Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation (70 page)

^*
After it runs out of sugars
to ferment,
S. cerevisiae
can switch on an enzyme that allows it to live
off the ethanol it has produced, yet another neat trick.

^*
Some brewers today regard the
fifteenth-century German beer laws that mandated hops as the only permissible
additive as a regrettable victory in an earlier war on drugs. Compared with some of
the other psychoactive plants that once were added to beer, hops, which is a
sedative distantly related to cannabis, is fairly mild.

^*
Libkind, Diego, et al.,
“Microbe Domestication and the Identification of the Wild Genetic Stock of
Lager-Brewing Yeast,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
108 No. 35 (2011): 14539–44.

^*
Horace got at this plasticity
in the following lines he addressed to a forty-year-old cask of wine (dating from
the year of his birth): “Whether you bear in yourself complaints or laughter,
or whether you contain strife and mad love or friendly sleep, O faithful
cask.”

^*
Though best known as the
bringer of wine to humankind, Dionysus was also credited with giving us beer and
honey.

^*
Or at least
nonexternal
chemical ways, because who knows how meditation, fasting,
risk, or extreme physical exertion work their effects on consciousness?

^*
For more on the Romantic
imagination and intoxication, see David Lenson’s important book,
On
Drugs
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995), and also his Hess
Family Lecture, “The High Imagination,” at the University of Virginia,
April 29, 1999. See also my discussion on plant drugs and the arts in the marijuana
section of
The Botany of Desire
(New York: Random House, 2001).