Science Friday - Global COVID Hotspots, Fact Check My Feed, Koji Fermenting. May 15, 2020, Part 1

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Fact Check My Feed: Finding The Falsehoods In ‘Plandemic’ Science Friday continues to weigh the truth and sift through the seemingly never-ending stream of misleading claims about the novel coronavirus. This week, virologist Angela Rasmussen joins Ira to help us decipher the uncertainties around this week’s COVID-19 headlines. While what we know and don’t know about COVID-19 changes daily, some things are certain: Rasmussen lays out some of the many falsehoods in the viral “Plandemic” video that circulated last week. She also explains why it’s important to know that a small study that found coronavirus RNA in semen samples leaves many questions unanswered—and that the presence of viral RNA doesn’t necessarily indicate a sexually-transmitted virus. Plus, more fact-checking of misconceptions about herd immunity, and more. Global Flare-ups Of COVID-19 Hot Spots Each country has tackled “flattening the curve” of COVID-19 cases in their own way and some countries were hailed as early successes in containing outbreaks. But two of these countries have seen recent increases: In reports earlier this week, Germany saw 900 new cases in a 24-hour period and as of Thursday, Singapore has identified more than 750 new cases, almost all linked to dormitories of foreign workers. Reporter Maggie Koerth of FiveThirtyEight.com talks about what the increasing numbers might mean for U.S. states that have started to reopen. She also discusses COVID-19 cases in Africa and South America, plus more science news of the week, including scientists that have identified heat-resistant algae that could help bleached corals.  Koji: The Mold You Want In Your Kitchen Koji-inoculated starches are crucial in centuries-old Asian foods like soy sauce and miso—and, now, inspiring new and creative twists from modern culinary minds. Rich Shih and Jeremy Umansky, two food fanatics, have written a new book describing the near-magical workings of the fungus, which, like other molds, uses enzymes to break starches, fats, and proteins down into food for itself. It just so happens that, in the process, it’s making our food tastier.  You can grow koji on grains, vegetables, and other starchy foods, and make sauces, pastes, alcohols, and vinegars. Even cure meats. Umansky and Shih say the possibilities are endless—and they have the koji pastrami and umami popcorn to prove it.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, we'll fact-check the viral pandemic video and other claims about COVID-19. But if you're looking for a lockdown cooking project, might we recommend Koji? We'll get to that too. Just a note, we won't be taking calls during this pre-recorded hour. Each country has tackled flattening the curve in its own way, and some countries like Singapore and Germany were hailed as success. able to contain infection more successfully than others. But we know this pandemic is not predictable. There are now flare up hotspots in countries that have flattened the curve.

Maggie Kerth is here to fill us in on that story and other science headlines from this week. She's senior science reporter at 538.com. Welcome back, Maggie. Hi, thanks for having me. So let's talk about this. Singapore was one of the first countries that was touted as a success story. What's happened? Well, there are now 23,000 new cases that have popped up that are linked to these dormitories

where foreign workers live while they work low-wage jobs on working visas in the city-state. So these workers don't get access to Singapore's social safety nets. Some of them told the New York Times that they've been confined to these dorms and prevented from seeking medical care. So in some ways, it's sort of like Singapore has some of these giant, cruise boats full of coronavirus cases, but just like parked on land in its city. And so they're just starting to pop up again. Yeah, exactly.

Are there other countries like it? What about, for example, what about Germany? Germany is definitely one of the other ones where you're starting to see cases popping up again. Cases tripled between Monday and Tuesday, more than 900 new cases in 24 hours. No kidding. And that, yeah, and that jump, you know, it's not entirely clear what's causing it, but it is worth noting that it's been about a COVID incubation period's worth of time since Germany started opening its schools and businesses again.

Similar thing happening in South Korea, where bars and nightclubs opened and then closed again after one guy went out for an evening on the town and seems to have passed COVID to more than 100 people. So these are in countries that have sort of put out some of the flames of the flare-ups, and then suddenly we have them thinking, okay, it's safe to go back, and once again, it starts over again. Right. I mean, I think one of the big messages that we should be taking away from this is that coronavirus isn't a problem you solve once and wash your hands of. You know, these curbs can unflatten, and they can do it in places that have big investments in testing and contact tracing. So those are things that we should be paying attention to here in a country that doesn't. You know, we're going to be having big problems keeping coronavirus under control,

given that even the places with better infrastructure than we have put in place for this are having those problems. Well, we're going to be having our own experiment in this country, aren't we? As some states are now opening up the bars and there were big crowds this week in some of the bars I was reading about it, especially in Wisconsin. Yeah, yeah, my own state of Minnesota here is going to have all of the bars and restaurants open by the end of the month. And our case numbers are still going up. We have not actually flattened out yet.

