longer earth-bound.
They're ethereal.
I don't know if there's another food I like quite as much as bread, I have to say.
Oh, it's such a simple food.
It's, like, three ingredients.
Flour, water, a little salt.
Why do we like air in our food? It's lighter, obviously, but also, all those air pockets have gas in them.
And so, there is flavors that come up through the back of your mouth into your sinus cavities, and they're tasted there.
And that's why crackers aren't as good as bread, and why flour isn't as good as bread.
[faucet running.]
Well, when I thought about baking bread, I thought it was like learning rocket science.
You know, you'd need a scale calibrated in grams, [chuckles.]
you have to know the metric system.
It's-- Even if you're an experienced cook, it's very intimidating.
And I think, of all the things I learned how to do, I was probably most intimidated by, uh, by baking bread.
When I was interviewing a food scientist at Davis named Bruce German, he told me something I didn't realize.
That if I gave you a bag of flour and water, and you had nothing else to live on, you could live on that for a while, but eventually you would die.
But if you take that same bag of flour and water and bake it into bread, you could live indefinitely.
So, what happens? What is happening to that flour that we're turning what won't keep us alive into something that can keep us alive? That made me realize that the technique, the technology of baking bread represented this revolutionary advance for our species.
[indistinct talking.]
[Michael.]
Bread requires a civilization.
I mean, you need people to grow the grain, you need people to harvest the grain, you need people to mill the grain and shape the dough.
And it's a cooperative venture.
[Omar in Arabic.]
Planting wheat begins in the month of October.
You wake up early and you work until the sun burns you, then you return back home.
Then you go back again in the evening for an additional one or two hours of work.
I have lived on this farm since I was a boy.
I inherited the land from my father.
Agriculture is very important to us.
Even Prophet Muhammad spoke about it when he said, "Sow in order to eat.
" It is also important because we don't buy grain in the store.
We get everything from here.
I take all of the grain to a traditional miller to get a good result.
[mill stone turning.]
[Simohammed in Arabic.]
Before we begin, we have to divert the river to add more pressure.
[Omar.]
It's working.
Carry on what you were doing.
Yes.
[Simohammed in English.]
The mill turns by water.
There is a channel of water that we divide from the river.
This mill has between 100 and 150 years.
And it still always works, you know.
Omar, he farms.
He brings his grain here to make flour.
[in Arabic.]
It's okay like that.
[in English.]
People from the villages bring their grain, grind it here, and after they don't pay by money.
They pay me by 10% of the grain.
From the 10%, we take what we need for family and the rest we could sell it in the market.
Or we could barter with other things that we need.
I'm the fourth generation to work in the mill.
To be a miller, I learned it from my father.
When I was young, I watched my father when he did work in the mill.
He was all the time busy with the grain, with the flour.
He loved his work.
[pots clattering.]
[Simohammed in Arabic.]
Everybody, come eat before you leave.
[Simohammed's wife in Arabic.]
Sarah.
Abdellah.
Come.
[Simohammed in English.]
The breakfast, we could start by honey, butter, olive oil, tea and bread.
Every meal, we eat bread.
It's sacred food.
You could say that.
[Michael.]
Bread is hugely important to many cultures.
In fact, in Morocco, it's forbidden to take a knife to bread because it is considered too violent an act.
The word "bread" is also the word for "life.
" [Simohammed in English.]
Khadija, when she was 12 or 13 years old, she started to make bread.
[Michael.]
There's no written record of the discovery of bread or the invention of bread, but as best as we know, it starts in ancient Egypt about 6,000 years ago.
There was a bowl of pulverized grain with water, of porridge, and it was off in a corner and neglected for a couple days, and some yeast from the air got into it, and it began to bubble.
And somebody had the idea of, "Let's cook this.
Let's put this in the oven and see what happens.
" And it got even bigger.
And there was the first loaf of bread which looked like this miracle of creating more food from less.
The discovery of bread marked a big advance from porridge, since bread was so much tastier and more nutritious.
The knowledge of how to make bread spread quickly to neighboring regions, like present-day Morocco.
But it takes a whole new division of labor to make it work.
[man speaking Arabic.]
[Michael.]
Hard to imagine bread evolving in a hunter-gatherer culture without the sophisticated division of labor to do all those different jobs.
So bread is, in that sense, the product of civilization as well as an enabler of civilization.
The work of the farmer, the miller, and the families who mix and knead dough ends with the baker.
In places like Egypt and Morocco, there's an ancient tradition of bringing dough to a community oven where the baker cooks the loaves for the entire neighborhood.
Since people did not have their own ovens, the baker played a crucial role in the community.
[baker in Arabic.]
We can make about 1,000 loaves a day.
We start at midnight and finish around 9:00 or 10:00 a.
m.
, depending on the workload.
I have been a baker since 1974, both here and other places.
I'm a baker because I didn't go to school and my parents were poor, but long ago, this profession had a high value.
People would say, "Oh, this girl, she married a baker! This is good, because she will have enough bread.
It is an honorable profession.
" A lot of things have changed in this profession.
People are no longer interested in learning it.
We don't make as much money as before.
There's not enough demand because most people buy bread from stores.
[Michael.]
So, when we discovered bread, and that this one grass called wheat was the way to make it, uh, wheat then takes off, and it becomes the most important grass we plant.
Today, wheat is planted more widely than any other single crop, more than 550 million acres worldwide.
And it all started in a region of the Middle East and North Africa, formerly known as the Fertile Crescent.
Although wheat has its origins here and bread is still the staple food in these countries, the Fertile Crescent is no longer the bread basket it once was.
The countries that make up this region today, from Egypt to Iraq, can no longer harvest enough wheat to feed their growing populations.
So they have to import it from places that have surpluses, like Russia, Ukraine, Australia and the European Union.
This imbalance creates a complex global wheat economy, in which countries like Morocco must rely on wheat harvested thousands of miles away.
[brakes screeching.]
[grain rushing.]
[Muhammad.]
Every day, we get 300 metric tons of grain, that become 240 tons of flour.
When we receive the grains, we clean it, we mill it, we sift it and we have different types of flours that we sell.
Our flour is bought by bread makers, by hypermarkets and by other sellers.
The flour is very important in the stability of the society.
When the yields are bad for Moroccan wheat, we can work with international and with other countries' grains.
Right now, the grain comes from five countries, from Lithuania, France, Germany, Ukraine and Morocco.
And every year it depends on the economic and political situation of every country.
For example, last year we didn't have Ukrainian wheat because of the political situation there.
[Michael.]
We're all connected by this price of bread.
If you have a shortage in Australia, it may be felt in Saudi Arabia.
And the agricultural policies of one country end up affecting another.
And governments work very hard to keep the price of bread down, because they all know, every political leader knows, you can lose your head if the price of bread goes up too fast.
[protestors chanting in Arabic.]
[reporter 1.]
Tunisia remains under a state of emergency this morning following yet another outburst of food rioting.
[reporter 2.]
Angry mobs rampaged through the poor sections-- [protestors chanting.]
