Scientists grow cheese from the microbes that live on human skin.
How local would you go? In an effort to showcase the symbiotic relationship between the human body and its bacteria, microbiologist Christina Agapakis and artist Sissel Tolaas have made a variety of homemade cheeses using their own microbes, as Mark Wilson recently reported in FastCoDesign. Michael Pollan, whose latest book talks about the process of fermenting foods, provided the microbes for the cheese pictured above from his own belly button for the project, aptly named Selfmade.
As strange as human grown cheese sounds, the human body is actually a super organism crawling with good microbes and bacteria, that happen to be very similar to those used to make cheese. This video shows the traditional method for making cheese from raw milk and encourages everyone to be more open minded about their own microbes.
