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Mike Parker
SE Pennsylvania

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. --Alan Kay

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Fermented Foods. Probiotics. Gut Health.

Microbial Nutrition is a food and nutrition group to discuss the role
of food microbes in health and gourmet pleasure. The idea is to have
a unified and focused forum for a very clearly defined topic instead
of taking up a disproportionate amount of bandwidth on more general
forums (Native-Nutriton, Live-Food, etc) or awkwardly subdividing the
topic on even more specialized groups (Kimchi-Sauerkraut-Cabbage,
EM_Health, Kefir_Making, kombucha groups, etc). This group is not
meant to replace any of these excellent groups, but rather augment
them as a more comfortable forum for certain topics and types of
discussions. This group might also serve as a way to alleviate the
problem of OT non-dairy posts on lists like RawDairy and
Kefir_Making. Hopefully this group will allow people who are really
interested in this topic to dig in without feeling bad about straying
too far outside the boundaries of other lists.

Example topics:

-Fermented vegetables
-Pickled vegetables
-Fermented grains and legumes (e.g. sourdough, miso, natto)
-Japanese rice-bran fermentation
-Comparisons between food preservation methods
-Salt-free fermentation
-Fermented land meats and water meats (fish)
-History of fermented foods
-Lactic Acid
-Yeast
-Molds (good and bad)
-Koji ferments
-Vinegar
-Kombucha
-Water Kefir
-SCOBYs
-Effective Microorganisms (EM)
-Anti-oxidant properties of fermented foods
-Phototropic bacteria
-Soil-based microorganisms
-Microbes as nutrients
-Vitamin production and loss in fermented foods
-Anti-nutrient reduction and creation in fermented foods
-Vitamin K2 (menaquinone-7)
-The microbial aspects of raw meat and eggs
-High meats
-Microbial nutrition before humans started fermenting foods
-GI microflora, parasites
-Probiotics
-Prebiotics
-Traditional fermented grain and fruit beverages

Certainly food preservation and probiotics/GI ecology can be totally
unrelated topics, but they both arise very naturally during
discussions of fermented foods, so they are both welcomed as topics
for this list. They can be seen as two vectors from a "fermented
foods" prototype.

Since fermented dairy foods are so heavily covered already by
RawDairy, Kefir_Making, Real_Kefir_Making, and possibly cheese groups
(which I'm not familiar with), and that's such a huge and clearly
defined topic, this list is tentatively offered with an "everything
but dairy" scope, but there's no reason to be strict about this, and
discussion of kefir, viili, yogurt, koumiss, whey, cheese, etc is
encouraged as it relates to more theoretical topics in microbial
nutrition. On the other hand, topics like "how do I strain my
kefir?", "how can I rig up the right temperature for my
yogurt?", "what kind of cheese press is best?" are perfect for
existing groups, where people have committed interests in fermented
dairy. There will be people (like me), who are into dairy and who
will want to simultaneously use both this group and one or more of
the dairy groups, but there will also be people whose fermented food
interests are limited to, say, kefir, and will be better served by an
existing group, or people who have have no interest in dairy for
various common reasons (intolerances, unavailability, etc), and might
not want to deal with the massive volume of posts that could easily
result from the massive topic of fermented dairy, as demonstrated
historically by the aforementioned groups. This the only subdivison
of microbial nutrition that is proposed to be practical, realistic,
and acknowledge the current state of email communities. We'll have
to see how it goes and stay open to reconsideration of this
division. For the topic of kefir, there is Dom's famous and thorough
website (kefir.notlong.com) and the archives of the aforementioned
dairy groups. For the topic of yogurt, well, make kefir :-)

This group welcomes both very practical and very theoretical topics,
and everything in between.

It's hoped that a full range from expert scientists to clueless
newbies will use this list for sharing, learning, and consolidating
knowledge, with an aim towards creating a well-organized archive that
will make it easy for newbies to get thorough answers right away and
keep the "oldies" happy enough to explore new frontiers! Towards
this end, please always use accurate subject lines with lots of
keywords! Also, summary posts and usage of the "files" section on
the homepage is strongly encouraged!