[reporter 3.]
an early help, dropped swiftly and with meager funds, is only bread.
[Michael.]
The French Revolution was tied to a spike in the price of bread.
The Arab Spring, there was a wheat shortage that led to food riots.
[protestors chanting in Arabic.]
Whenever the price of bread spikes, there will be political unrest.
And the reason is that that is the bedrock food.
If you can't afford meat and you can't afford vegetables, you can usually still afford bread.
[sniffs.]
Now it will essentially rest for 45 minutes.
If you look at the size of it, in the bowl, it's, you know, only coming up about a third.
And as the day goes on, it's gonna rise.
Bread-making is a kind of ingenious technology for the conversion of grass seeds into a really nutritious and delicious food.
You know, in a way, it's one of the first food processing technologies.
This is our master baguette, I think it has some really nice These were just baked a couple of hours ago, but [Nathan Myhrvold.]
It's fashionable to call some foods "natural" as a form of goodness.
But let me tell you, bread is unnatural.
Bread does not grow anywhere.
Bread is, of course, made of natural ingredients like grain, but a loaf of bread and a pile of wheat couldn't be more different.
[Michael.]
We went to see Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft and founder of Modernist Cuisine, a food science laboratory in Washington, to get a closer look at the science behind bread-making.
[Nathan.]
Bread like this is largely air.
Now, if you got rid of all of the air, it'd be a lot smaller.
And I hate to do this to beautiful bread, but this shows you how little is actually there.
Now, in a big rustic loaf like this it's a little harder to squish it but it's still mostly air.
And if you look inside, you can see that there's bubbles everywhere.
Air is mostly what you're eating when you eat bread.
Bread is a fascinating combination of cooking and biology and physics.
Biology is involved because bread is alive before you bake it.
If you take a bunch of flour, uh, of almost any grain, and you mix it with some water and you let it sit out on the counter, in somewhere between a couple hours to a couple days, it'll be bubbling like crazy.
And you will have a community of microorganisms making carbon dioxide.
So, a good way to think about the process of bread rising is you've got bacteria blowing, or farting, if you prefer, into balloons.
And the more they fart into those balloons, the bigger those balloons get, leading the bread to double or even triple in size.
What acts as the balloon? The best material anybody has found in the context of bread is something called "gluten.
" [crackling.]
At our lab here, we take bread, or dough, and freeze it, and break it, and look at it under an electron microscope.
And you can see the little network of these gluten molecules, and it's almost like a fishnet.
[Michael.]
Gluten is basically two proteins.
And when you moisten flour, these two proteins, they kind of mesh together.
And when they do, they form a substance that's very stretchy, extensible, but it also will return like a balloon.
The head chef at Modernist Cuisine took a ball of dough and washed it in water, stripping away the starches, and leaving nothing but pure gluten.
He blew it up like a balloon to simulate what happens on a much smaller scale during fermentation.
The reason gluten is important to bread is that those little bubbles of gas would just go off into the air if there weren't gluten to hold them.
And actually, air is one of the reasons we love bread.
Biologically, there's this very interesting phenomenon of retronasal olfaction.
The fact that we smell in two ways.
I mean, we smell things outside through our nose, and then we smell things in the back of our throat.
The gases, the aromatics come up and it deepens the kind of flavors that's available to us.
And it's all due to gluten.
[Nathan.]
A variety of things have caused interest in gluten to expand enormously.
Lots of people have written books demonizing gluten, and saying, "Oh, my God, gluten is responsible for almost every bad thing you can imagine.
It's cancer, it's insanity, it's all" Doesn't matter what it is, someone has claimed gluten causes it.
And so you see these ridiculous things, uh Ice cream shops in Greenwich Village all have signs saying, "gluten-free ice cream.
" Well, there was never any gluten in ice cream! [Michael.]
By some estimates, 30% of Americans today make an effort to avoid gluten.
The trend is undeniable, which is why Nathan wants to make the best gluten-free bread he can.
So, this is a regular, uh, gluten-free brioche next to our actual brioche loaf.
Both of these are based on our master recipe.
[Nathan.]
So, this is the real deal.
So, the gluten-free brioche, - it's not as stretchy.
- Mmm-hmm.
[Nathan.]
It's got a texture that's a little bit more like a pound cake.
The challenge in making gluten-free bread is, "How do I make a dough that will trap the air bubbles and yet have a texture that I wanna eat?" It's really hard to do.
A lot of gluten-free bread, as a result, tastes like a kitchen sponge.
My personal philosophy is, "No one should eat food they don't wanna eat.
" By the same token, if someone says, "Oh, you shouldn't eat gluten.
It's terrible for you," I would say, "Well, prove it.
" And unfortunately, there's not been a whole lot of proof in that respect.
[Michael.]
There are a lot of people who struggle with gluten.
Some of them have celiac disease, which is, like, a real allergy to gluten.
That's one or two percent of the population.
And then a much larger group, uh, report gluten intolerance.
And this is a bit of a mystery given that this has been the staple food for our species for a very long time.
What happened? You have to put it in the context of, you know, we have a history of demonizing one nutrient and celebrating another nutrient.
And we tend, especially in America, to think in terms of this black-and-white, cold war of nutrients.
An example of another nutrient that we demonized really badly, beginning in the '60s and '70s, is fat.
Dietary fat was the great evil nutrient.
[announcer 1.]
Introducing Philly Free.
It's fat-free.
[Michael.]
It explained heart disease, it explained overweight, it explained everything.
And we've since come to realize, you know, there's very little evidence to correlate fat intake with heart disease, uh, as it turns out.
Now, the focus has switched to carbohydrates.
And today, gluten happens to be getting the really bad rap.
There's something going on, clearly, but my guess is it's a sign of something else.
It may be the changes in the way we make bread that are contributing to this problem.
'Cause the bread you buy in the supermarket, in that package, that Wonder Bread, um is very different than what bread was for most of history.
You know, there used to be an official definition of bread.
The FDA had these standards of identity for all products.
And bread was, uh, you know, flour, water, salt.
And so, once you industrialize bread, and make things like Wonder Bread, the industry petitioned the FDA to loosen things up so they could move to this commercial thing.
This bread is three ingredients, basically, and commercial bread is 31 or 37 ingredients.
And so they redefined bread to admit these other 30 ingredients.
Um, so, is it the real thing? The FDA says it's the real thing, but historically, no, it's not.
It's a real novelty.
Sometimes as a species, we're a little too smart for our own good.
We industrialized bread for the reason we industrialized so much about food production, which is to make it cheaper.
[narrator on TV.]
When the wheat grains are clean, they go to the roller mills.
These machines separate the coarse part of the grains from the fine parts through very fine silk cloth.
[Michael.]
When we moved from whole grains ground on a stone to white flour, really white flour, on a roller mill, this was a major change, and it looked like a great boon to civilization and to economics.
White flour is non-perishable, which allowed mills to produce it on a larger scale and ship it all around the world.
Roller milling made white flour cheaper and more widely available.
People loved white bread, and there was a great prestige attached to white flour.
And suddenly you could make really white flour that everybody could afford.
