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What if I told you ants might be able to make delicious yogurt? NPR's Regina Barber reports on a study out of Denmark that put a traditional fermenting method to the test.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Imagine you're walking in the mountains of Bulgaria, enjoying the lush greenery, the clear streams. And the reason you're up there? To make yogurt the old-fashioned way - by dropping live red wood ants into fresh milk.
VERONICA SINOTTE: We added four whole ants, dropped them into the top, covered it with a cheesecloth, hiked up the mountain and buried it inside of the ant colony.
BARBER: That's Veronica Sinotte, a microbial ecologist and lead author of the study. Sinotte was part of a small team that did this outdoor experiment and then hiked back up the mountain the next day to give it a taste. The research team said the yogurt was just barely clumpy at the bottom of the jar, slightly tangy and herby, and it tasted very different from what you buy in the supermarket. That's because the ants have their own microbiome that includes lactic acid used in fermentation.
In the U.S., all commercial brands of yogurt taste really similar because they're made pretty much the same way, using only two industrial bacterial starters. But this wasn't always the case, says Leonie Johanna Jahn, a microbiologist and co-author of the study published in iScience.
LEONIE JOHANNA JAHN: Traditionally, yogurt has been fermented with complex microbial communities, resulting in very special flavors and textures that are unique maybe to specific person or household.
BARBER: Which means that, depending on which house in the community was making the yogurt, it would taste and maybe even look different. Jahn was part of the research team that fermented yogurt a slightly different way in the lab using crushed red wood ants. Jahn said this lab yogurt was thicker and tangier than the mountain yogurt - she said like Greek yogurt. The researchers wanted to know what kinds of bacteria were causing this fermentation - bacteria living on and inside the red wood ants. And Sinotte says one of those bacteria is actually pretty well known.
SINOTTE: This isn't really found in yogurt beyond our study, but it's found in two places in the world - ants and sourdough bread.
BARBER: Specifically, the San Francisco sourdough bread. The ant yogurt in the lab was further utilized by chefs from the two-star Michelin restaurant Alchemist in Copenhagen. They turned the ant yogurt into a decadent ice cream sandwich.
ANNE MADDEN: This morning, when I woke up, I didn't think that I would end the day by craving a ice cream sandwich made with ants, but now I am.
BARBER: That's Anne Madden, chief scientist at The Microbe Institute. She didn't work on the study, but she has worked with bugs used in fermentation. She was part of a previous scientific study that found the same lactic acid yeast used in sour beer brewing on the body of wasps. Madden was impressed by the interdisciplinary nature of this ant study - anthropologists, biologists and chefs all working together to make something new from something old.
MADDEN: These red wood ants are known for producing formica acid, or formic acid, which is peppery. And so I want to know if that ice cream sandwich is peppery and what other flavors might have been made possible by the ants and the microbes.
BARBER: Some people in the U.S. might grimace at the idea of eating something ants have been swimming in, but the researchers were unfazed, saying that eating bugs is very normal around the globe. David Zilber is a former chef at Noma in Copenhagen and a fellow researcher on this study. He points out that there's a bit of a double standard when it comes to consumer cringe factors.
DAVID ZILBER: The vegetables in their crisper are grown in manure.
BARBER: Zilber also thinks this study can give a new perspective on what we call food and what we call pests.
ZILBER: It really makes you think about the boundarylessness of nature and how fuzzy life can be and that what you think is a contaminant is actually something you need to make something you love.
BARBER: Scientists say this study is an opportunity to connect our past with our future, making new kinds of fermented foods using knowledge from thousands of years ago. Regina Barber, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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