I lurk in a Facebook group called "Photos of Evansville, Indiana." In it, photographers of various skill levels share photos taken around our city.
Two days ago, a member shared this photo taken across the street from Reitz Memorial High School:
Image Credit: Ted Byrom, via the "Photos of Evansville, Indiana" Facebook group
It's terrible, and I love it.
I could totally see it as a pop art painting in our local museum. Art teachers would ask the students:
"What do you think the artist was trying to portray?
"What does the hand sanitizer represent?"
"What about the Road Closed sign?"
"Notice how the composition hat-tips the classical concept of a vanishing point while boldly departing from the typical usage!"
"Likewise with the pillar. It follows the rule of thirds by placing something on the line, but breaks the rule by making it entirely insignificant. What did the artist intend to imply by this?"
I like how the hand sanitizer sits in the foreground and immediately catches your eye as if it's the subject of the photo. Then you realize that it's out-of-focus, and move up to the stop sign. But that's... also not an interesting subject. From there, the composition draws you to the Road Closed sign, which isn't very interesting either. The photo is almost interesting, but lacks a clear subject. It only leaves you confused.
Lose the hand sanitizer and add a girl walking by with an boldly-colored umbrella, and it would work just fine. Or keep the hand sanitizer, add an N95 mask, and post it during COVID as a commentary. Five years ago, the stop sign and construction barrier could have been meaningful:
"Life has stopped, and all roads to happiness are blocked. I feel stagnant, and all I can do is keep washing my hands and hoping to survive it"
Obviously, this is just someone's snapshot of a view that he liked, but couldn't convey. He accidentally managed a composition that fell into the uncanny valley between "Just someone's snapshot" and "Art that's trying to say something", and it's hilarious.
I recently came across the following joke map online:
Surprisingly, and probably unintentionally, there’s a grain of historical truth to this “Megachusetts”. Massachusetts’ original colonial charter specified northern and southern borders, and that the colony should extend all the way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, or rather: “…from the Atlantick and Westerne Sea and Ocean on the East Parte, to the South Sea on the West Parte;” The grant wasn’t quite the line depicted in the meme, but it was a line across the continent nevertheless.
Massachusetts wasn’t the only New England colony to get such a “sea to sea” grant. Connecticut’s colonial charter of 1662 granted the young colony all English territory “…from the said Narrogancett Bay on the East to the South Sea on the West parte, with the Islands thereunto adioyneinge…”
Besides the creative spellings of “Narragansett” and “adjoining” (from before standardized English spelling), this line gave Connecticut a basis to claim to its own narrow strip of entire continent, again hypothetically reaching the Pacific ocean. And like any reasonable government of the era, the colonial governments of Connecticut and Massachusetts kept on claiming this land as long as they feasibly could.
Several colonies had western claims along these lines. New York and Virginia claimed the most western land, but North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia all had claims, too. Many of these seven state claims overlapped. The southern states in particular actually had access to land past the Appalachians, and several of them tried to actually settle those areas and enforce their claims after American independence.
Connecticut and Massachusetts, however, had no way to enforce most of their claims. The clearest issue was that French Louisiana and Spanish New Spain were in the way of the westernmost section, but also Pennsylvania and New York territory cut off direct access New England the old Northwest. (And of course, there were numerous indigenous nations in the territory as well, but in the Americans’ minds they were going to be conquered eventually either way.)
But even without direct access Connecticut didn’t entirely give up on its long western extension. States of the young USA started ceding their western land claims to the federal government in the decades following independence. This kept the peace between states and gained goodwill from the union, and made it easier for Americans to expand into the area. Connecticut ceded most of their claim, too but held onto a small piece of what would become Northeast Ohio.
Connecticut even started sending settlers to the area in the 1790s, under the auspices of the “Connecticut Land Company”. A few towns were even founded, most notably one on the banks of the Cuyahoga river by a certain Moses Cleaveland. Even today, Cleveland, Ohio1 maintains its original New England-style common grazing land as its central plaza, Public Square.
