Stinky Cheese

Researchers collaborate to create fermented food products using microbes harvested from some malodorous parts of the human body.

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No bellybuttons were harmed in the making of this camembert.WIKIMEDIA, NJGJNow that your Thanksgiving meals have settled, it’s probably safe to hip you to the latest treat on the culinary scene: bellybutton cheese. University of California, Los Angeles postdoc Christina Agapakis and scent researcher/artist Sissel Tolaas have conspired to craft cheeses using microbes harvested from human beings. One cheese was cultured using a sample of microbes from the bellybutton of chef and acclaimed food writer Michael Pollan, and others with bacteria swabbed from Agapakis’s mouth and skin, artist Olafur Eliasson’s tears, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist’s nose, and another scientist’s feet. Quite the collection de fromages, no?

The cheeses are all part of the “Selfmade” exhibit in GROW YOUR OWN, a new exhibition on synthetic biology, at the Science Gallery at Trinity College in Dublin, on display—for smelling but not tasting—until January 14, 2014. “[Visitors] were really nervous and uncomfortable, and kind of making these grossed out faces,” Agapakis told NPR. “Then they smell the cheese, and they'll realize that it just smells like a normal cheese.”

The bacteria and yeasts used in cheesemaking are actually remarkably similar to the microbial assemblages that inhabit the human body, Agapakis explained. Thus the jarringly familiar and human-y smells imparted to some cheese varieties (I’m looking at you, Limburger). “It's no surprise that sometimes cheese odours and body odours are similar,” Agapakis told the magazine ...

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Meet the Author

  • Bob Grant

    From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer.
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