How did people figure out how to make yogurt?
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Hi, friends. If you love Brains on Universe, you'll love the latest season of Million Bazillion, Marketplace's award-winning kids podcast about money. Hosts Ryan and Bridget answer the funny, tricky, and just really good questions from kid listeners to help dollars make more sense.

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I love yogurt. It's one of my favorite foods. In the morning, I'll put a nice big dollop of Greek yogurt in a bowl, sprinkle a handful of granola over it, and toss some fruit on top. Sometimes if I'm feeling extra fancy, I'll drizzle a little maple syrup or agave over it.

There's tons of other foods I like to eat yogurt with, too. My family is Middle Eastern, so we eat yogurt as a side dish with our dinner sometimes. We'll eat it with stews, rice, even use it for dipping toasted bread. But one thing I've always wondered, how did people first learn to make yogurt anyway? One of our listeners had a question about this, too. Let's ask someone who knows all about yogurt.

Hi, my name is Ali Conroe and I am a food and culture writer and journalist. So fermentation as it's widely known or used today is the transformation of food by bacteria, fungi and yeast. So essentially imagine little Pac-Men and they're eating different molecules, different substances in food and they're spitting back out a new version of those substances.

Bacteria, yeast and fungi don't need to use oxygen to convert energy. So it's kind of wild because it's believed that fermentation has existed on Earth since before the Earth's atmosphere even had oxygen to begin with. For the last 30 years,

Thousands of years, humans have used fermentation to preserve food, make it more digestible and less toxic for us to eat. We don't have any official earliest known for the production, but it's widely believed

that humans began making yogurt between 7 and 10,000 years ago. And that likely occurred in Central Asia, the Middle East, or Southeastern Europe. It's entirely possible that yogurt was discovered by humans in various civilizations and various parts of the world at the same time, but via happy accident.

When humans began to domesticate livestock and animals, when we began using milk products, yogurt would be very quick to follow. And that was about 10,000 years ago. And a lot of scientists think that around that time,

Groups of humans that were not settled in one place were storing milk in animal skin pouches and the bacteria that naturally occurs on the animal skins. And so the bacteria that existed on those pouches created the perfect environment for yogurt to be created. And so there was maybe, you know, a herder just walking around. He'd stored his milk there.

Inside of his pouch for the day, he traveled where he needed to go and he woke up the next morning and suddenly he had yogurt there. There definitely has been deliberate creation of yogurt over time for thousands of years. And there's been a whole host of ways that humans have created yogurt. Yogurt requires a starter culture to be created. So what people would do over time is they would usually take a sample of their previous batch of yogurt to start the next batch of yogurt.

But then if they didn't have a previous batch of yogurt, how did people start yogurt to begin with? Some communities have used rainwater. And if you think back to like Scandinavia, Iceland, ancient Viking times, Vikings were known to use plant matter as well. So they would use sundew or butterwort to make skier, which is like a cousin of yogurt.

in Southeast Asia, the stems on chili peppers have been known to start a batch of yogurt as well too. So really, really interesting, really innovative and very place specific ways to produce yogurt over time. Um, uh,

So we don't know exactly when or how people first started making yogurt. But scientists think it could have been as long as 10,000 years ago, when people first started raising domesticated animals for milk, like cows, sheep, and goats. And at some point, people accidentally made yogurt, maybe when they were carrying around milk in pouches made from animal skins.

That's because yogurt is made when milk comes into contact with certain kinds of special bacteria. So if the pouches had those bacteria inside, people might have accidentally made yogurt. But it's hard to say for sure. What we do know for sure is that they liked it. Humans have been experimenting with yogurt ever since, coming up with new ways to make it and flavor it all the time. But it's not always the case.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a giant strawberry banana smoothie. With extra yogurt, of course.

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If you have a question, we'd love to help you answer it. Drop us a line by going to brainson.org slash contact. See you next time and the next day and every weekday. Until then, um... Okay, let's add some strawberries, yogurt, banana, blend it all up, and perfect.