It seemed like a great thing.
[narrator.]
Delicious bread, fresh and clean, brought every day to the neighborhood food store for you and for me.
[Michael.]
But all of a sudden, people started getting sick because we had removed the most nutritious part of the flour without even realizing it.
And it's fine to try things, but when you recognize they don't work, you go back and you pick up the thread.
And we didn't do that with white flour.
[announcer.]
Here's how to help build strong bodies eight ways.
Eat Wonder Bread.
Wonder Bread every meal gives you eight elements you need.
As much muscle-building protein as roast beef.
As much calcium for bones and teeth [Michael.]
Instead of realizing we should go back to whole grain flour, the government, working with bakers, pioneered the idea of fortifying flour.
Let's put vitamins back in.
And they sold this as something better and brand new.
[announcer.]
Because Wonder Soft Whipped Bread is made from batter, not dough, it has no holes.
Get Wonder Soft Whipped.
And this is really how capitalism usually works, right? It creates a problem, and rather than fix the problem, it creates a new business to solve the problem.
You know, industrialization's not inherently evil.
It can be done well or done badly.
But often in the rush to make something cheaper, we overlook the reason why it was done in this somewhat more painstaking way.
And in the case of bread, what we may have overlooked is the importance of a long, slow sourdough fermentation.
A lot of us think of sourdough as a style of bread, but what sourdough is is the traditional way all bread was made until only about a hundred years ago.
Sourdough is the proper way to make bread.
You can feel the difference from an hour or so ago, which is that it feels billowy.
I started this bread last night, and then it takes about four hours of bulk fermentation.
And I taste it at every stage to really find out how my fermentation is going.
And it should get more sour as the day goes on, but if it gets too sour, you know, you've over-fermented, so you have to keep an eye on that.
One of the masters of sourdough baking that I sought out in my education was Richard Bourdon.
Richard's obsession is nutrition as much as anything.
He's kind of a mad scientist, and he really believes that fermentation is key to health.
He's doing it the old-fashioned way.
[machinery whirring.]
[Richard.]
I come from a farm country, uh, northwestern Quebec province.
I come from a family of ten and, uh, food was a big part of our lives.
My mother, she baked her own bread, and I was always my mother's little helper, carrying the bag of flour inside, and I actually asked her to teach me how to bake a few things.
I used to make a little dessert on Sunday morning.
That was my specialty.
I would make that for the family.
I kind of took a personal commitment to saying, like, at 21 years old, to say, "I'm gonna bring better food to this world.
" And I actually put an ad in the paper for a farmer or a baker.
Whoever calls first is what I'm going to do.
The baker called first.
- I'll load these, uh - Yeah.
peasant French in about five minutes, okay? - [man.]
All right.
- All right, that's it on that one? - Yep.
- Okay.
Where are we at? Seeded rye here? I prefer when they go in one at a time.
I'll show you why.
They come out nicer if you hold them back just a little bit.
You know, I came into it with the question of, like, you know, "What is bread? And what is it about it that's worth doing again? What is it about it that gives sustenance? What is it about it that keeps you alive?" It's taking this kernel of grain and transforming it into something that's more.
You free the nutrients out of the seeds.
I'd like to call myself more of a grain processor than a baker.
I process grain.
I process them in a way that they become digestible.
That's really my goal.
In a kernel of grain, there's everything to support a whole life.
Carbohydrates, minerals, proteins.
And it's locked up real tight, like, uh I like to use the example of a Batmobile, you know.
And it's all-- Uh, you've seen the movie, I'm sure, where it's all, you know, you hit the clicker and the thing locks up.
If you just take the seeds and start chewing on them without doing anything, it's not gonna go well.
It's very difficult to digest.
All grains need to be fermented, where you use a culture of bacterias.
They're everywhere.
From the air They're just always there, omnipotent, omnipresent.
[Michael.]
Sourdough culture is this mixed ecosystem of bacteria and yeast that were used to ferment bread for millennia.
You expose some wet flour to the air and stir it, and you will get a sourdough culture that transform the wheat into a very nutritious substance.
This, by the way, is exactly how the ancient Egyptians accidentally learned how to leaven bread.
When someone left out that bowl of wheat porridge and it started to bubble, that was one of the world's first sourdoughs.
[Richard.]
Building a culture is kind of like the art of baking.
This is where it becomes the skill of the orchestrator.
Working with natural starters is difficult because it has a mind of its own.
It changes all the time.
It's a live process.
But it's essential.
If you don't do this, you don't get the nutrients out of it.
[Michael.]
Wheat, even in the form of milled flour, is hard for our bodies to digest.
One of the advantages of the long sourdough fermentation that Richard has mastered is that it allows bacteria to fully break down the carbohydrates and the strong, stretchy gluten in the dough.
It also releases the healthy minerals in the grain so that our bodies can more easily absorb them.
The sourdough fermentation has all the variables of any natural system, too many of them to manage on a large scale.
So to simplify the process, food scientists came up with a reliable shortcut, in the form of fast-acting commercial yeast.
We isolated the yeast and we bred the yeast to get the biggest rise as fast as possible.
And we overlooked the rest of what was going on in fermentation.
As it turns out, that represents one of those simplifications of industrial food that had unintended consequences that we're dealing with right now.
I think we're gonna turn the heat on on these ciabattas.
[beeping.]
People ask me this, like, "Why don't you use yeast?" The problem is that when you use the yeast, you have no fermentation here, you have no acidic breakdown.
The bread becomes harder to digest and when things are harder to digest, it taxes your system.
Now we see a trend where there's so much sensitivity, whether it's gluten or wheat.
There are so many bad wheat products out there, I'm not surprised that people are not feeling well.
I hate when I see that they promote eating more whole grain, so everybody gets on the bandwagon eating, like, whole-wheat macaroni, and, uh But they didn't say fermented whole grain.
[Michael.]
I think we have to make a distinction between a properly fermented loaf of sourdough bread and all the other forms in which we get gluten.
You know, I would bet that if you took a dozen people who claimed a gluten intolerance and you gave them Richard's bread, they'd be fine.
[Michael.]
When you bake a loaf of bread, essentially, the loaf itself becomes a pressure cooker.
And this thoroughly cooks the starches in a way that makes them delicious and digestible.
- [soft crunching.]
- [Richard.]
You know, that sound is It's like walking on crispy snow or something.
It's just crispy.
It's just, uh-- And the smell.
If you crack it a little bit, the aroma comes out, so [clicks tongue.]
It's one of the little pleasures, you know, that a baker might get.
You know, it felt light enough.
Just not too light, not too heavy.
Now if we look inside, everything is, um, opened nicely.
It formed the crust.
It cooks from inside out.
And if you take the inside of the bread, just like this, this is where you can taste, really, if it's well done, if it tastes sweet as you chew it.
And the more you chew, the deeper it becomes.
The deeper the flavor comes.
It's like a whole-- It keeps changing.
It keeps becoming more.
You take a bite of this bread that's a little sour and the first thing that will happen is it will make you salivate.
This process is essential to trigger digestion.