This area, known as the “Connecticut Western Reserve”, eventually was ceded to the federal government as well. It was just too impractical for Connecticut to manage an exclave on the other side of the Appalachians. But the legacy of this last bit of Long Connecticut (Disconnecticut?) remains, most notably in the name of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Coming soon: The elementary school in a nuclear bunker
On the afternoon of February 2nd, I received an email from a student researcher named Angel Nulani. She had found 40 social media accounts with AI-generated black women that perpetuated racist, anti-black behavior. Coincidentally, earlier that day, I had received an email from Sharihan Al-Akhras from BBC News Arabic. She was working on a piece about an impossibly-black AI-generated character that stole real videos and “reskinned” them with AI.
Together, Riddance embarked on an investigation in collaboration with the BBC that uncovered over100 social media accounts that depict the likenesses of Black women through AI-generated characters.
Research revealed accounts running out of 34 countries across North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. They tally a cumulative 19.4 million followers across Instagram and TikTok. The majority (68 accounts) actively promote monetization on sites where they sell explicit AI-generated media.
AI-generated videos are especially adept in race-to-the-bottom trends because creators can avoid accountability. They push limits to get attention. But by depicting black women, they perpetuate a long history of exploiting black people, using caricatures and self-hating characters to attract morbidly curious or racist audiences.
By identifying and examining these accounts, we can start to find solutions for this quickly-growing problem. With AI media improving rapidly, solutions must keep up, otherwise this AI-perpetuated exploitation will only get worse.
How AI advancements scaled digital blackface
Our sample of 100 accounts is representative of both big and small accounts. Of the 100 accounts, 63 were exclusive to Instagram, 4 were exclusive to TikTok, and 33 had pages on both. This means that tracked 136 pages total.
Most of the Instagram accounts were created between mid-2025 and early 2026. A third were created in the past three months alone, and 60 changed their usernames at least once, meaning they “pivoted” to AI-generated black women. The trend is clearly demonstrated in the graph below, measuring when the Instagram accounts were created and if they still have their original usernames.
Google released the Veo 3 AI video model in May, and companies like Kling and Runway unveiled competing video models shortly after. AI-generated videos flooded Instagram and TikTok at this time, as creators experimented with AI slop but lacked clear monetization plans. Once their accounts grew, they looked towards profitable AI niches.
All 100 accounts had to satisfy three criteria:
They use entirely AI-generated media
They depict black women (including numerous albino and vitiligo accounts)
They are sexual in nature
The explosion of accounts from late 2025 through today directly correlates with the releases of open-source AI generation models: FLUX-2, an AI image model launched in November, and Alibaba’s Wan 2.2 Animate Replace, an AI video model released in September. FLUX-2 can generate sexual images, and Wan 2.2 can “animate” them. This combination lets AI creators generate realistic, consistent AI videos without guardrails.
Many of the AI-generated characters demonstrate explicit, internalized anti-blackness. They may state a desire to be European (particularly Slavic) or ask if they’re “good enough” for white attention. Women with vitiligo and albinism are characterized as having one white parent, outright calling themselves white or half-white. At least three accounts have made references to the n-word, and one gives its followers an “n-word pass.”
Women are often depicted kissing famous white men like Donald Trump, John Cena, or Johnny Sins (a white male porn actor). Some accounts post about Jeffrey Epstein, with one character attempting to defend him. (35) of the accounts include race-play terminology in their usernames, like “black”, “white”, “vanilla”, “charcoal”, “dark”, “ebony”, or “noir”.
Many accounts fetishize aspects of Black culture and the Black diaspora while having no understanding of them. Black American naming conventions are used for African characters. African accounts often have no specified ethnicity. And when they try to give characters a cultural background, they get basic information wrong. For example, Carolamater, an account based in Lithuania, depicts a Mursi woman with light skin and box braids. The real Mursi people, from southern Ethiopia, are known for their distinctive lip plates and body painting.
And then, there are the characters who have impossibly-black skin.
Not normal
What does it mean to have “impossibly-black” skin?
Part of my job is to perfectly dial-in accurate skin tones on camera. This helps me identify exactly what’s wrong with these characters. Any real human, light or dark-skinned, has skin tones falling on a vector of various red-orange hues. This is clearly demonstrated by a vectorscope, which analyzes color and saturation.
