The taste for fermented food goes back a long way

Whether it is miso or kimchi in Asia, wines, cheeses and sauerkraut in the West, or cauim and caxiri in South America, people all around the world consume a lot of fermented food and drink a lot of fermented drink. They also, as this list suggests, choose what to ferment with deliberation. Besides the obvious pleasures of inebriation, appropriate fermentation can both release otherwise unavailable nutrients from a foodstuff and assist in its long-term preservation.Overall, fermented products comprise between a fifth and two-fifths of an average human diet, and there is archaeological evidence to suggest people were fermenting grains to make beer as long ago as 6,000 years. But that is an evolutionary eye-blink. So Katherine Amato, an anthropologist at Northwestern University in Illinois, found herself wondering just how far back in time a predilection for the fermented goes. As she reports in the , she discovered that several other primate species also feed on fermented foods. Moreover, though they are not as avid about them as human beings are, their choices seem equally deliberate.