If you chew a piece of yeasted bread, you typically need something to wash it down.
You know, it kind of, like It doesn't make you salivate.
You start with wheat.
If you smell wheat flour and, um after the whole process of fermentation, it doesn't smell like wheat anymore.
It doesn't smell like, uh It smells like something new.
[Michael.]
Richard points out that we're not the only creature that ferments.
You know, I had thought we were the cooking animal, and that we're the only ones.
We have a monopoly on this technology.
But Richard convinced me that there is There are exceptions.
[Richard.]
Most people think a dog buries a meat to go hide it, but the real reason that they do this is actually to let their meat ferment.
They can't eat fresh protein.
Birds know how to sprout seeds to get food, to be able to break the seed down.
Instinctively, if you look at nature, nature knows what to do.
Nature knows what to eat.
We are also part of nature.
[Michael.]
You know, one of the values of traditional foods made in traditional ways is they they've worked for a very long time.
And they're the product of a kind of cultural evolution.
[Simohammed in English.]
The mills, they are always close to the river, and we've had problems with floods.
When the snow melts, the level of water becomes too high.
When there is rain in summer, the soil is so dry that it doesn't absorb the water, and it becomes a big problem.
Twenty years ago, it would last seven or eight years between floods.
Now there are more and more floods.
Five months ago, we had water inside the house, a meter and a half high.
Part of the mill was falling down, and we had to build it again.
Before there were 18 or 17 mills in this valley, but most of them were destroyed by the river.
Now we have three or four mills.
[Michael.]
People who live off the land, whose livelihoods are at the mercy of the weather, are most susceptible to things like flooding, drought, and climate change in general.
Perhaps the most vulnerable of all are the farmers and their crops.
Crops like wheat depend on a certain temperature range and rainfall range, and that's changing right now.
And there will be places that were bread baskets that won't be any longer.
I think, even this one I don't think that it's a good one.
But this one can be This one is not bad.
Can be given a chance.
Most of it is bread wheat.
Some of them were dried because of the heat wave.
So, this has already lost most of its leaves.
I am from the southern part of Morocco.
I am from an agricultural family.
My father used to be a farmer.
I have witnessed myself, the drastic effects of climate change.
We are already witnessing severe droughts, extreme heat waves, and this has affected the agriculture.
Morocco, they are big consumers of wheat.
It is the major crop.
It's contributing 60% of the calories in the diet.
If we cannot produce enough, then I think we are in trouble.
[Michael.]
With more drought predicted for an already arid climate, crop yields in Northern Africa could fall by 50% by 2020 and as much as 90% by 2100, with small family-run farms being the most severely affected.
Wheat, you know, it's a very volatile commodity.
And at any given time, there is not a lot of give in the system.
There's usually, like, a month's supply of wheat available around the world, and if that moves too much or too fast, we will see enormous political instability.
[protestors chanting.]
- [drums beating.]
- [rhythmic clapping.]
[Michael.]
In ancient times, the granary was the physical structure that allowed civilizations to rise, a way to store food long-term, to buffer against a bad crop or political instability.
In the modern world, we've taken the idea of the granary to the next level, by establishing seed banks.
[man 1.]
When accidents or natural disasters or war intervened, that was it, they were dead as a dinosaur, extinct.
But we're going to put an end to extinction with this vault.
It's a home for seeds from all around the world.
[man 2.]
Now we have the possibility to preserve the seeds all over the world.
[Michael.]
International non-governmental organizations have built and maintained these fortresses, attempting to stockpile seeds of all the crops we've ever raised.
But instead of storing calories, they store information, the genetic information contained in small samples of every type of seed.
What we hope to achieve with these banks is to buffer against global catastrophe, using the information they hold to help us breed new crops that will thrive in a changing world.
A world of new diseases and an increasingly hostile climate.
[Ahmed Amri.]
What we are trying to do here is to screen for heat tolerance and drought tolerance.
We are looking for very clean leaves like this.
That's what the breeders are looking for, to breed new varieties.
[Michael.]
Ahmed Amri is a leading geneticist at a gene bank for seeds.
In 2012, he rescued wheat seeds from war-torn Syria and brought them into Morocco for safekeeping.
[Ahmed.]
When we had a crisis in 2012, we had to leave our premises in Syria.
We had there around 141,000 samples of seeds in the gene bank.
It could happen that a shell could destroy it completely.
Then we would lose everything.
So, we have to reconstruct our collection in Morocco, and this is what we are doing.
If we find one trait, good trait, we conserve them for any future use.
Like this one, for example, has tolerance to drought, tolerance to heat, that the breeders can use today, or can use in the future, to overcome the challenges of heat and drought.
[Michael.]
Amri works with fellow geneticist and wheat breeder Nasir Nasrallah.
[talking indistinctly.]
You work the genes, you isolate them by crossing and selecting, crossing and selecting, until you get them into something useful for us.
[Ahmed.]
The best ones will make it to the farmers.
From 25 lines that are in this experiment, for example, only maybe one or two will make it to the farmers.
With this, we will be able to overcome most of the challenges to agriculture, most of the challenges posed to wheat around the world.
[Michael.]
A wheat seed is an amazing thing.
I mean, it is this perfect package, like a spaceship, you know, heading into the future with everything needed to sustain life.
And the challenge of bread-making is to access all those nutrients and hijack them, in a way, so they go to us.
And that's really what bread allows us to do.
And actually, one of the things that was a pleasant surprise to me, was that it isn't rocket science, and you can do it by feel.
And it was very liberating to learn that.
And sometimes it's better than other times.
Sometimes you get a great oven spring and you're You feel like, "God, I really know what I'm doing.
" And other times, it's kind of flat, and you don't exactly know what went wrong.
This is called an ear.
That's a good thing, to have a pronounced ear on a loaf of bread.
[inhales deeply.]
Mmm.
I would do it just for the smell.
[chuckles.]
I began feeling daunted, and I ended feeling confident, and an enormous sense of, uh, satisfaction.
I think of all the things I learned how to make uh, making a decent loaf of bread has been the most satisfying.
[all speaking Arabic.]
[in Arabic.]
Here, eat it.
[Michael.]
All cooking is alchemy, right? I mean, it's transformation.
But bread is the greatest alchemy of all.
Take a small amount of food and turn it into a large amount of food that can feed a lot of people.
Out of thin air, literally out of thin air.
The word "spirit," you know, comes from wind, comes from air.
And it's no accident.
The spiritual dimension is the one that you can't really grab hold of.
It is like the breeze.
Exactly what we need to make this wonderful food is democratically available to everybody in the air.
It really is a miracle.
[theme music playing.]
[dishes clattering.]
[Zineb in Arabic.]
We add a little bit of salt.
Then we mix it together.
Add some sugar, Mom.
[Zineb.]
No, you can't do that.
[grunts.]
Oh, son, I'm tired already.
We make bread every morning.
Homemade bread is best.
It's much better than any bread from the store.
But making bread is hard work.
It's impossible to live without bread.
Water and bread are the same.
You can't live without water, and you can't live without bread.
You just can't.