Below, I’ve highlighted four dots representing different skin tones. These all cluster on the top-left vector around what is known as the “skin tone line”, which slopes up and to the left.
Impossibly-black characters, on the other hand, land almost directly in the middle of the vectorscope, which means there is no color saturation in their skin. Notably, this is a separate measurement from the amount of light reflected off the skin, which can also vary. The resulting characters display a range of dark grey to pitch-black skin.
Historically racist portrayals of Black people, like caricatures or minstrel shows, often painted their faces literally black. And if it’s not obvious, AI-generated characters will have normal skin tones by default. Human creators have to deliberately try to make impossibly-black characters. In testing, we have confirmed that prompting FLUX-2 for “very dark, pitch black skin with no undertones” will yield impossibly-black skin.
Nianoir is a character with impossibly-black skin. It had the most followers of all 100 accounts, with 3.1 million on TikTok alone — 2.7 million more than the next largest TikTok account. The account was removed from TikTok after our request for comment, but remains up on Instagram (we’ll dive into the platform responses later).
Their bio says “Just a girl with dark side... 🖤” [Grammar incorrect]. The Ukraine-based account makes many of their videos by stealing content from real creators, then replacing them with the Nianoir character. The AI video model Wan 2.2 Animate Replace does this by design.
The BBC interviewed Riya Ulan, a young model from Malaysia, who had her own videos stolen by Nianoir. Ms. Ulan was stunned and tried to take action, but was unable to get the stolen content taken down until the BBC reached out.
The sad irony is that Nianoir’s comment sections are full of people posting screenshots from the videos Nianoir stole from — often from white or Asian creators like Ms. Ulan — which are met with accusations that these creators are the ones whitewashing.
Organized, international operations
AI-generated media is about quantity before quality, so operators often run multiple accounts. Sometimes, this turns into full operations with teams of people working in content farms.
One operation, based in the United Kingdom, runs ten accounts, including four of the top ten in total followers. Their accounts totaled almost 3.5 million followers, though there’s significant follower overlap. These accounts follow one another, “collaborate” between characters, and some use the exact same character.
Their accounts include zurilovesvanilla, the fourth-most-followed account of all 100, and ayannasoblack, an impossibly-black character. Naledi_the_white_girl is an albino black character who once posted that she “still commits 50% of the crime.”
Many accounts had at least one former username, showing this group was making other AI content before pivoting to Black characters. Eighteen username changes before landing on “zurilovesvanilla” tells you this wasn’t their first idea, but it was their most profitable one.
How do they make money? The majority of accounts (68 of the 100) promote monetization links to sites where they sell AI porn. You can assume that the other 32 are waiting to get big enough to monetize. None of the content on social media is explicit, so the objective is to capture an audience on an social media, then filter the “whales” — a term from betting meaning high-spending individuals — to the monetized sites.
A group based in Kosovo demonstrates the recency of the trend. They run seven accounts and focus on dark-skinned, curvy avatars, with a couple (shaykelt and nyxkash) having the same exact avatar. Their accounts combined to a total of 680,000 followers. Every account was created in the past two months and has no username changes. This group identified the niche and went all-in right away.
What platforms can do
I wasn’t expecting Instagram or TikTok to proactively remove many of these accounts, and for the most part, I was right. Over three weeks of collecting and tracking accounts, a few were taken down. But this was insignificant compared to the new accounts that popped up every day.
Then, Riddance and the BBC independently reached out to TikTok and Instagram for comment, and provided both with lists of accounts.
Within three days, TikTok banned 20 of 37 accounts, including removing Nianoir.xo, the single largest account on either platform. Several accounts belonging to the UK group (onlyskyewhite, zurilovesvanilla, emma.cynder) and the Kosovo group (nyxkash, abbyblacki9) were taken offline entirely. TikTok also applied AI-generated labels to the videos we shared. These were significant steps, taken quickly.
Instagram took down just 2 accounts: ayannasoblack and naledi_the_white_girl, both belonging to the UK content farm. Nineteen other accounts were age-gated, meaning they went from fully public to requiring digital ID to view. The remaining 59 accounts are still fully public and unchanged.
