From Fountain of Youth to Fruit on the Bottom: How Yoghurt Finally Made it Big in America

26:31But even more importantly, no one was familiar with what on earth was making any of these fermented foods. Despite eating them by the boatload, No one had seen a microbe until microscopes were invented in the 1600s, and no one knew what they did until Louis Pasteur came along in the 1800s. Pasteur may have figured out microbes caused fermentation, but he didn't do research on yogurt. He did end up creating the Pasteur Institute in France to study diseases and microbes, and the first foreign scientist he invited to come work with him was named Eli Mechnikov. He was a Russian biologist who spent the second half of his time in France.

27:10He worked in Paris at the Pasteur Institute. And he was very famous, not just as a scientist, but he was at the beginning of the 20th century. He was one of the most famous people in the world. Luba Vekonsky is a science writer and author of the book Immunity, How Eli Mechnikov Changed the Course of Modern Medicine. Mechnikov is a big deal in the story of yogurt. He's sometimes known as the grandfather of yogurt. But his scientific reputation was not built on dairy products. He won a Nobel Prize for basically wholesale coming up with the idea of the immune system. It wasn't called then at the time, but he developed the very first modern theory of immunity.

27:54Until then, there was no notion of immunity in the way we know it exists today. In the lab in the late 1800s, Metchnikov was studying starfish larvae. They're transparent, which makes them easier to study. He noticed that there were cells that were basically digestion cells. They eat food for nourishment. And somehow he had the idea that maybe they don't just eat food. Maybe they eat harmful things, too, as a form of protection. And he performed one of the most famous experiments in the history of science. He introduced into this tiny larva little pieces of thorns from a rose bush. And then he saw the next day that indeed the cells had ganged up on these thorns to protect the little animal.

28:36They seem to be a built-in defense system, an immune system. Metchnikov continued his experiments and eventually discovered that there's a similar, more sophisticated system in humans made of white blood cells that surround and ingest harmful foreign particles. This was an amazing breakthrough. It was so ahead of its time, it was ridiculed at first. But ultimately, it made Metchnikoff famous, and so he got an invitation to come work at the center of the universe for science at the time, the Pasteur Institute in Paris. This was an incredibly exciting time in science, and particularly for the Pasteur Institute.

29:10Pasteur had just created a vaccine against rabies in 1885. And that was like a miracle cure. This was just something that totally captured people's minds, and everybody thought that this was like the beginning, which indeed it was, a new era in medicine. Metchnikov carried on researching the immune system at the Institute, but as tends to happen, he was also aging. He was in his 40s when he arrived in Paris, but by the time he got into his 50s, he was beginning to feel like, well, not a spring chicken anymore. He started to worry about getting old. That was then, I guess, you know, considered old.

29:47And that's how he felt. Metchnikoff had an idea at the time. This wasn't just his theory. It was kind of a popular theory in medicine. It was even, I would say, verging on a medical obsession. It was called auto-intoxication. The idea was the germs, microbes in your intestines, were causing you to rot from the inside out. And Metchnikoff figured that was probably what was causing aging. So he came up with the idea that aging is a disease, that it's a disease that's called by, you know, harmful infectious organisms in the gut. And it should be cured like any other disease. That was his starting point.

30:27This belief, this theory, it made him a total germaphobe. He tried every way possible to prevent what he saw as harmful microbes from getting into his intestines. He had a burner in the lab and he sterilized everything. He boiled even bananas because he thought that maybe somehow through the skin the germs can get in. And when he went to restaurants where waiters would bring, they knew him, they would bring a burner. And he sterilized utensils for himself and for his guests. But just avoiding bad germs wasn't enough. Metchnikov wanted a cure. And just like the immune cells he discovered in starfish, he wondered if there might be good germs that could eat the bad ones.