Tell the baker to put the bread in the oven as soon as you get there.
- Now? - Yes.
[Zineb speaking Arabic.]
Take your time.
Be careful.
[theme music playing.]
[Michael.]
Of the four elements, air is the most elusive because we can't see it.
Which is, I think, what makes it special.
There's something very magical about it.
One of the ways we transform food is by getting air into it.
Think of the soufflé, think of the loaf of bread.
These things are elevated by the fact that they now contain air.
They're no longer earth-bound.
They're ethereal.
I don't know if there's another food I like quite as much as bread, I have to say.
Oh, it's such a simple food.
It's, like, three ingredients.
Flour, water, a little salt.
Why do we like air in our food? It's lighter, obviously, but also, all those air pockets have gas in them.
And so, there is flavors that come up through the back of your mouth into your sinus cavities, and they're tasted there.
And that's why crackers aren't as good as bread, and why flour isn't as good as bread.
[faucet running.]
Well, when I thought about baking bread, I thought it was like learning rocket science.
You know, you'd need a scale calibrated in grams, [chuckles.]
you have to know the metric system.
It's-- Even if you're an experienced cook, it's very intimidating.
And I think, of all the things I learned how to do, I was probably most intimidated by, uh, by baking bread.
When I was interviewing a food scientist at Davis named Bruce German, he told me something I didn't realize.
That if I gave you a bag of flour and water, and you had nothing else to live on, you could live on that for a while, but eventually you would die.
But if you take that same bag of flour and water and bake it into bread, you could live indefinitely.
So, what happens? What is happening to that flour that we're turning what won't keep us alive into something that can keep us alive? That made me realize that the technique, the technology of baking bread represented this revolutionary advance for our species.
[indistinct talking.]
[Michael.]
Bread requires a civilization.
I mean, you need people to grow the grain, you need people to harvest the grain, you need people to mill the grain and shape the dough.
And it's a cooperative venture.
[Omar in Arabic.]
Planting wheat begins in the month of October.
You wake up early and you work until the sun burns you, then you return back home.
Then you go back again in the evening for an additional one or two hours of work.
I have lived on this farm since I was a boy.
I inherited the land from my father.
Agriculture is very important to us.
Even Prophet Muhammad spoke about it when he said, "Sow in order to eat.
" It is also important because we don't buy grain in the store.
We get everything from here.
I take all of the grain to a traditional miller to get a good result.
[mill stone turning.]
[Simohammed in Arabic.]
Before we begin, we have to divert the river to add more pressure.
[Omar.]
It's working.
Carry on what you were doing.
Yes.
[Simohammed in English.]
The mill turns by water.
There is a channel of water that we divide from the river.
This mill has between 100 and 150 years.
And it still always works, you know.
Omar, he farms.
He brings his grain here to make flour.
[in Arabic.]
It's okay like that.
[in English.]
People from the villages bring their grain, grind it here, and after they don't pay by money.
They pay me by 10% of the grain.
From the 10%, we take what we need for family and the rest we could sell it in the market.
Or we could barter with other things that we need.
I'm the fourth generation to work in the mill.
To be a miller, I learned it from my father.
When I was young, I watched my father when he did work in the mill.
He was all the time busy with the grain, with the flour.
He loved his work.
[pots clattering.]
[Simohammed in Arabic.]
Everybody, come eat before you leave.
[Simohammed's wife in Arabic.]
Sarah.
Abdellah.
Come.
[Simohammed in English.]
The breakfast, we could start by honey, butter, olive oil, tea and bread.
Every meal, we eat bread.
It's sacred food.
You could say that.
[Michael.]
Bread is hugely important to many cultures.
In fact, in Morocco, it's forbidden to take a knife to bread because it is considered too violent an act.
The word "bread" is also the word for "life.
" [Simohammed in English.]
Khadija, when she was 12 or 13 years old, she started to make bread.
[Michael.]
There's no written record of the discovery of bread or the invention of bread, but as best as we know, it starts in ancient Egypt about 6,000 years ago.
There was a bowl of pulverized grain with water, of porridge, and it was off in a corner and neglected for a couple days, and some yeast from the air got into it, and it began to bubble.
And somebody had the idea of, "Let's cook this.
Let's put this in the oven and see what happens.
" And it got even bigger.
And there was the first loaf of bread which looked like this miracle of creating more food from less.
The discovery of bread marked a big advance from porridge, since bread was so much tastier and more nutritious.
The knowledge of how to make bread spread quickly to neighboring regions, like present-day Morocco.
But it takes a whole new division of labor to make it work.
[man speaking Arabic.]
[Michael.]
Hard to imagine bread evolving in a hunter-gatherer culture without the sophisticated division of labor to do all those different jobs.
So bread is, in that sense, the product of civilization as well as an enabler of civilization.
The work of the farmer, the miller, and the families who mix and knead dough ends with the baker.
In places like Egypt and Morocco, there's an ancient tradition of bringing dough to a community oven where the baker cooks the loaves for the entire neighborhood.
Since people did not have their own ovens, the baker played a crucial role in the community.
[baker in Arabic.]
We can make about 1,000 loaves a day.
We start at midnight and finish around 9:00 or 10:00 a.
m.
, depending on the workload.
I have been a baker since 1974, both here and other places.
I'm a baker because I didn't go to school and my parents were poor, but long ago, this profession had a high value.
People would say, "Oh, this girl, she married a baker! This is good, because she will have enough bread.
It is an honorable profession.
" A lot of things have changed in this profession.
People are no longer interested in learning it.
We don't make as much money as before.
There's not enough demand because most people buy bread from stores.
[Michael.]
So, when we discovered bread, and that this one grass called wheat was the way to make it, uh, wheat then takes off, and it becomes the most important grass we plant.
Today, wheat is planted more widely than any other single crop, more than 550 million acres worldwide.
And it all started in a region of the Middle East and North Africa, formerly known as the Fertile Crescent.
Although wheat has its origins here and bread is still the staple food in these countries, the Fertile Crescent is no longer the bread basket it once was.
The countries that make up this region today, from Egypt to Iraq, can no longer harvest enough wheat to feed their growing populations.
So they have to import it from places that have surpluses, like Russia, Ukraine, Australia and the European Union.
This imbalance creates a complex global wheat economy, in which countries like Morocco must rely on wheat harvested thousands of miles away.
[brakes screeching.]
[grain rushing.]
[Muhammad.]
Every day, we get 300 metric tons of grain, that become 240 tons of flour.
When we receive the grains, we clean it, we mill it, we sift it and we have different types of flours that we sell.
Our flour is bought by bread makers, by hypermarkets and by other sellers.
The flour is very important in the stability of the society.
When the yields are bad for Moroccan wheat, we can work with international and with other countries' grains.
Right now, the grain comes from five countries, from Lithuania, France, Germany, Ukraine and Morocco.
And every year it depends on the economic and political situation of every country.
For example, last year we didn't have Ukrainian wheat because of the political situation there.
[Michael.]
We're all connected by this price of bread.
If you have a shortage in Australia, it may be felt in Saudi Arabia.