So that will be an experiment and we'll see what happens. So are these countries that have flared up again, what are they doing? Just batting down the hatches one more time? Yeah, I mean, like you see in South Korea, they closed the bars and nightclubs again. you know, kind of doubling up on the testing, working harder on the contact tracing, sometimes kind of closing down things that had previously been opened, and it just kind of becomes a game of whackamol. But we also hear about the COVID-19 numbers in Asia, you say Europe and now here,

but it's happening in other places that we don't hear much about, isn't it? Yeah, this week, a bunch of news outlets began to report on how the virus is affecting cities in central and South America and in Africa. So the New York Times went into this project where they documented deaths from all cause death in a number of South American cities. So basically showing how many more people are dying in those places of everything right now compared to what's normal for this time of year. That's an important stat because it's going to capture unconfirmed COVID deaths in places where you can't get tested or where you might not be able to go to a doctor. And it's also capturing deaths that aren't caused by COVID, but that wouldn't have happened if the hospitals hadn't been overloaded, right? So what we're seeing in some of these cities are huge increases in all-cause deaths compared to past years. So some of these things that the New York Times noted was that these stats doubled in Lima, Peru.

They tripled in Manaus, Brazil, and they were five times higher than normal in Guayaquil, Ecuador. So that means that some of these cities in South and Central America are having impacts as big as what we saw in places like Italy. And some places in Africa are reporting it and actually not reporting it, right? They're holding back. Yeah, it's now in every African country. Some of the countries like Cameroon, Egypt, and Algeria are seeing some of the biggest increases in COVID cases in the world right now. And the U.S. Embassy announced this week that Tanzania is experiencing enough of an outbreak to overwhelm the hospitals in that country. But that can't be corroborated, though, because as the BBC reported, Tanzanian leaders stopped reporting case and fatality data for COVID on April 29th. Let's move on to your next story. Your next story looks at how the U.S. is funding PPE around the world or actually not funding it. Right. So a lot of these countries, central, South America, Africa, you know, where we're having these big outbreaks right now, they rely on

U.S. State Department funds for a lot of health care infrastructure issues, right? And there's $900 million that the U.S. State Department has committed to international response, but it's also told the organizations that are seeking those funds that they won't be allowed to use that money to purchase PPE. When NPR talked to the State Department about that, they were told that that was specifically to reduce competition and ensure that the U.S. would have more access to PPE. But it's really worrying a lot of these organizations

because it means that they're kind of left in a bond, They can't purchase the protection for front client health care workers. And we're talking about places where health care systems are already stretched pretty thin. So I give them the money anyhow. I mean, what would they be using the money for instead? I mean, there are other things you can do with it, supporting people through lockdowns, for instance. You can be putting money into getting medications for people, you know, things like that. But PPE is such a huge important part of how we protect health care workers.

And not being able to get that really, really cripples your response. Yeah. And also I understand that the U.S. pulled support from the WHO's program to develop drugs and vaccines for COVID-19. Right. There's been a number of sort of nationalist turns that we've taken on international health care related to COVID. And it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Because when you think about how anything is produced, medications, vaccines, those are all international supply chains.

And if we are not participating in international sharing of the outcome of those supply chains, what's that going to mean for us down the road when we need the supplies? And that's why international cooperation is so important to try to coordinate with everyone. That is what the experts say. And goodness, we'll see how that plays out. I want to talk about some good news. There is actually some good news in the world. Isn't there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is. I swear, there is. And actually, it's one of my favorite subjects. It's about coral reefs, I understand, right? So, algae, scientists have grown some algae that could help coral survive climate change better. You know, it's a long way from being used in the real world. This is just laboratory.

