Traditional Food Preservation, or How to Tell When Your Yogurt Goes Bad

A reader wanting to know how to tell when sourdough bread went bad prompted this article.

I told her that sourdough bread is “sour”—hence, already bad. Not so bad that you can’t eat it, however. Then I launched into a small litany of old ways of food preservation.

Our ancestors soaked, milled, fermented, and cultured their food for many reasons: lack of refrigeration, to remove toxins, and to make food more digestible, among others. Tibetans and Mongol tribes get milk straight from yaks, make yogurt and cheese, and have no access to refrigeration. American Indians, Mexicans, and other grain-based populations ground and soaked their grains before making breads and tortillas. African regions soak, pound, and bake certain other foods to make them palatable and easier to digest. And most interestingly, Eskimos eat mostly meat and fat from bears, whales, and salmon, yet never get a cholesterol problem from it!

It’s not like Eskimos have a place to garden or anything—it makes you wonder about the so-called “nutritional information” and health warnings being handed out on a near-daily basis. It also makes you wonder how we ever arrived at a point where “childhood obesity” has become a serious problem.

In modern times, we Americans processed our foods differently with the advent of mechanization (mills, etc.). Because we had access to refrigeration in one form or another, food preservation became a matter of thrift instead of necessity. Nowadays, we have perfected food freshness with “just-in-time” delivery of supplies, preparing food only for demand and not for supply (outside sales of excess), or having ways to rid ourselves of excess efficiently through online sales, auctions, overstock sales, or outright donations to food-based charity programs.

We have managed to over-produce ourselves into a health quandary.

The old ways of preservation (and I mean ancestral, not familial) did many good things for our systems: helped break down substances for easier digestion, helped remove dangerous toxins and allergens, and added useful bacteria (probiotics) to our systems to further aid in digestion as well as immunity. Modern food processing has stripped away all the benefits of traditional ways in favor of time and money, causing us more harm than good (as some would say)—now we have more food allergies, malnutrition (in spite of additives), indigestion issues, and more dependence on electronic appliances than ever before. It’s no wonder people panic when the power goes out, even for a couple of days—they’d lose their entire stock of frozen or frozen processed food quickly.

Here are some places to read up on traditional methods of food preservation and why we should implement some of them in our own homes: Traditional Diets , Traditional Foodways, Food Preservation Techniques.

The way our weather has been lately, you never know when a freak snowstorm or January tornado is going to hit—when the power goes out in unexpected places, it takes TIME to rebuild the infrastructure. Meanwhile, your entire fridge and freezer contents have been lost, and it makes no sense to go out and buy more with such an unstable power source.

Q: When DOES sourdough bread go bad?

A: When it becomes so rock-hard that you can’t bite into it without breaking a tooth.

Q: When DOES yogurt go bad?

A: I have no idea!

Instead of concentrating on how long food lasts, why not learn to only have the amount you can deal with at one time, leaving “shelf life” issues for someone else to work out? It’s not like we’re in a Depression and HAVE to hoard food, for heaven’s sake!

The habit of hoarding food plays right into the hands of marketers and sales pitches. We have gotten to a place where we no longer need to worry about having ENOUGH—now we need to worry about getting maximum nutrition from our food. This means freshness and proper preparation for service. This also means ALL bread (and bread products) should be sourdough if the flour was soaked overnight, as our ancestors did.

Is it any wonder why so many of us are popping Prilosec on a regular basis, or have children who waddle instead of run, or why food allergies are surging into prominence? I used to blame GMO foods, but they can't take all the blame any more!