And the agricultural policies of one country end up affecting another.
And governments work very hard to keep the price of bread down, because they all know, every political leader knows, you can lose your head if the price of bread goes up too fast.
[protestors chanting in Arabic.]
[reporter 1.]
Tunisia remains under a state of emergency this morning following yet another outburst of food rioting.
[reporter 2.]
Angry mobs rampaged through the poor sections-- [protestors chanting.]
[reporter 3.]
an early help, dropped swiftly and with meager funds, is only bread.
[Michael.]
The French Revolution was tied to a spike in the price of bread.
The Arab Spring, there was a wheat shortage that led to food riots.
[protestors chanting in Arabic.]
Whenever the price of bread spikes, there will be political unrest.
And the reason is that that is the bedrock food.
If you can't afford meat and you can't afford vegetables, you can usually still afford bread.
[sniffs.]
Now it will essentially rest for 45 minutes.
If you look at the size of it, in the bowl, it's, you know, only coming up about a third.
And as the day goes on, it's gonna rise.
Bread-making is a kind of ingenious technology for the conversion of grass seeds into a really nutritious and delicious food.
You know, in a way, it's one of the first food processing technologies.
This is our master baguette, I think it has some really nice These were just baked a couple of hours ago, but [Nathan Myhrvold.]
It's fashionable to call some foods "natural" as a form of goodness.
But let me tell you, bread is unnatural.
Bread does not grow anywhere.
Bread is, of course, made of natural ingredients like grain, but a loaf of bread and a pile of wheat couldn't be more different.
[Michael.]
We went to see Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft and founder of Modernist Cuisine, a food science laboratory in Washington, to get a closer look at the science behind bread-making.
[Nathan.]
Bread like this is largely air.
Now, if you got rid of all of the air, it'd be a lot smaller.
And I hate to do this to beautiful bread, but this shows you how little is actually there.
Now, in a big rustic loaf like this it's a little harder to squish it but it's still mostly air.
And if you look inside, you can see that there's bubbles everywhere.
Air is mostly what you're eating when you eat bread.
Bread is a fascinating combination of cooking and biology and physics.
Biology is involved because bread is alive before you bake it.
If you take a bunch of flour, uh, of almost any grain, and you mix it with some water and you let it sit out on the counter, in somewhere between a couple hours to a couple days, it'll be bubbling like crazy.
And you will have a community of microorganisms making carbon dioxide.
So, a good way to think about the process of bread rising is you've got bacteria blowing, or farting, if you prefer, into balloons.
And the more they fart into those balloons, the bigger those balloons get, leading the bread to double or even triple in size.
What acts as the balloon? The best material anybody has found in the context of bread is something called "gluten.
" [crackling.]
At our lab here, we take bread, or dough, and freeze it, and break it, and look at it under an electron microscope.
And you can see the little network of these gluten molecules, and it's almost like a fishnet.
[Michael.]
Gluten is basically two proteins.
And when you moisten flour, these two proteins, they kind of mesh together.
And when they do, they form a substance that's very stretchy, extensible, but it also will return like a balloon.
The head chef at Modernist Cuisine took a ball of dough and washed it in water, stripping away the starches, and leaving nothing but pure gluten.
He blew it up like a balloon to simulate what happens on a much smaller scale during fermentation.
The reason gluten is important to bread is that those little bubbles of gas would just go off into the air if there weren't gluten to hold them.
And actually, air is one of the reasons we love bread.
Biologically, there's this very interesting phenomenon of retronasal olfaction.
The fact that we smell in two ways.
I mean, we smell things outside through our nose, and then we smell things in the back of our throat.
The gases, the aromatics come up and it deepens the kind of flavors that's available to us.
And it's all due to gluten.
[Nathan.]
A variety of things have caused interest in gluten to expand enormously.
Lots of people have written books demonizing gluten, and saying, "Oh, my God, gluten is responsible for almost every bad thing you can imagine.
It's cancer, it's insanity, it's all" Doesn't matter what it is, someone has claimed gluten causes it.
And so you see these ridiculous things, uh Ice cream shops in Greenwich Village all have signs saying, "gluten-free ice cream.
" Well, there was never any gluten in ice cream! [Michael.]
By some estimates, 30% of Americans today make an effort to avoid gluten.
The trend is undeniable, which is why Nathan wants to make the best gluten-free bread he can.
So, this is a regular, uh, gluten-free brioche next to our actual brioche loaf.
Both of these are based on our master recipe.
[Nathan.]
So, this is the real deal.
So, the gluten-free brioche, - it's not as stretchy.
- Mmm-hmm.
[Nathan.]
It's got a texture that's a little bit more like a pound cake.
The challenge in making gluten-free bread is, "How do I make a dough that will trap the air bubbles and yet have a texture that I wanna eat?" It's really hard to do.
A lot of gluten-free bread, as a result, tastes like a kitchen sponge.
My personal philosophy is, "No one should eat food they don't wanna eat.
" By the same token, if someone says, "Oh, you shouldn't eat gluten.
It's terrible for you," I would say, "Well, prove it.
" And unfortunately, there's not been a whole lot of proof in that respect.
[Michael.]
There are a lot of people who struggle with gluten.
Some of them have celiac disease, which is, like, a real allergy to gluten.
That's one or two percent of the population.
And then a much larger group, uh, report gluten intolerance.
And this is a bit of a mystery given that this has been the staple food for our species for a very long time.
What happened? You have to put it in the context of, you know, we have a history of demonizing one nutrient and celebrating another nutrient.
And we tend, especially in America, to think in terms of this black-and-white, cold war of nutrients.
An example of another nutrient that we demonized really badly, beginning in the '60s and '70s, is fat.
Dietary fat was the great evil nutrient.
[announcer 1.]
Introducing Philly Free.
It's fat-free.
[Michael.]
It explained heart disease, it explained overweight, it explained everything.
And we've since come to realize, you know, there's very little evidence to correlate fat intake with heart disease, uh, as it turns out.
Now, the focus has switched to carbohydrates.
And today, gluten happens to be getting the really bad rap.
There's something going on, clearly, but my guess is it's a sign of something else.
It may be the changes in the way we make bread that are contributing to this problem.
'Cause the bread you buy in the supermarket, in that package, that Wonder Bread, um is very different than what bread was for most of history.
You know, there used to be an official definition of bread.
The FDA had these standards of identity for all products.
And bread was, uh, you know, flour, water, salt.
And so, once you industrialize bread, and make things like Wonder Bread, the industry petitioned the FDA to loosen things up so they could move to this commercial thing.
This bread is three ingredients, basically, and commercial bread is 31 or 37 ingredients.
And so they redefined bread to admit these other 30 ingredients.
Um, so, is it the real thing? The FDA says it's the real thing, but historically, no, it's not.
It's a real novelty.
Sometimes as a species, we're a little too smart for our own good.
We industrialized bread for the reason we industrialized so much about food production, which is to make it cheaper.
[narrator on TV.]
When the wheat grains are clean, they go to the roller mills.