When asking TikTok which policy those 18 deleted accounts had violated, they cited their policy that prohibits “pretending to be a fake person or organization with the goal of misleading people.”
Instagram’s version of this policy, “Authentic Identity Representation,” prohibits accounts “created or used to deceive others.” But in practice, the policy targets accounts that impersonate real people, or networks engaged in coordinated manipulation. It doesn’t appear to be designed for scenarios like this, when someone creates an entirely fictional persona.
95 of the 100 accounts did not disclose they are AI-generated anywhere on social media. None of them labeled individual posts as AI-generated, which both TikTok and Instagram require. In theory, when either detect a C2PA “watermark” that indicates a video is AI-generated, they can label it as such. But the open-source AI models powering this surge, FLUX-2 and Wan 2.2, don’t embed C2PA metadata.
TikTok stated that over 1.3 billion videos have been labeled as AI-generated to date. They also stated that 98% of the videos TikTok removed for violating edited media and AIGC policies, and 90% that violated sexual activity and services policies, were removed proactively in the most recent reporting period. Instagram declined to comment.
Instagram’s hateful conduct policy explicitly bans harmful stereotypes “historically linked to intimidation or violence, such as Blackface.” The impossibly-black characters documented in this article — characters with no undertones, no color saturation, skin that reads as literal black — are digital Blackface. In my opinion, Instagram’s written policy should cover them.
What’s missing?
Platforms should directly address AI-generated impersonation of marginalized groups. A user who encounters an impossibly-black AI character posting watermelon memes has to decide whether to report it as “hate speech” (which doesn’t capture the AI deception), “spam” (which misses the harm), or “AI-generated content” (which also misses the harm). The reporting categories don’t reflect the problem.
As agentic AI content pipelines become more common, we’ll need automated and human interventions. Automated systems don’t have the depth of social awareness needed to catch what’s happening here. So while platforms will naturally focus on automated, software-based solutions, they should work with third parties with human investigators to help out.
If you come across harmful content, report it for hate speech or sexual exploitation so platforms have that data. It might feel like the reporting goes unnoticed, but in aggregate it may help.
But while AI detection is still possible for some people, the quality improvements of AI media will outpace detection in the long run. The accounts in this investigation are already more convincing than they were six months ago. Platforms must act now by banning accounts and finding algorithmic patterns outside of the videos themselves.
“We’re so beautiful”
Angel Nulani, the student researcher who brought many of these accounts to our attention, did hours of research for this project. As a Black woman herself, this investigation was emotionally taxing. We asked her to be an editor and contributor to the piece. Angel is not a journalist or investigator (yet), but a student with an incredible drive and attention to detail. We assumed she was already a working professional.
As the investigation neared its conclusion, we asked her about how the content and investigation had affected her. We decided to include her response in full.
What upsets me is not that these characters are self-hating, but that there is no “self.” For the majority of the people who are behind these accounts, the only Black people they know are the women they generated. They were not born Black. They chose to be Black, and yet they spend so much time distancing themselves from it.
An ‘all lives matter’ shirt can be paired with booty shorts; crime statistics can be overlaid on thirst traps; videos crying over their features are spliced between suggestive yoga poses.
It’s not enough to pander to people that say “ebony” more than “African” because the appeal is not simply a Black woman desiring white men. The appeal is in a Black woman desiring a complete absorption into whiteness. The men they attract are not suitors, they are saviors.
I’ve tried so hard to disassociate. As a Black woman that’s been online since I was young, I assumed I saw it all. Nothing could really hurt me. At first, all I wanted was to be objective, and rational, and done with it. But this cuts me down to my core.
Ironically, that’s even more confirmation they could never be us, because when you’re real there’s no separating yourself from this. The watermelon emojis are par for the course for them; they’re not for me.
I’m terrified to think there’s a little Black girl somewhere feeling as terrible as I do right now because some guy in Malta wanted €3 a month.
They make us seem so ugly, but we’re beautiful. We’re so beautiful.
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During my first year at Figma, I designed and printed a run of posters for the office titled “Design is more.” The idea was to highlight that UX design is more than people expect, and connected in interesting ways to other domains. Today, they feel like a spiritual predecessor to this blog.
