Breaking down complex carbohydrates & proteins into amino acids, alcohol & carbon dioxide, the reason that specific strains of yeast are added to wort in beer making or dough in bread making or in kimchi or sauerkraut or other pickled or fermented veggies.
Add sliced carrots to a 2% saline solution in a jar for about a week & the resulting pickled fermented carrots are more nutritious & tastier than the raw carrot slices that went into the slightly salty water for a week or so.
Beneficial microbes, yeast fungi, and certain bacteria break down foods in organized desirable ways to produce yogurt from whole milk for example. When we have a container of strawberries on our counter that grows mould from spoiling, thats undesired microbial activity that causes food rotting.
In a cup of bioactive yogurt there are more bacteria & yeast than there are people in India. Bacteria & yeast and fungi are vastly more abundant in terms of gross mass in the biosphere than all plants & animals combined.
Plants widely colonized the biosphere by taking advantage of sunlight energy & carbon dioxide that people & other aerobic animals breath out, including yeast, such that they turn CO2 into cellulose & sugars, and binding proteins & some fats or lipids.
People are omnivores (able to eat plants or animals) who figured out with trial and error over thousands of years what we could eat that would not kill us, and what makes us stronger & what is edible or not.
Sadly, today much confusion abounds about what is real food or not, largely because of western American diet confusion exported on TV network broadcasting content or shows or videos all around the world, as TV shows or movies features unhealthy processes & ultra processed foods consumed by celebrities or as product endorsements with brand promotion deals.
The Standard American Diet or SAD making people everywhere fatter and sicker if they adopt wester diseases of civilization diets full of artificial colors, artificial flavors, synthetic chemical preservatives & fake flavors & strange chemical additives that most people cannot even read or make sense of if they read the huge list of ingredients on many thousands of foods in colorful packaging boxes with strange nutritional claims, or bags with colorful labels.
You can spot ultra processed foods if they come in a plastic bag & have more than 5 ingredients, including at least one ingredient you would never cook with at home.
Watch "Science of Fermentation" https://youtu.be/GQXa6MQvt7g?si=--9SI9fxVUBCmnBs
Microbes can perform work on food that no chef can even hope to accomplish because the microbes are working at the molecular levels, hence the title of this post, Molecular Gastronomy | Beneficial Fermentation vs Rotting & Spoilage
Fungi are very important to Forest Ecosystems, especially in Old Growth Forests in the PNW or Pacific North West for example. Many of these fungi have powerful medicinal properties as supplements from Fungi Perfecti or Host Defense (see https://hostdefense.com) which sells mushroom spores, mushroom extracts, freeze dried mushroom powders, capsules, supplements & similar based on Fungi or extract from Fungi, and some that even have military value during bio-war like agarikon, eburiko, or quinine conk, a wood decay fungus behind brown heart rot on conifer trees, also called Laricifomes officinalis.
Quoting the related Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laricifomes_officinalis "Mycologist Paul Stamets has performed numerous investigations of the biological activities of Agarikon; its extracts have demonstrated antiviral activity against a range of viruses in vitro.This activity has been specifically observed against pox family viruses, HSV-1 and HSV-2, Influenza A, Influenza B, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis in vitro. Other researchers have identified novel chlorinated coumarins in the organism which demonstrated notably low minimum inhibitory concentrations against the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex.[
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