results, but it's a first step in the right direction, and I am bound and determined to end this on a high note today. So the algae live inside coral polyps, and they actually help coral eat. They kind of produce the photosynthesis that gives coral nutrition. When the temperature in the water gets too hot, the algae start to react, they can't handle it, and the coral effectively spit them out. So when you get coral bleaching, that's what's happening. The coral are, you know, vomiting out their algae and starving themselves. So scientists took some of this algae, and they raised hundreds of generations of it in warmer water, effectively breeding, evolving it to be more heat tolerant and finding something that could maybe

keep the coral healthier at hotter temperatures. And hopefully then they could seed the algae around to the reefs that may be spitting out their algae or, you know, spreading the new warm tolerant algae around. That's the idea eventually. Right now, it works in a lab. And hey, it's good news. It is. You know, I also heard that there's a group in Florida that is growing corals and aquariums, which is very hard to do. I know I used to do that when I had my saltwater tank. Maybe you can retire and be a coral rancher. Ooh, that's not such a bad idea. I will come to your coral ranch.

Maggie Kerth is senior science reporter at 538.com, bringing us some bad news and some good news this week. Thank you for. for taking to have to be with us today. Thank you so much. A quick program note. In April, we teamed up with Valley Public Radio to unravel the medical mystery of Valley Fever. That's a fungal disease that commonly impacts communities in dusty, dry regions of the Southwest U.S. and Latin America. And we asked you for your personal experiences on the SciFri Voxpop app. And your response was incredible. Over 50 calls came from family, friends, and patients. We wrote up an article where you can see photos and listen to their stories. It's up on our website at sciencefriady.com, Your Valley Fever. That's sciencefriiday.com, your valley fever. After the break, dubious coronavirus claims have been

flying fast and loose in the last couple of weeks. We're going to fact-check your feed with virologist Angela Rasmussen. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The race continues to understand the inner workings of COVID-19, find treatments, and develop a vaccine, and it all threatens to bury us in an avalanche of new scientific research. Some of it good, some of it preliminary, thin, or with conclusions unsupported by the actual evidence. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Scientists are collaborating with an intensity never seen before. But if your social media feed is anything like mine, you are being bombarded with a confusing

number of claims and many don't have good or maybe any research behind them. So what better time, ladies and gentlemen, for another edition of Fact Check Your Feed, where we debate, discuss, and debunk all that stuff clogging your inbox. And we're starting out with a video that went viral on Facebook and YouTube last week, though it's now been taken down. The pandemic video made bombastic claims about the coronavirus, but as my next guest is about to explain, many were either baseless or flat-out falls. Here with me again is Dr. Angela Rasmussen, Assistant Research Scientist and Virologist at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. Welcome back, Angela. Thank you so much for having me back, Ira.

Let's start with that viral video. What's incorrect in the claims made there? Oh, almost everything. That video pretty much from actually the moment I hit play, I started shouting, oh my God, I can't believe that they are saying this. Both the researcher who is interviewed in that video, Judy Mikovitz, as well as some of the circumstances of her, prior career as a scientist, as well as the things that she's actually saying about coronavirus and vaccines are completely incorrect. Beginning with really sort of her history, so she made news by publishing a paper about 10 years ago that suggested that a mouse retrovirus was the cause

of chronic fatigue syndrome. And it turned out that that was a laboratory contaminant that caused those results to happen. So the paper ended up being retracted. And she was, fired by her employer, which was a research institute in Nevada, and was arrested then because she actually took a laptop and several lab notebooks and some data from her office to Southern California. So the whole thing is kind of a mess, but it doesn't actually have anything to do with her being silenced for being a truth teller. And in fact, she is not a truth teller because in that video, she says a whole number of things that are just flat out untrue. She says, Ebola was made in a lab in the 1980s.

Yes, and that's easy to disprove. Ebola actually emerged naturally in the country of Zaire at the time. Now the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa. So we knew about Ebola before the 80s, and it did infect people. She also claimed that we've never successfully made a vaccine for an RNA virus, which is not true. So many of the vaccines that we've known about and have worked for years, including polio, the measles mumps rebella vaccine, influenza vaccines. Those are all RNA viruses with very effective vaccines.