The first series was three posters:
I still (mostly) like them. I do believe that software can learn more about conveyance from video games; a lot of first-run experiences and particularly new feature onboarding still feel like a series of random pop-ups floating around the screen without much understanding of me as a user.
I would rewrite these posters, however, and particularly the Fitts’s Law examples: they’re generic and probably not as relevant to today’s applications.
After series one, we also collaboratively started working on series two, but the pandemic put a halt to the effort, and these posters were never finished/printed. But the two below were perhaps closest to ready, and they seem fun today; I particularly liked the joke on the Hick’s Law one.
Jon Yablonski, the author of “Laws of UX,” made some posters in a similar vein and they’re available for purchase. His are slightly more on the visual side, but I was delighted to discover today that we both chose a rather similar approach to visualizing the Zeigarnik Effect.
The human immune system is, in one sense, a detection mechanism. It has evolved, over millions of years, to scan the body for molecular signals that tell it whether to attack or stand down. Most of these signals come from pathogens, damaged cells, or the body’s own hormones. But in 2019, a lab in Germany published a finding that pointed to a much stranger source: one of the signals sensed by the immune system is found in sauerkraut.
When people eat sauerkraut, a molecule called phenyllactic acid (D-PLA) — found in fermented foods — enters their bloodstream and activates a receptor, known as HCA3, on immune cells, triggering an anti-inflammatory response. In addition to lactic acid, phenyllactic acid is one of many compounds produced by lactic acid bacteria during the fermentation of sauerkraut and related fermented foods. Prior to this study, other molecules had been found to bind HCA3, but D-PLA was a hundredfold more potent than any of them.
Left: Molecular structure of D-PLA. Right: Sauerkraut. Credit: Gandydancer
This discovery advances our understanding of how fermented foods can reduce inflammation and positively affect human health. But more striking is what it suggests about hominid physiology. Although HCA3 is part of a larger family of receptors broadly conserved across eukaryotes, HCA3 is only present in humans and other great apes like chimpanzees and gorillas — and not even in other mammals. It is a recent addition to the genome, appearing only a few million years ago. Its existence seems to suggest that our immune system evolved to recognize the microbial metabolites from fermented foods.
We tend to think of fermented foods as something humans invented and then chose to eat. But, increasingly, scientific evidence suggests the causality runs the other way. Fermented foods appear to have helped shape human biology itself, and our bodies may have been built, in part, to expect them. The case for this runs from changes in hominid gut anatomy millions of years ago to the HCA3 receptor, to a growing body of research linking fermented food consumption to immune function and gut health. And it raises an uncomfortable question about what happened when the Western food system, in the name of safety and efficiency, quietly removed these foods from our diets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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Early Fermentation
Fermented foods are the result of the controlled growth of communities of microbes. At their core, they are the products of the interaction of these microbes and whatever food they consume, whether cabbage or cucumber. While this process varies from food to food, fermentation typically involves managing environmental variables such as oxygen, temperature, and salinity. In contrast to food preservation methods like canning or even pickling, which are designed to prevent microbial growth, fermentation harnesses the capacity of naturally occurring microbes found on fresh food or in the environment to outcompete spoilage organisms.
Kimchi under the microscope (400x magnification). The red dot is chili oil. Many microbes are visible. Credit: Rachel Dutton
Most archaeological evidence from pottery shards suggests that fermented food production is at least 7,000 to 10,000 years old. This timeframe coincides with the major transition to agrarian lifestyles, which would have reliably produced surpluses of food and the subsequent need for preservation methods.1 While this explanation satisfies most scholars, there is reason to believe that fermentation may be far older.
For one, it’s a very simple process to trigger. Some foods even ferment spontaneously. In the case of alcoholic drinks, like beer, wine, or mead, ubiquitous yeast species, which are naturally found on grapes and other fruit skins, rapidly use sugar as a food source for reproduction, producing ethanol as a byproduct. The same results occur when ripe fruit falls to the ground and its sugar is exposed to the environment, or when honey is diluted with water.