These machines separate the coarse part of the grains from the fine parts through very fine silk cloth.
[Michael.]
When we moved from whole grains ground on a stone to white flour, really white flour, on a roller mill, this was a major change, and it looked like a great boon to civilization and to economics.
White flour is non-perishable, which allowed mills to produce it on a larger scale and ship it all around the world.
Roller milling made white flour cheaper and more widely available.
People loved white bread, and there was a great prestige attached to white flour.
And suddenly you could make really white flour that everybody could afford.
It seemed like a great thing.
[narrator.]
Delicious bread, fresh and clean, brought every day to the neighborhood food store for you and for me.
[Michael.]
But all of a sudden, people started getting sick because we had removed the most nutritious part of the flour without even realizing it.
And it's fine to try things, but when you recognize they don't work, you go back and you pick up the thread.
And we didn't do that with white flour.
[announcer.]
Here's how to help build strong bodies eight ways.
Eat Wonder Bread.
Wonder Bread every meal gives you eight elements you need.
As much muscle-building protein as roast beef.
As much calcium for bones and teeth [Michael.]
Instead of realizing we should go back to whole grain flour, the government, working with bakers, pioneered the idea of fortifying flour.
Let's put vitamins back in.
And they sold this as something better and brand new.
[announcer.]
Because Wonder Soft Whipped Bread is made from batter, not dough, it has no holes.
Get Wonder Soft Whipped.
And this is really how capitalism usually works, right? It creates a problem, and rather than fix the problem, it creates a new business to solve the problem.
You know, industrialization's not inherently evil.
It can be done well or done badly.
But often in the rush to make something cheaper, we overlook the reason why it was done in this somewhat more painstaking way.
And in the case of bread, what we may have overlooked is the importance of a long, slow sourdough fermentation.
A lot of us think of sourdough as a style of bread, but what sourdough is is the traditional way all bread was made until only about a hundred years ago.
Sourdough is the proper way to make bread.
You can feel the difference from an hour or so ago, which is that it feels billowy.
I started this bread last night, and then it takes about four hours of bulk fermentation.
And I taste it at every stage to really find out how my fermentation is going.
And it should get more sour as the day goes on, but if it gets too sour, you know, you've over-fermented, so you have to keep an eye on that.
One of the masters of sourdough baking that I sought out in my education was Richard Bourdon.
Richard's obsession is nutrition as much as anything.
He's kind of a mad scientist, and he really believes that fermentation is key to health.
He's doing it the old-fashioned way.
[machinery whirring.]
[Richard.]
I come from a farm country, uh, northwestern Quebec province.
I come from a family of ten and, uh, food was a big part of our lives.
My mother, she baked her own bread, and I was always my mother's little helper, carrying the bag of flour inside, and I actually asked her to teach me how to bake a few things.
I used to make a little dessert on Sunday morning.
That was my specialty.
I would make that for the family.
I kind of took a personal commitment to saying, like, at 21 years old, to say, "I'm gonna bring better food to this world.
" And I actually put an ad in the paper for a farmer or a baker.
Whoever calls first is what I'm going to do.
The baker called first.
- I'll load these, uh - Yeah.
peasant French in about five minutes, okay? - [man.]
All right.
- All right, that's it on that one? - Yep.
- Okay.
Where are we at? Seeded rye here? I prefer when they go in one at a time.
I'll show you why.
They come out nicer if you hold them back just a little bit.
You know, I came into it with the question of, like, you know, "What is bread? And what is it about it that's worth doing again? What is it about it that gives sustenance? What is it about it that keeps you alive?" It's taking this kernel of grain and transforming it into something that's more.
You free the nutrients out of the seeds.
I'd like to call myself more of a grain processor than a baker.
I process grain.
I process them in a way that they become digestible.
That's really my goal.
In a kernel of grain, there's everything to support a whole life.
Carbohydrates, minerals, proteins.
And it's locked up real tight, like, uh I like to use the example of a Batmobile, you know.
And it's all-- Uh, you've seen the movie, I'm sure, where it's all, you know, you hit the clicker and the thing locks up.
If you just take the seeds and start chewing on them without doing anything, it's not gonna go well.
It's very difficult to digest.
All grains need to be fermented, where you use a culture of bacterias.
They're everywhere.
From the air They're just always there, omnipotent, omnipresent.
[Michael.]
Sourdough culture is this mixed ecosystem of bacteria and yeast that were used to ferment bread for millennia.
You expose some wet flour to the air and stir it, and you will get a sourdough culture that transform the wheat into a very nutritious substance.
This, by the way, is exactly how the ancient Egyptians accidentally learned how to leaven bread.
When someone left out that bowl of wheat porridge and it started to bubble, that was one of the world's first sourdoughs.
[Richard.]
Building a culture is kind of like the art of baking.
This is where it becomes the skill of the orchestrator.
Working with natural starters is difficult because it has a mind of its own.
It changes all the time.
It's a live process.
But it's essential.
If you don't do this, you don't get the nutrients out of it.
[Michael.]
Wheat, even in the form of milled flour, is hard for our bodies to digest.
One of the advantages of the long sourdough fermentation that Richard has mastered is that it allows bacteria to fully break down the carbohydrates and the strong, stretchy gluten in the dough.
It also releases the healthy minerals in the grain so that our bodies can more easily absorb them.
The sourdough fermentation has all the variables of any natural system, too many of them to manage on a large scale.
So to simplify the process, food scientists came up with a reliable shortcut, in the form of fast-acting commercial yeast.
We isolated the yeast and we bred the yeast to get the biggest rise as fast as possible.
And we overlooked the rest of what was going on in fermentation.
As it turns out, that represents one of those simplifications of industrial food that had unintended consequences that we're dealing with right now.
I think we're gonna turn the heat on on these ciabattas.
[beeping.]
People ask me this, like, "Why don't you use yeast?" The problem is that when you use the yeast, you have no fermentation here, you have no acidic breakdown.
The bread becomes harder to digest and when things are harder to digest, it taxes your system.
Now we see a trend where there's so much sensitivity, whether it's gluten or wheat.
There are so many bad wheat products out there, I'm not surprised that people are not feeling well.
I hate when I see that they promote eating more whole grain, so everybody gets on the bandwagon eating, like, whole-wheat macaroni, and, uh But they didn't say fermented whole grain.
[Michael.]
I think we have to make a distinction between a properly fermented loaf of sourdough bread and all the other forms in which we get gluten.
You know, I would bet that if you took a dozen people who claimed a gluten intolerance and you gave them Richard's bread, they'd be fine.
[Michael.]
When you bake a loaf of bread, essentially, the loaf itself becomes a pressure cooker.
And this thoroughly cooks the starches in a way that makes them delicious and digestible.
- [soft crunching.]
- [Richard.]
You know, that sound is It's like walking on crispy snow or something.
It's just crispy.
It's just, uh-- And the smell.
If you crack it a little bit, the aroma comes out, so [clicks tongue.]
It's one of the little pleasures, you know, that a baker might get.
You know, it felt light enough.
Just not too light, not too heavy.
Now if we look inside, everything is, um, opened nicely.
