WORTH THE WAIT?

Asmell begins wafting toward your nose as you pull the fridge door open. Your eyes begin to water as you grab the various fruit, vegetable, meat product, or drink that has begun the process of turning. Whether it may be covered in fuzzy white or yellow mold, has lumps of curtled culture suspended in the bottle, or has turned a color that is far from optimal, you move quickly to the trash with the item in hand and throw it away without a second thought.

We become frustrated with ourselves for not having consumed the various foods quicker, before it passes its fated expiration date. However, almost in a hypocritical way, when going grocery shopping there are a plethora of foods where we look for food way past its expiration date. From cheese, to wine, to fermented foods, to dry aged meats, the longer the food has sat and, almost lacking a better word, expired, the more desirable and expensive the food becomes. This article will dive into the world of “expired” foods and the mysterious way time changes the taste and monetary values of goods.

The lore of fermentation and aging dates all the way back to 7000 BCE, when it is said that a woman was banished by the king of Persia. In a distraught state she attempted to take her own life by drinking liquid from a barrel of expired grapes that was deemed poisonous. However, instead of death, she experienced intoxication. Similarly, there are other wives’ tales about the creation of other matured foods, such as the legend of the invention of blue cheese, which goes as such: a French shepherd in the 1600s became distracted by a beautiful woman, and in chasing after her he left his lunch of bread and cheese behind. Upon returning to the cave months later he discovered the cheese had become moldy with penicillium roqueforti, a fungi that is found in many “expired” foods, and thus blue cheese found its origins. While amusing and seemingly ridiculous in nature, these tales tell of the origins of an important invention to the world of food: aging

While all these stories begin with food being left or forgotten and, often by chance, being eaten after months just for the brave taste tester to discover the food tastes better than it did before, what’s left behind are stories of chance, the process behind aging foods is in fact a real science. Using the two examples as mentioned before, cheese and wine, there are intense, molecular changes that cause for the food to become an amazing delicacy. For cheese, it has to do with the enzymes and microbes inside the milk culture that break down the milk fats and proteins into a complex mix of fatty and amino acids, while for wine it has to do with the tannins in the wine undergoing polymerization, which binds them into long chains, which causes them to lose their ability to bind with other compounds.

The question now arises: Why are some things aged longer than others? The answer is very simple. Some foods have longer shelf lives than others and can endure and remain “fresh” for longer than others. When comparing something like blue cheese to steak, within the realm of aging, sometimes longer isn’t better. Traditionally, blue cheese is only aged for around two to three months, while most white or red wines you see in the grocery store are aged for around one to two years. That being said, when it comes to beef, there is quite a bit of controversy over how long a “good” steak needs to be aged for. A food writer at Vogue conducted an experiment in which they called 100 of the best steakhouses in the United States, and discovered that of those 100, only three of them were aging their steaks over two weeks. However, in many of the top steakhouses and restaurants in Europe, the minimum they will age their steaks is 55 days. While this may seem the difference between a few weeks, and thus a little amount of time, with meat, and especially with expensive cuts of steak such as a ribeye or filet mignon, the difference of a day can turn a beautifully aged steak into a rancid piece of meat. When it comes to the aging process, it is very subjective to the person who is aging the meat, with all of them having a specific time to age the good, with some even having it down to the minute and second, and thus the question posed above must be understood as one that is very subject to change as you move from one master ager to another.

Finally, one may ask: How can one attribute a monetary price or value to these goods? Often, the longer something sits the more expensive it becomes. This can most easily be attributed to the fact that more resources were put into it: it had to sit for X amount of days, months, or years taking up space that could have been filled with something else, it needs to be maintained constantly, it needs to constantly be observed my specialists who ensure it is aging correctly and safely, etc. When a luxury wine company, for example, decides to age a new barrel of grapes, they are making a huge investment of five, ten, twenty, even fifty years, with the idea that it will sell then. That is why many of the cheeses, steaks, wines, and other aged goods you see in the store are at most aged for five years. Something with that big a risk is not something most companies are willing or financially able to do. That is why the prices of the extremely aged goods are so high. Companies willing to take this gamble have invested countless time, money, energy, and other resources to create a product, and this reflects very heavily in the price on the label.

While these “expired” goods came from simple origins of conidncdece, they have become luxury goods that are extremely sought after. In thinking about this, maybe, backwards way of looking at aged goods, one can learn a lot about the history of this industry —how long these foods are allowed to sit, and the monetary connotations that have become associated with these goods.

Article by Cathy Li

Photos by Natalia Pallas

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