Other processes require only minimal intervention. For example, submerging fresh food in liquid or burying it creates a low-oxygen environment that encourages the growth of acid-producing bacteria that preserve the food by what is called “lactic acid fermentation.” This technique produces dill pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchi. While salt is often added as an additional intervention against unwanted microbes, it’s not required as it isn’t the primary driver of the fermentation.
Another argument for an earlier origin for fermented foods is that they are found across nearly all human cultures. While the number of fermented foods in the modern, Western diet is fairly limited (cheese, yogurt, bread, chocolate, coffee, beer, wine, kimchi, and kombucha) hundreds more are eaten around the world, from fermented shark in Greenland to a seemingly limitless variety of fermented soy beans in Asia. This diversity is a testament to how humans gradually mastered this ancient practice and modified it to suit new environments as they moved out of Africa.
Around 14 million years ago, our hominid ancestors were arboreal species whose diet would have been primarily based on fresh fruits picked from the trees they lived in. When ripe fruit fell to the ground and underwent spontaneous fermentation, it would have been toxic to our ancient ancestors due to its high concentration of ethanol. Their bodies as yet had no efficient way to break down ethanol.
But then, about 10 million years ago, a mutation arose in the genome of the common ancestor of humans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. This mutation, a single amino acid change in the enzyme Alcohol Dehydrogenase 4 (ADH4), enabled it to break down and detoxify ethanol with 40x higher efficiency. The capacity to consume this energy-rich but previously dangerous fruit may even have driven our transition from an arboreal lifestyle to a terrestrial one. What’s more, this ability to tolerate ethanol may have been what allowed our ancestors to diversify their diet and survive while lineages without this mutation went extinct.
The fossil record shows that a major shift in hominid anatomy occurred around 2 million years ago, when hominids developed a smaller rib cage and larger skull. At the same time, another major change took place in their intestines. Compared to our closest relatives, humans have a digestive tract that is 40 percent shorter. This decrease was thought to be driven by the external processing of our food, which reduced the time and energy involved in chewing and digesting. Anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that the technological innovations of controlling fire and cooking food led to this major change, and that the excess energy we got from cooked food, in turn, supported the evolution of a larger brain.
However, two recent studies, by biological anthropologist Katie Amato in 2021 and evolutionary biologist Erin Hecht in 2023, suggest that these anatomical changes may have been driven by human use of fermentation even before humans began to cook. By allowing microbial species to ferment and break down complex carbohydrates and other macromolecules in foods, we may have turned over certain parts of an otherwise energy-intensive digestive process to microbes in a form of “external digestion.” This use of fermentation to pre-digest food, intentional or not, may have served as a predecessor to cooking, providing the extra calories needed to support the evolution of a larger brain.
Another benefit of fermentation is that it offered access to foods which, previously, would have been toxic. As our ancestors came down from the trees and needed new ways to fill their stomachs, the tubers of many plants and grasses offered an appealing, ready source of calories. Tubers contain large deposits of starch. Root vegetables, such as potatoes, yams, and carrots, are our modern-day, highly domesticated equivalents. But the wild tubers of our ancestors’ time were hard to chew, and some contained low levels of toxins. Varieties of cassava, for example, contain compounds that release cyanide when ingested. After just a few days of fermentation, however, microbes destroy these dangerous molecules and make the food safe to eat.2
Ultimately, given the simplicity of the fermentation process, its provision of new food sources, and its role in decreasing the need for extensive chewing and digestion, fermentation could have had an outsized impact on human evolution. It may, in fact, have helped make us human.
Peril and Promise
Perhaps the most striking thing about fermentation is that humans figured out how to control the growth of microbial species long before we understood what “microbes” were.
No one had seen microbial life until the 17th century, when Dutch scientist Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek used a handmade microscope to reveal small, motile forms he described as “animalcules.” It wasn’t until the late 1800s, however, that the French chemist Louis Pasteur demonstrated the role of microbes through his studies of fermented foods. His work on the spoilage of beer and wine formed the basis of the “germ theory” of disease. If microbes could be the causative agents of spoilage in food, Pasteur reasoned, maybe they could also be the causative agents of disease.