It formed the crust.
It cooks from inside out.
And if you take the inside of the bread, just like this, this is where you can taste, really, if it's well done, if it tastes sweet as you chew it.
And the more you chew, the deeper it becomes.
The deeper the flavor comes.
It's like a whole-- It keeps changing.
It keeps becoming more.
You take a bite of this bread that's a little sour and the first thing that will happen is it will make you salivate.
This process is essential to trigger digestion.
If you chew a piece of yeasted bread, you typically need something to wash it down.
You know, it kind of, like It doesn't make you salivate.
You start with wheat.
If you smell wheat flour and, um after the whole process of fermentation, it doesn't smell like wheat anymore.
It doesn't smell like, uh It smells like something new.
[Michael.]
Richard points out that we're not the only creature that ferments.
You know, I had thought we were the cooking animal, and that we're the only ones.
We have a monopoly on this technology.
But Richard convinced me that there is There are exceptions.
[Richard.]
Most people think a dog buries a meat to go hide it, but the real reason that they do this is actually to let their meat ferment.
They can't eat fresh protein.
Birds know how to sprout seeds to get food, to be able to break the seed down.
Instinctively, if you look at nature, nature knows what to do.
Nature knows what to eat.
We are also part of nature.
[Michael.]
You know, one of the values of traditional foods made in traditional ways is they they've worked for a very long time.
And they're the product of a kind of cultural evolution.
[Simohammed in English.]
The mills, they are always close to the river, and we've had problems with floods.
When the snow melts, the level of water becomes too high.
When there is rain in summer, the soil is so dry that it doesn't absorb the water, and it becomes a big problem.
Twenty years ago, it would last seven or eight years between floods.
Now there are more and more floods.
Five months ago, we had water inside the house, a meter and a half high.
Part of the mill was falling down, and we had to build it again.
Before there were 18 or 17 mills in this valley, but most of them were destroyed by the river.
Now we have three or four mills.
[Michael.]
People who live off the land, whose livelihoods are at the mercy of the weather, are most susceptible to things like flooding, drought, and climate change in general.
Perhaps the most vulnerable of all are the farmers and their crops.
Crops like wheat depend on a certain temperature range and rainfall range, and that's changing right now.
And there will be places that were bread baskets that won't be any longer.
I think, even this one I don't think that it's a good one.
But this one can be This one is not bad.
Can be given a chance.
Most of it is bread wheat.
Some of them were dried because of the heat wave.
So, this has already lost most of its leaves.
I am from the southern part of Morocco.
I am from an agricultural family.
My father used to be a farmer.
I have witnessed myself, the drastic effects of climate change.
We are already witnessing severe droughts, extreme heat waves, and this has affected the agriculture.
Morocco, they are big consumers of wheat.
It is the major crop.
It's contributing 60% of the calories in the diet.
If we cannot produce enough, then I think we are in trouble.
[Michael.]
With more drought predicted for an already arid climate, crop yields in Northern Africa could fall by 50% by 2020 and as much as 90% by 2100, with small family-run farms being the most severely affected.
Wheat, you know, it's a very volatile commodity.
And at any given time, there is not a lot of give in the system.
There's usually, like, a month's supply of wheat available around the world, and if that moves too much or too fast, we will see enormous political instability.
[protestors chanting.]
- [drums beating.]
- [rhythmic clapping.]
[Michael.]
In ancient times, the granary was the physical structure that allowed civilizations to rise, a way to store food long-term, to buffer against a bad crop or political instability.
In the modern world, we've taken the idea of the granary to the next level, by establishing seed banks.
[man 1.]
When accidents or natural disasters or war intervened, that was it, they were dead as a dinosaur, extinct.
But we're going to put an end to extinction with this vault.
It's a home for seeds from all around the world.
[man 2.]
Now we have the possibility to preserve the seeds all over the world.
[Michael.]
International non-governmental organizations have built and maintained these fortresses, attempting to stockpile seeds of all the crops we've ever raised.
But instead of storing calories, they store information, the genetic information contained in small samples of every type of seed.
What we hope to achieve with these banks is to buffer against global catastrophe, using the information they hold to help us breed new crops that will thrive in a changing world.
A world of new diseases and an increasingly hostile climate.
[Ahmed Amri.]
What we are trying to do here is to screen for heat tolerance and drought tolerance.
We are looking for very clean leaves like this.
That's what the breeders are looking for, to breed new varieties.
[Michael.]
Ahmed Amri is a leading geneticist at a gene bank for seeds.
In 2012, he rescued wheat seeds from war-torn Syria and brought them into Morocco for safekeeping.
[Ahmed.]
When we had a crisis in 2012, we had to leave our premises in Syria.
We had there around 141,000 samples of seeds in the gene bank.
It could happen that a shell could destroy it completely.
Then we would lose everything.
So, we have to reconstruct our collection in Morocco, and this is what we are doing.
If we find one trait, good trait, we conserve them for any future use.
Like this one, for example, has tolerance to drought, tolerance to heat, that the breeders can use today, or can use in the future, to overcome the challenges of heat and drought.
[Michael.]
Amri works with fellow geneticist and wheat breeder Nasir Nasrallah.
[talking indistinctly.]
You work the genes, you isolate them by crossing and selecting, crossing and selecting, until you get them into something useful for us.
[Ahmed.]
The best ones will make it to the farmers.
From 25 lines that are in this experiment, for example, only maybe one or two will make it to the farmers.
With this, we will be able to overcome most of the challenges to agriculture, most of the challenges posed to wheat around the world.
[Michael.]
A wheat seed is an amazing thing.
I mean, it is this perfect package, like a spaceship, you know, heading into the future with everything needed to sustain life.
And the challenge of bread-making is to access all those nutrients and hijack them, in a way, so they go to us.
And that's really what bread allows us to do.
And actually, one of the things that was a pleasant surprise to me, was that it isn't rocket science, and you can do it by feel.
And it was very liberating to learn that.
And sometimes it's better than other times.
Sometimes you get a great oven spring and you're You feel like, "God, I really know what I'm doing.
" And other times, it's kind of flat, and you don't exactly know what went wrong.
This is called an ear.
That's a good thing, to have a pronounced ear on a loaf of bread.
[inhales deeply.]
Mmm.
I would do it just for the smell.
[chuckles.]
I began feeling daunted, and I ended feeling confident, and an enormous sense of, uh, satisfaction.
I think of all the things I learned how to make uh, making a decent loaf of bread has been the most satisfying.
[all speaking Arabic.]
[in Arabic.]
Here, eat it.
[Michael.]
All cooking is alchemy, right? I mean, it's transformation.
But bread is the greatest alchemy of all.
Take a small amount of food and turn it into a large amount of food that can feed a lot of people.
Out of thin air, literally out of thin air.
The word "spirit," you know, comes from wind, comes from air.
And it's no accident.
The spiritual dimension is the one that you can't really grab hold of.
It is like the breeze.
Exactly what we need to make this wonderful food is democratically available to everybody in the air.
It really is a miracle.
[theme music playing.]