What do you think is the most important claim that needs to be debunked here? There's two really important claims that need to be debunked. One is that coronavirus pandemic was planned and it has something to do with vaccination. And the second is that vaccines are inherent. unsafe and ineffective. So she claims that she's not anti-vaccine, but she claims also that vaccines are immune therapies when in reality vaccines can be used that way, but they're typically used as preventative measures. And it's very dangerous, I think, to circulate the idea that vaccines or any hypothetical vaccine that will be developed against SARS-Coronavirus-2 is all

part of this dangerous conspiracy to kill people, because then people might not get the vaccine, and getting that vaccine will be key to us sort of resuming our normal lives. And these types of vaccine denial we've already seen with measles vaccine denial, for example, that one consequence of this is actually people can be very seriously ill and people can die. You know, one of the claims that you mentioned from this viral video is when we keep hearing from politicians also, and that is that the virus was made. And a listener, James, called into our box pop app with a question. Scientists have always said that most likely the virus came from bats in the wild and transferred to a intermediate host animal. What's the evidence?

How do scientists know that the virus is natural versus from a lab? That's a good question. How do scientists know that it was, you know, emerging naturally and not made in a lab? So we have several pieces of evidence that suggests, first of all, that this virus wasn't made. And it's also highly unlikely that this virus escaped accidentally from a lab, which has been another origin theory that's been put out there. So by analyzing the genome of this virus, there are genetic features that would be observable if this virus would. was actually made from one of the reverse genetic systems that we know exist for beta coronaviruses.

So one way that viruses, biologists can study viruses is by using these reverse genetic systems, which is basically a way to store all of the information you need to make the virus on a piece of DNA. And if you are going to engineer a virus or do any kind of genetic engineering, you need to have access to one of these reverse genetic systems, there are telltale sequences associated with these

reverse genetic systems and none of them are part of this virus, SARS-Coronavirus 2's genome. So that's one very strong indicator that this virus emerged naturally. Another feature of the virus genome that has to do with the polybasic cleavage site in the spike protein is something that we haven't seen before. So it would be very, very unlikely that somebody would sort of spontaneously engineer a polybasic cleavage site with this particular sequence because computer modeling shows that this sequence would actually be predicted as suboptimal. And it's very unlikely that somebody would just decide to use a suboptimal polybasic cleavage site sequence when they could use one of the other ones that are already known for other beta coronaviruses.

So the evidence, just by looking at the genome and analyzing the genome, strongly, strongly suggests that this virus emerged naturally. And one of the problems with the way that this has sort of been presented in the public discussion is that people seem to think that it's either only one of two things could have happened. It could have come out of a lab by accident or it could have emerged from this wet market in Wuhan. And the reality is we know that people who live near bat caves in China actually a number of them have antibodies to other bats SARS like coronaviruses. So there are many circumstances in which people might be exposed to these viruses. is just in the course of their normal daily lives. And in fact, that serology data suggests that this happens with a fair amount of frequency.

So it's entirely possible that any number of natural encounters with either a bat or their droppings or another animal potentially that was infected with SARS coronavirus too was actually the event that led to this rather than an escape from a lab. Now, these aren't the first examples of falsehoods that have gone viral during the first. this pandemic, why do you think that people are latching onto so many things that are demonstrably incorrect now? So one of the things that scientists think about a lot is sort of how to deal with uncertainty. And I think that the general public, you know, when facing something that's completely new like this, that, you know, scientists don't know what to make of this. There's so much that we

don't know about this. We know far less than what we actually do know about this virus, which is only been, you know, known to us for the last five and a half months. I think that the general public has a lot of difficulty dealing with this uncertainty with the fact that we actually just don't know very much about this and we're working as hard as we can to find out. But I think people's natural response to this is to try to find explanations. And, you know, scientists would call this developing hypotheses. The problem is sort of separating a hypothesis. from the evidence that we actually have to prove that that hypothesis is true. And while most scientists are credible, most scientists are also very careful to sort of gauge,

you know, to make people aware of the limits of our knowledge. Moving on to another piece of research making the rounds, coronavirus has been seen in the semen of at least, what, six people, including a couple in recovery from the virus. Does this hint that like Zika, it may be sexually transmitted? So it's something definitely that we should look into, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that coronaviruses can be sexually transmitted. So this study was a very small report showing that six patients who are recovering from

confirmed cases of COVID had viral RNA in their semen. That doesn't necessarily suggest that they had enough actual infectious virus. in their semen to transmit it by that route. And one thing that would also be a big factor in this is whether receptors, receptor distribution of ACE2 would allow actually sexual transmission to be a root of transmission. We know for Zika and Ebola virus that the viruses can persist in the testes of infected men. The Ebola outbreak in particular, we learned this in a very unfortunate way when a person

