The Rise Of Yeast: How Civilization Was Shaped By Sugar Fungi
Without yeast, bread wouldn't rise and beer wouldn't foam. As Nicholas Money's new book, The Rise of Yeast, points out, it leaves its mark on other foods, too, including coffee, and even chocolate.
An imagined conversation between two yeast cells appears in Kurt Vonnegut's 1973 novel . "They were discussing the possible purposes of life," Vonnegut writes. If that's not absurd enough, their existential discussion takes place against a weird, dismal backdrop, "as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement." Little did they know, their little yeasty lives had an important, human-centric purpose. "Because of their limited intelligence, they never came