31:06And that is how yogurt entered the picture. Because fermented milk from the beginning of history was known to preserve milk. Like other products rot and spoil, and milk doesn't. It becomes sour. So what actually stabilizes it? It wasn't known. Metchnikov began to speculate that maybe the microbes that fermented the milk to turn it into yogurt were eating the bad ones that would normally make it spoil, keeping milk fresh longer. We know today that isn't how it works. As we said, they created an acidic environment that promotes the growth of beneficial bacteria at the expense of nastier ones. But Metchnikov didn't know that, and good microbes that could eat bad ones that made things rot was exactly what he was looking for.

31:53Metchnikov was already familiar with yogurt. As we said, he was from Russia, and people in Russia ate a lot of yogurt, and it had been thought to be a particularly healthy food. In fact, his first wife back in Russia, she had tuberculosis. And one of the foods he and the doctors gave her to try to restore her health was yogurt. It didn't work. She did die. But that didn't turn him off the food. The real breakthrough came when a Bulgarian student called Starman Grigorov brought back some yogurt from his home region to show his professor. They found a bacteria in it, one of the two that's in all yogurt today.

32:25And they made extraordinary amounts of lactic acid. And they call these bacteria Bacillus bulgaricus. The professor in Switzerland knew Metchnikov, so he sent him a sample of the yogurt and of the lactic acid bacteria. And he also passed along that in Bulgaria, there were an unusual number of people who lived until they were over 100. There were actually only so many centenarians because there were so few accurate records of their dates of birth. But it made for a compelling story. And for Metchnikov, it all fitted in together perfectly. Like here was his theory that aging is caused by microbes in the large intestines and that you can fight it with good bacteria.

33:07And the good bacteria, for example, there are in yogurt. And here are these Bulgarians who are living proofs of that they eat so much yogurt and look at them. So Metchnikov started giving lectures where he shared his new theory about auto intoxication and the power of yogurt to cure aging. He was a big popularizer of science, and he was a very eloquent speaker, and he was very passionate, and journalists loved him. He was sort of like a media person. He was probably the equivalent of, like Carl Sagan was for astronomy, and he was the same for health, you know, and medicine. So when he started talking about yogurt, you could imagine that people listened.

33:47And then came the tipping point, a lecture that Metchnikov gave on the subject of old age and its prevention in Paris in 1904. Luba says that is when the yogurt frenzy really took off. And he brought with him an old dog and an old parrot, and the dog looked sort of shabby, and this was sort of his way of showing this is what happens when you have a large intestine full of germs. And birds have almost no large intestine, And the parrot was 70, and it looked very young, sort of, and feisty. These were visual props that, at least to Metchnikoff, proved, so to speak, the ills of toxic gut microbes.

34:24Today, we know it's useful for humans and dogs to have a large intestine. Birds don't have the same type of large intestine because they need to save space to stay aerodynamic. They've evolved different digestive hacks to make up for that. But in any case, that wasn't the only thing he lectured on that day. He talked about many things, but the one thing that caught on was this maybe mention of yogurt and the Bulgarians who live these long and healthy lives. He also said he personally ate yogurt three times a day. And it was just picked up by the press without any caveats, without any mention that it's a theory, that it's just an idea, basically.

35:03And journalists just ran with it. The headlines were splashed across papers in Europe and in America. sour milk is the elixir. And, quote, pretty ladies and brilliant gentlemen who don't want to age or die, here's the precious recipe, eat yogurt. I found clippings from Chicago, from Los Angeles, from the Pasteur Institute, the great Professor Mechnikov comes up with a cure for aging. Eating yogurt was suddenly all the rage in Paris. So first of all, there were cafes that sold it, like you could go for your five o 'clock yogurt. And there was like the one cafe on one of the Parisian boulevards that said, come and eat yogurt, and following the work of the great Professor Metchnikoff, it will prevent the disastrous old age.