who had recovered from Ebola, ended up sexually transmitting it to two different women who both died. So it definitely has huge public health implications if COVID can be sexually transmitted. But showing that there's just RNA in the semen is a far cry from showing that sexual transmission is possible. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. What kind of research would it take to actually understand if the virus is sexually transmitted? So I think there's a couple different approaches you could take to this. One is to just look for infectious virus in the semen of people who are RNA positive. If there's no infectious virus there or there's very, very low levels of it, that certainly

indicates that sexual transmission is probably less of a risk. Another way to look at this is by looking at epidemiology. And are there patterns of transmission in populations that suggest that sexual transmission might be occurring? So to my knowledge, there is no evidence that there is, first of all, infectious virus in the semen, or that there are clusters of transmission that suggest a pattern associated with sexual transmission. So until we have that type of information, it's really hard to say whether this is something we need to be worried about or not. Amira Plato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

We talked about this story I'm going to bring up a bit last week, but I want to come back to it from a virology point of view. And that is the claim that COVID-19 has been mutating to become much more infectious. Why is that wrong? So COVID-19 or SARS-Coronavirus 2, viruses, RNA-Viruses, including coronaviruses, mutate every time they copy their genomes. So that is basically because the enzymes that do the copying make mistakes, and those mistakes don't get corrected. Sometimes those mistakes will confer an advantage to the virus. Sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they are actually detrimental to the virus.

When they confer some type of advantage, then that mutation can be selected for, undergo what we call positive selection evolutionarily. Sometimes, though, there are other things called founder effects where basically a mutation. mutation gets into a population early on. And just because it lucked out and was there first, it ends up being the dominant strain in that community. So the paper published or the preprint last week that showed that there was a mutation in the spike protein that became dominant throughout the US

and in some other places could be from either of those things. That preprint suggested that it is associated with increased transmissibility. And it's worth noting that while that may be the case, that study does not indicate that that is actually true. In order to determine that and the functional effect that a mutation will have, you actually need to do studies to see if that mutation is linked to increase transmissibility, perhaps in an animal model, or increases in viral fitness. And there's a really good example of this happening with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It turned out that that virus, when they looked at it in cell culture, actually did that mutation conferred some fitness advantages, meaning the virus could replicate more efficiently and affect cells better. But when they tried it out in animals, it had no effect on pathogenesis or the ability of the virus to cause disease.

So we need to be really cautious about the way we talk about the functional implications of these mutations for viruses. It definitely deserves a closer look, but we can't conclude that it's increasing transmission just based on sequence analysis alone. And we also keep hearing people talking about herd immunity, but maybe with the wrong definition. So the way we've induced herd immunity, meaning that enough people in the population are immune, that a virus cannot establish itself and spread in that population, the way that we've done that historically is with vaccines.

you make basically the majority of people unable, not susceptible to a given virus viral pathogen, and then that virus won't spread in that community, so we prevent it. In this case, people are talking about herd immunity now as if, like, let's infect everybody with this potentially lethal virus, and once everybody gets infected with it, we'll all be immune. And that is a terrible way to approach herd immunity. The main reason that vaccines have been such incredibly powerful public health tools is that they allow us to get that immunity without having to suffer the deaths that will happen if we were actually infected with those viruses themselves. So I think it's really, really dangerous to talk about herd immunity as let's just reopen up and infect everybody. We're now in month five since the coronavirus first started really making itself known around the globe and right here in the, in the,

the U.S. is debunking getting easier or harder for you? Are you seeing more misinformation or less? I'd say probably more, although it's been a pretty steady stream from the beginning of this. A lot of the times I see the same sort of thing get sort of recycled over and over again in different ways. So the origin of the virus is a great example. Early on in the pandemic, like in February, you know, a lot of people were saying, oh, this is a biological weapon. And then Christian Anderson and colleagues published a paper that outlined the genetic evidence why this is probably not a biological weapon. In fact, it's not a biological weapon. So then this sort of went away for a little bit and then came back in the form of this

laboratory accident origin theory. So these same stories kind of keep getting brought back resurrected with just slightly different twist on them. And it's, it's, it does honestly get pretty exhausting trying to argue about these all the time. Yeah. And that is all the time we have. But keep sending us your questionable stories on Science Friday Vox Pop app. And we'll be back to fact check it with Dr. Rasmussen in a future show. As, as always, Angela, you've been terrific. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having me. I always love coming to Science Friday and talking about this with you, Ira. You're welcome.