For his part, Pasteur was not strictly “anti-microbe.” He found them enthralling, investigating the differences between lactic fermentation (yogurt, pickles, and sauerkraut), butyric fermentation (butter, cheese, and milk), and acetic fermentation (kombucha, sourdough, sour beer), as well as developing the categories “aerobic” and “anaerobic” (which refer to whether microbes require oxygen to survive).
Even so, Pasteur’s work identifying microbes responsible for putrescence and disease has had the greatest impact on our food system. At the beginning of the twentieth century, automated machinery expanded canning capacity from roughly 10 cans a day to 1,000. Variation in the quality of the sealed lids, temperature treatments, and exposure to contaminants through handling meant a greater potential for microbial illnesses like botulism.
After three deadly botulism outbreaks in 1919 linked to California-distributed olives, the canning industry turned to Pasteur-inspired “bacteriologists” to design better canning systems and restore public confidence. While the resulting practices — including steam sterilization, the marking of batches, and traceable can coding — were at first voluntary, the Cannery Act of 1925 mandated statewide compliance.
By the mid-1900s, microbial research into food had come to focus on how to keep organisms out of it. Innovations in heat, pressure, refrigeration and anti-microbial agents to extend shelf life and decrease potential contamination with food-borne pathogens formed the core of academic and industrial research. As our methods of food production shifted, so did our diets. Americans largely moved away from the consumption of traditionally fermented foods, with one major exception.
That exception began with a single lecture. The Russian zoologist, Ilya Mechnikoff, based at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, was well known in the early 1900s for his scientific discoveries involving the immune system, for which he would win the Nobel Prize. But towards the end of his career, Metchnikoff became fascinated with the idea that aging was just another disease awaiting a cure.
In his 1908 book, The Prolongation of Life, Metchnikoff proposed that this disease was caused by "putrefying" microbes that lived within the human gut, or, as he put it, “chronic poisoning from an abundant intestinal flora.” His suggested cure came in an unexpected form — yogurt. Mechnikoff reasoned that just as the acid in sour milk prevented the growth of spoilage organisms, it might limit the growth of “spoilage” microbes in the gut.
After speaking with a student after one lecture, Metchnikoff learned of large numbers of centenarians in Bulgaria (one of whom he credulously reported as being “158” years of age).3 Metchnikoff hypothesized that the consumption of large quantities of yogurt in Bulgaria prevented aging through the action of lactic acid on gut bacteria. After obtaining a sample of the “Bulgarian bacillus” (Lactobacillus delbrückii subsp. bulgaricus) from yogurt, he set out to study the effects on the gut. His lab work showed that the presence of the yogurt microbe and the lactic acid it produced slowed the growth of intestinal microbes.
Metchnikoff thus advised the consumption of yogurt to promote healthy intestinal balance, writing: “A reader who has little knowledge of such matters may be surprised by my recommendation to absorb large quantities of microbes, as the general belief is that microbes are all harmful. This belief, however, is erroneous. There are many useful microbes, amongst which the lactic bacilli have an honourable place.”
Metchnikoff initially presented his yogurt hypothesis at a public lecture in 1904 in Paris, titled “Old Age.” The lecture went the early 1900s equivalent of viral. Newspapers ran stories with headlines like “Drink Sour Milk and Live to be 180 Years Old” (Evansville Courier and Press) and “Sour Milk is Elixir: Secret of Long Life is Discovered by Prof. Metchnikoff” (Chicago Daily Tribune). “Within months of Metchnikoff’s lecture, milk-souring germs had blossomed into an international business. Pharmacies throughout Europe and the United States were offering Bulgarian cultures in the form of tablets, powders, and bouillons — to be consumed as is or used,” writes Luba Vikhanski in her book Immunity. It was, in effect, the first “superfood.”4
Evansville Courier and Press, February 4, 1906
“Probiotic” products quickly followed, containing dehydrated “lactic bacilli,” that anyone could use to sour their own milk in the way prescribed by Metchnikoff. But despite interest in yogurt and probiotics as health foods, most 20th century microbiologists remained focused on “bad actors,” the microbes and pathogens involved in disease. However, this changed toward the end of the century with advances in sequencing technology and chemical analysis techniques like mass spectrometry, which allowed them to probe microbial genetics and metabolism more closely and with more nuance.5
Environmental DNA sequencing revealed the diversity of microbial species across habitats, including in and on the human body as well as in our food. Understanding what these microbes are doing, and how, has become one of the challenges of modern microbiology.