35:52Yogurt was also sold in tablets, and there were chocolates that were spiked with yogurt and yogurt bacteria. Doctors were recommending it to their patients in extremely generous quantities. So the British Medical Journal, for example, wrote in the review, yogurt can be used for an indefinite time without harmful results. If the dose be not too large, one kilogram a day should not customarily be exceeded. For American listeners, one kilo is 2.2 pounds of yogurt per day. No thank you. That is in fact what many Americans said about yogurt at the time. There was one snippet from the newspaper in Elk Falls, Kansas that I found particularly lovely.

36:33It says, quote,

36:51And speaking of dying young, Metchnikov did not, in fact, live forever. He had not cured aging with yogurt. Metchnikov died in 1916, and he died at the age of 71. And he thought that if you take all these preventive measures, he believed that people should and could and should live to 150. And when he died halfway through to that mark, you know, it was a huge disappointment for many people. Metchnikoff had been afraid this might happen. And he was very worried about all this harming his theories. And he was talking about how his whole family didn't quite live long, learned that he started very late with his healthy regimen.

37:31He made all kinds of explanations, provided all kinds of explanations for why he wasn't going to live till 150. Meshnikov may have been a household name in his day, but his fame kind of died out in the decades after he died. That said, the research he did was totally ahead of its time. He conducted just absolutely modern and totally pioneering studies of the gut microbiome. and he tried to answer the question, for example, is it essential? Can we live without it? And which germs are good, which ones are bad? He found that the microbiome changes throughout a person's life. He found that it could be changed by diet.

38:11He was a very firm believer in preventive medicine, which was he was like 100 years ahead of his time in everything. But I think in terms of his popular image, and if he is remembered for anything, it's just for yogurt. But even when it comes to yogurt, the Metchnikov-inspired yogurt fad ran out of steam in most of the world pretty quickly. In the U.S., yogurt fell back off the radar almost completely. So how did we get from preferring death to eating yogurt to entire supermarket aisles devoted to it today? That's coming up after this break. When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it.

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40:34adele davis i have come to describe as the most popular cookbook writer you've never heard of because she sold by all accounts millions of dollars worth of her cookbooks over the course of the 20th century and is not someone that i hear anybody talk about matthew wolfmeyer is a professor of science and technology studies at rpi and author of the book american disgust racism Microbial Science, and The Colony Within. I got interested in her because she's one of those people who's like an early proponent of yogurt. And you can see in the early cookbooks that she's trying to convince people that it's like an edible substance, you know, that like maybe they've heard about it, but they've definitely never tried it.

41:19Adele's books combine nutrition advice with recipes. They were called upbeat, but also sort of patronizing things like let's eat right and let's have healthy children. She got going in the late 1940s and hit her stride in the 1950s, and by then, most Americans had gratefully forgotten all about Eli Mechnikoff and wouldn't know yogurt if they bumped into it on the street. Adele had very strong feelings about nutrition. A lot of her nutrition advice was pretty sound. She recommended eating whole grains and vegetables and that people cut down on meat. She was also, unfortunately, a big proponent of megadoses of supplements and had some not particularly science-based recommendations.

41:57She recommended large doses of vitamins that could be and sometimes were harmful for her readers and their families. She was a big yogurt fan, in part because she was a milk fan. She thought milk was super healthy and a great alternative to meat. But she also did recognize that yogurt had some unique microbial benefits too. The thing that I often think about is this recommendation that she has that if you're feeling ill that you eat two cups or four cups of yogurt. That it's like a significant amount of yogurt in order to deal with stomach upset. But apart from spooning out cups when they were feeling crappy, Americans didn't know how to regularly incorporate yogurt into their diets.

42:36And so in order to kind of convince people that it's worth eating, she's thinking about like ways that you can convey its palatability. And part of that is including it in recipes, but some of it is just convincing people that it counts as food. And she's there to kind of bridge the gap conceptually to like convince you it can be eaten and give you some ideas about how it can be eaten. Adele not only provided a recipe for making yogurt at home, she also had a recipe for yogurt sauce with grated onion, mustard powder and Worcestershire sauce to serve with cold cuts and another one to go with cheese cutlets.