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, Assistant Research Scientist, and a virologist at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health in New York. After the break, we've got a home food project for your lockdown life. Mold-based fermentation with Koji. We'll geek out about miso popcorn, other creative combinations. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Plato. If anything is certain in this stay-at-home pandemic, it's that people are cooking, like these listeners who called us to share their proud creations. Since the onset of the pandemic, I've brewed three big batches of kombucha using a variety of teas, chai, Assam, and White. I've grown oyster mushrooms from a mail-ordered bag of my sileal spawn and fermented two jars of sauerkraut. Through this quarantine, I've done a lot of bread baking and a lot of fermenting. I recently made a sourcrow with red cabbage, beets, and carrots, and it was really, really good. And I have a whole bunch of ginger that I accidentally bought too much of. So now I'm going to make a fermented ginger paste and see how that works. So I made dandelion jam, pesto from the chickweed and dead nettle

in my yard. I've been brewing kombucha. I'm trying to make fass. I've been using a mesophilic yogurt starter to make my own yogurt. It's really been great fun and a good way to pass time. Those were the voices of Morgan from Portland, Camille and Tanya from Arkansas. Thank you for your submissions to the Science Friday Fox Pop app. And as we face still uncertain opening dates for workplaces and recreation around the country, what better to do then play with our food? Maybe you've already done the sourdough or the pickles or the yogurt, right? My next guests have the perfect next step for you. It's called Koji. It's a white, fuzzy mold, and it smells like fruit. And we can thank it for a splendid array of foods from East Asian cultures, including soy

sauce, miso, and sake. And my next guest want you to join in to make culinary delights with the help of this magical mold, even beyond the traditional uses. Think Koji Charcuttery or miso peanut butter. Here to talk more about the transformation power of Aspergillus or Isaiah are my guests, the co-authors of the book Koji Alchemy. Rich Shee is a mechanical engineer by day and the exhibit engineer for NYC's Museum of Food and Drink. And Jeremy Umanski is a co-cheft and co-owner of Larder Delicatessen and Bakery in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having us on. Thank you.

I know I've already given the overview that Koji is a mold and had it's been used for thousands of years, but please, you got to sell me on the idea of using a mold to make food, Jeremy. Why is this so delicious? Well, one thing to keep in mind is you're already eating this mold in one way, shape, or form. I'm willing to bet that virtually every listener today has some soy sauce in their house, whether it's a bottle of it or a little packet from Chinese. takeout. And that soy sauce cannot be made without this mold. So we already have it in our lives. We already eat so many different fermented foods that rely on molds, things like cheeses and charkootery. We can lump yeast into that. They're both types of fungi. So bread, it's already exists there. So using it to make foods more delicious is pretty simple and straightforward. And is it the rice that we're really cooking with it, right?

Exactly. You can't just take the spores of the mold and make something delicious. You have to get it to grow first. So you grow it on rice or barley or actually any starchy substrate. So it could be wheat berries. It could be rye. It could be hominy. Give me an idea what it looks like. You know, I've seen photos. It looks very pretty growing there on the rice. I think pretty is a lackluster word, Ira. It is, it is sultry and stunning. I mean, it's sultry and stunning. It really is, you look at it and you get lost in it. It is just so white and fuzzy and fluffy. It's inviting, almost like, you know, you look at a picture of a sky with beautiful, like, cumulus clouds in it.

And you're like, that just makes you relax and feel at home. And it just, oh, I could, I could hug one. of those clouds or I could lay down on it and take a nap. Koji kind of has that same effect on you when you look at it and it's growing fresh. And then you throw its aroma on top of that, which, you know, its aroma is, you know, green apple and champagne and honeysuckle, tropical fruit like mango and pineapple with a little bit of mushroominess there. Some people even say they pick up roasted chestnut.

I mean, it's just absolutely bewitching and intoxicating from how it. it looks to how it smells, to how it tastes. It's just absolutely incredible. You know, you sound like you're describing a fine wine. Rich, does it do that for you too, make you feel that way? Yeah, I mean, I am not as externally excited about Kodi as Jeremy is, but internally it just blows my mind. Koji is so simple. All you need is like a warm space with a little bit of humidity that can be achieved in an array of ways, very similar to setting up for breadproofing. And you just basically boil some water or you set up a steamer and you mix these ingredients in, dust on some spores. And you mix every 12 hours. And who can't do that over the course of two days?

