The Inspiring Cheese
Among the most ancient food processing technologies is cheese, the oldest of which is found to be 7,200 years old. But how did our ancestors know that there was rennet — a complex combination of protease enzymes in particular chymosin, extracted from animal stomachs — that could curdles the protein (casein) present in milk?
Modern humans can only guess that it happened by chance, it is said that when our ancestors stored milk in a qirbah — a water container made from animal bladders, the milk proteins curdled into cheese.
But I do not believe this coincidence theory, not even only humans, animals and plants-are inspired to be able to overcome the problems of life faced in their respective times. Even very weak fungi roots can penetrate the hardest rock. While a mighty big plant cannot live on a rock, a very weak black fungus can live freely on it.
What do cheese and fungi that can live on the rock have in common? Both need enzymes, universal compounds provided by the Creator of the universe to all inhabitants of the earth, from the smallest to the largest — so that they can solve their life problems.
If with enzymes whose names were not known at the time — they could separate proteins from milk, then what can we do with enzymes in this super modern era?
In the stomachs of our cattle, it’s not just chymosin, there are thousands of other enzymes. If humans have been able to make cheese with chymosin for thousands of years, what can we do with phosphatase, lipase and decarboxylase for example? all in the stomach of the same animal.
With these three enzymes we will be able to make our own fuels such as diesel, gasoline and LPG, as easily as we make cheese. For this we only need vegetable oils that we can easily grow in our most arid soils.
That is, among other things, why we at Green Waqf invite the community to plant as many tamanu or nyamplung as possible, because this is where one of our best hopes lies for the community to be energy independent to remote corners of this archipelago.
Big trees don’t live on rocks, but fungi grow there. To make cheese, you don’t need big companies, most people if they want to learn to do it-they can do, so that’s how energy independence should be.