43:17Neither sound particularly pleasant, to be honest, but Adele's story highlights two main points about most of America at the time. Okay, maybe more than two, because first, food sounds pretty terrible back then. But also, most Americans were, one, not familiar with yogurt, and two, didn't really have easy access to it. Even Davis, when she's talking about, like, where would you find yogurt, she's recommending people go to their, you know, nearby European grocery stores. That it's not going to be something that you'll find at a mainstream grocery store. At the time, yogurt was definitely something you'd only find at the quote-unquote ethnic food store.

43:50It was something that Greek or Armenian or Eastern European immigrants would make and sell to their own community. One of those immigrant families, they were Armenians who came to the U.S. in the early 1900s and they moved to Massachusetts. It starts with Sarkis and Rose, who are the father and mother of this family. And they start a intensely local yogurt distribution network. Rose literally made the yogurt at home on the stove, the way she and her family always had. In the beginning, it's just plain yogurt, right? And they tell the story that Rose brought the basilisk to start the yogurt from Turkey when she emigrated.

44:33Rose Ansarkey's Kolombosian had a son named Bob, and Bob said his parents used to drive around to deliver yogurt to Armenians living in the area and to bring containers to ethnic stores in Boston. He also remembered bringing yogurt to school with him in the very white town of Andover where his family first lived. And so he brings it to school to share with people and his teacher uses it like as a moisturizer, right? Like she puts it on her face in order to like see if that's what you do with it. Evidently, Bob's teacher was not an Adele Davis fan. In any case, Bob eventually joined the family business and worked on expanding it.

45:09One of the challenges that you can see is they're really trying to figure out how to make it palatable for mass consumption. And so part of what they embark on is sweetening it up, putting fruit into it. And when they did that, sales just took off. Americans vastly preferred the fruit-based yogurt over the plain kind. Colombo Yogurt even started making TV ads to promote their yogurt to a whole new audience. Hi, I'm Bob Colombo, and this is my wife Alice. This is my mom, Rose Kolombosian. She invented Kolombo yogurt in our kitchen in 1929. The kitchen, it was right about here. My mom cooked yogurt in a big bucket.

45:52It was this big. My brother fell in a bucket once. We threw that batch away. But Kolombo yogurt wasn't the only one on the market at this point. One of the earliest yogurt entrepreneurs, a Spartac Jew called Isaac Carrasso, had started a business selling yogurt in Barcelona in the early 1900s. He'd grown up in Greece eating thick, strained Greek yogurt, and when the Metchnikov yogurt fad got going, he decided to make a business out of it. At the time, he was living in Spain, and he decided to call his company Danone. It was from a nickname for his son Daniel, Little Daniel. Originally in the 20s, Isaac sold his yogurt in pharmacies as a health food.

46:28He died in the 30s, and Daniel took over. In the 1940s, Daniel decided to leave Europe, for obvious reasons. He settled in the Bronx, and he renamed the American arm of his company Dannon to try to make it more appealing to Americans. But even with the new name, the yogurt itself was not flying off the shelves. Americans weren't taking to it, so he figured he had to do something. Now, he took on a partner, Juan Metzger, and together they came up with a number of innovations, but the first and most groundbreaking was they added fruit. This was the same move Colombo made to appeal to Americans. both companies had realized they needed to make the yogurt sweeter and more dessert-y, less tangy, less kind of weird and ethnic, at least to American taste buds at the time.

47:11But even with fruit and sugar added, and with Adele Davis's enthusiastic backing, it wasn't until the 1970s that yogurt truly hit its stride in the U.S. And that is really tied to the health food movement in that moment. It's tied to kind of national distribution networks. But like the 1970s marks like a real shift in American consumption of yogurt. America in the 1970s was going through a lot of changes. As Matthew said, more brands were becoming kind of national brands. Supermarkets were getting bigger and bigger. Also, people were, as he said, obsessed with health. A few hippie, crunchy ideas were going mainstream.