I mean, you can go to work, come back home and do your mix. And at the end of the day, it's done and ready to go. and then all you have to do is add some water to it and some grain like cook grains. And you can make this amazing sweet porridge that you can also use as a marinade. That's a perfect, like the perfect marinade for any piece of meat or protein you put it on. Because we often go through the exercises of making a marinade such that you enhance the flavor of the core component itself. Koji does that by default by taking the enzymes to break down the constituent. parts of this food and creates, you know, basically what I call, what I like to refer to as, you know, an automatic barbecue sauce that has nothing, that is made with everything that's part of the food

that you create it with. And Jeremy, does it have a taste of its own? If I put it on rice, for example, and I'm growing it on rice, I know what rice tastes like. Well, well, then the other flavor there be that of the mold. Yeah, so it's actually going to transform the rice itself. So oftentimes we talk about one of the molds, Aspergillus lucensis, that produces citric acid as it grows, not as a byproduct, but actually produces it as it grows. And if you were to eat some rice that had this mold growing on it, it would taste like sour patch kids. And we're talking just plain old rice here.

And Rich, are there different strains of Koji that produce different flavors? There are specific cogees that create different flavors based on their enzyme engines. SoJ has this an enzymatic engine that is more on the protease side to break down proteins into amino acids. As these enzymes become active in terms of breaking down the base food substances, you get all sorts of, you know, interesting and funky flavors. I recall, you know, every time that I grow it on rye or even taff, I get these, you know, mushroomy aromas as well as flavors. We're all familiar with soy sauce, for example, which is one of the many things Koji is used to make, as you said before.

How does that process work? I mean, how do you start from a mold and get to a tasty soy sauce, Rich? Yeah, so to make soy sauce, you basically cook some soybeans. whether you soak them and steam them or you boil them such that in the state where they're cooked all the way through. So that's one part of it. The other part is you have toasted, cracked wheat. So what you do is you basically have a one-to-one ratio of these two ingredients. You mix the ingredients together.

You allow it to cool to a temperature that's pretty much to your body temp. And that's how a lot of Japanese makers gauge when you can actually inoculate it with the spores. then you just you basically sprinkle it lightly with spores. Once you grow the Koji, you put it in a basically a salt water brine and you allow it to ferment. And then you have a specific mixing schedule based on the temperature conditions and the stages of making it. So that's how it happens. Yeah. And you know, the only difference between miso or an amino paste, as we call them, because they're

pasts and they're rich in amino acids and an amino sauce like soy sauce is, water content. So whether you decide you want to make amiss or gojejezeng or any of these pasts or you want to make an amino sauce, it's just varying degrees of water that they contain. So you can go in either direction just as easily. And sake, can you get alcohol? Oh my God, an you. You know, it's really interesting because of the breath, the types of sugars, like the oglios sugars and the glucose that's formed in an amazaki, which is a mixture of a cooked starch, the cogi inoculated starch, and water, you can get a lot of alcohol. I mean, you can get upwards towards a 12% ABV without doing anything extraordinary, literally just putting some yeast

in and letting it sit and be happy. So you can get some fantastic alcohols. And, uh, Some of the cogeys that produce these different flavors and aromas and some that produce citric acid can just add infinite layers of complexity to any of the alcohols you make. I understand you can make popcorn. Rich, how did you come up with that? So I was kind of just looking around in my pantry to figure out, hey, what could I really play around with to create this accessible starch that could have these gaps such that the mold would grow in between because you need a level of air in between the grains? And I just saw this popcorn and I said, well, when you pop popcorn, you're basically, you know, it's basically a pressure cooker for each kernel. And when it blows up, it uses the internal steam to blow it up to create a puffed condition such that the starch is very accessible. As we all know, when we eat it, it dissolves in our mouths. So I just decided that, hey, I don't have to cook it.

I can make it explode and create this accessible starch. And all I needed to do was not to make it too wet is just to mist it with a little bit of water. And there I had my accessible starch. I had plenty of air for the mold to grow. And I just, you know, to assure that it would grow well, I just dusted it with a little bit of flour in the spores. And it took off like gangbusters. And for somebody who doesn't necessarily want to sit and wait for, you know, your grains to soak, your beans to soak and you just want to try something?