47:49And so Dannon took advantage of this by bringing back Metchnikoff's legacy. It was their ad that appeared in the 1970s that showed a Soviet Georgian man who was certainly over 100 years old in appearance. In Soviet Georgia, there are two curious things about the people. A large part of their diet is yogurt, and a large number of them live past 100. And they said, do you want to know why the people in this region live, many of them past 100? They eat a lot of yogurt. Of course, many things affect longevity, and we're not saying Dannon yogurt will help you live longer. But Dannon is a natural, wholesome food that does supply many nutrients.

48:32At this point, yogurt had essentially been made into dessert to suit American palates, but it was still being marketed as a health food. And of course, healthy is often code for it will help you lose weight. So yogurt really finds one of its early markets in women who are dieting. Over the decades since the 70s, yogurt has continued to be marketed as a food that will make you healthy. But the arguments change based on the latest health fads. Dannen launched their Activia line in Europe in the 80s and in America in the 2000s. And this one focused on yogurts, microbes and their relationship to gut health.

49:09I remember my aunt used to buy Activia because of those Jamie Lee Curtis commercials saying it was good for your gut. So Kate, you were stressed, a lot of junk food on the go, and you were... A little irregular, sluggish. My daughter needed Activia. Help get your system back on track. Activia with Bifidus Regularis helps regulate your digestive system. When it comes to those microbes, of course, fermented foods are good for your gut. We talk about that all the time on Gastropod. Doesn't have to be yogurt. There are lots of great fermented foods out there. Miso and sauerkraut and pickles and all sorts of things.

49:42Yogurt's good too. Activia was always a little thin and drippy for my taste. But if you, like me, prefer your yogurt on the other end of the texture spectrum, well, don't worry. Greek yogurt is here for you. Greek yogurt is strained after it's fermented to make it even thicker and more tart. Why did it catch on? Very simple. Has much less sugar in it. And so it became very popular for people who were on the keto diets and the paleo diets, because it was really much lower in carbohydrates. So it was pretty much a simple reason for it. it was perceived as healthier. And today the fad is not just to avoid carbs, but also to seek out protein.

50:26And there's yet another yogurt for the protein obsessed these days. Icelandic provision skir. It's like yogurt, but packed with more protein and less sugar. And that's why we've been eating skir since we were Vikings. There's a yogurt to appeal to every single taste and style. 100%. I'm still out here in grocery stores looking at the new brand of yogurt. The obsession will never fade. These days, yogurt is big business almost everywhere. It's made it in America, and it's still beloved in its traditional homelands. It's proven adaptable to all sorts of palates and cuisines. In America, we're used to, like, scooping our granola and berries on top of our yogurt.

51:09In other countries, it's used as a sauce. In India, you know, we use it in all of these types of dishes. I do feel like it's a cross-cultural food that speaks many languages. Yogurt is compatible with a lot of different cuisines, and also it can be both sweet and savory. I personally love to turn yogurt into a sauce for fish with dill and garlic, while my spouse prefers his with maple syrup. Priya enjoys it both ways every single day. I have it in the morning. I make a smoothie for myself, and I always put that yogurt in there. And then I have it as an afternoon snack, either two ways. either with chocolate chips or with a drizzle of olive oil and salt and pepper.

51:52Thanks this episode to Priya Krishna, June Hirsch, Matthew Wolfmeyer, Luba Vekansky, and Veronica Sinat, and also to our favorite microbe expert, Ben Wolf, for advice. We have links to their work on our website, gastropod.com. And in case you're having a meltdown because we didn't discuss froyo, never fear. Our dearly beloved supporters will get the full scoop in their newsletter. Get yourself on that list by signing up at gastropod.com slash support. Thanks as always to our fabulous producer, Claudia Geib. We'll be back with a brand new episode in two weeks. Till then. When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account.

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