It's a pretty cool starting point. Can you use Koji as a quarantine experiment for all of us now? You most definitely can. Whatever level you want to plug in with, you can. So for example, traditionally throughout Japan, they use a product called Shio Koji, which is this porridge of the molded rice or barley with salt added to it. And that is used as a general all-purpose seasoning.

So you can easily find that online, and you can order a little package of it. It'll show up at your doorstep. You can rub it on some chicken or some steak or saute some vegetables with it and see instantly the short-term drasticness that Koji brings to amazing flavor as you're working with it. So while it is straightforward, should you not want to grow the mold, There's several great companies out there. Most of them are really small, family-owned businesses, like Cold Mountain Koji, and you can buy pre-inoculated rice or barley from them.

So if you wanted to go ahead and make an amino paste, like a miso or gojujang, you could simply buy the inoculated grains, mix them with a little water to hydrate them, open up a can of beans, mix those together with the inocular. grain and a little bit of salt. We use 3% of its weight as a very minimum on the base, but you can go 5%, 7%, 10%, and let it sit. And you will have your own amino paste, something like a miso. Or you could simply order spores and just go all in and start growing the mold on everything like we do. There really are no barriers to entry for working with Koji. I'm Ira Plato and this is Science Friday from WNYC

studios. Does Richard, does playing with molds give you a new dimension about creativity with food? You know, we're talking about jams and pickles and pastos and vinegars. Now you have something new to play with? I think it's just the fact that Koji allows you to do so many multi-faceted things. A lot of us focus on very specific fermented products like crowd or kimchi or, you know, yogurt or a very specific beer from a very specific region with all these incredible mults and hops and specific water and a specific alcohol content. What we have to think about is they got to that point because somebody just left something out for a period of time such that it can be consumed at a specific time for survival. And people got tied into this idea of, hey, I really

love that, I want to keep making it the same exact way because not only is it safe to consume, but it's delicious. But our idea is to think about this in a much larger scheme in terms of that specific discovery can be with any food that you apply it to. I mean, granted, things can go wrong, but it's the adventure of all these possibilities that we have access to, whether it be the ingredients, technology, ideas, you know, or even, you know, past products that, we know and love that we can kind of change up and play around with. And that's the nature of what we love to do. How does it go with pastrami? Oh, man. If I describe it, I'll be bragging. So I'll let Rich, who's eaten my pastrami describe it. So I think one of the things to understand about it is that,

you know, through these, you know, through usage of, you know, creating these amino acids, through the enzymes and these sugars, you get this amazing flavor like that bounds, you know, that's above and beyond what you could do in a traditional method. With a traditional method, you know, you have the slow process of heating such that you can create the food that is quite unctuous by breaking down the connective tissue and it makes it moist and it makes it very pleasing. And then you also have a brine to create this, you know, the salinity. But with Akogi, you can actually create like this level of tenderness and depth of

flavor without doing any sort of manipulation. And it's just bringing it up a level of what it already is. I'm coming over. We'll save a seat on the patio for you. We're not open in the dining room for a little bit. Yeah. Thank you both. This was quite fascinating. I hope we have inspired a lot of people to try some new cooking ideas. Rich Shee is a mechanical engineer by day. and the exhibit engineer for NYC's Museum of Food and Drink. And Jeremy Umanski is a chef and owner of Larder Delicatessen and Bakery in Cleveland, Ohio, and their co-authors of the book, Koji Alchemy, Rediscovering the Magic of Mold-Based Fermentation. Thank you guys for enlightening us and giving us something more to do as we stay home.

You're welcome. Ira, thank you so much. This has been a dream come true. Yeah, this is a pleasure. Yeah, thank you so much. And that's about all the time we have for this hour. Charles Berkowitz is our director. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather, and Kathleen Davis.

B.J. Leideman composed our theme music. And if you missed any part of this program or you would like to hear it again, please subscribe to our podcasts. Or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Oh, and on the Science Friday Voxpop app, we want to know what question you have about environmental rollbacks in the U.S. Is there a certain sector or species you're worried about most? Leave us a voice message and let us know this on the Science Friday Box Pop app.

Have a great and safe weekend. I'm Iraflato.