To Eat Microbes
In response to this challenge, a lab at Stanford University, led by Erica and Justin Sonnenburg, has been doing seminal work on the human gut microbiome and how species within it function and interact. Recently, the Sonnenburgs have turned their focus on diet-microbiome interactions to fermented foods. A clinical trial, which the Sonnenburgs set up in collaboration with nutrition scientist Christopher Gardner in 2021, offered the clearest evidence to date that fermented foods are essential for gut health. In the trial, 36 healthy adults spent 10 weeks eating a diet high in such foods.
At the end of the study, they showed increases in gut microbiome diversity, which is generally associated with gut health. (The participants had new microbial species in their guts, which did not come from the fermented foods. It seems, rather, that fermented foods somehow make the existing gut ecosystem more receptive to incorporating new strains.) Perhaps an even more impactful outcome was that the researchers also found widespread decreases in inflammatory markers in the blood of these participants.
Given that low levels of inflammation sustained over time, referred to as chronic inflammation, is believed to be implicated in many diseases, the ability to decrease it though simple dietary changes would be welcome. However, the six servings of fermented foods a day consumed by the study participants is far higher than that in most U.S. diets. While yogurt and cheese are commonplace, with an average of 13.8lbs and 42.3lbs consumed per person per year respectively, this represents about a serving of fermented dairy a day. Fermented vegetables also comprise less than a serving per day. The impressive 387 million pounds of sauerkraut Americans consume per year equates to only 1.5lb per person, or about 0.06 servings a day.6 There has been a resurgence in interest in fermented foods, from high-end chefs experimenting with new types of fermentations to home fermenters caught up in the pandemic sourdough craze, but we have a long way to go before consumption reaches levels needed for clinically meaningful outcomes.
Kefir under the microscope (400x magnification). Credit: Rachel Dutton
Even larger gaps remain in our understanding of how fermented foods actually drive health benefits. Beyond inflammation, fermented food consumption has been associated with a wide range of positive health outcomes, from gut health to mental health. As compelling as the Sonnenburg study is, it doesn’t yet reveal the mechanism(s) by which fermented foods trigger changes in human physiology.
While the 2019 sauerkraut study points to the importance of microbial metabolites like phenyllactic acid, if we co-evolved with fermented foods over millions of years, this example of a metabolite-receptor pairing is likely just the tip of the iceberg. As in many other areas of microbiome research, we need to move beyond correlation to causation. Doing so will require a much deeper understanding of the molecular composition of fermented foods, how they are connected to human biology, and more precise clinical studies.
Scientists are beginning to recognize the potential diversity of bioactive metabolites in fermented foods, but most studies focus on a single food type at a time and use different assays of bioactivity from lab to lab. To be able to effectively map the complex interactions between fermented food microbes, metabolites, and human biology, we need larger, consolidated datasets.
To this end, the Microcosm Foods project has been assembling a first of its kind collection of fermented food data pairing metagenomics (mapping microbes), metabolomics (mapping metabolites), and transcriptomics (mapping changes in human immune cells upon exposure to fermented foods) across over 100 different foods. Open-source, systematically-acquired datasets such as these will help build the scientific foundation needed to untangle these complex interactions.
For most of human history, people harnessed microbial ecosystems to make fermented foods and reaped the benefits without understanding their mechanism. Then, in a period of roughly 100 years, the Western food system replaced them with sterile, shelf-stable alternatives.
Today, we are finally beginning to understand how fermented foods interact with our biology — through receptors like HCA3, through shifts in gut microbial diversity, and through inflammation pathways. Science is catching up to what fermentation has been doing all along.
Rachel Dutton is a microbiologist studying fermented foods, from their use as microbiome models to their impacts on health. She received a PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University, and led academic labs at Harvard and UC San Diego. Rachel is currently a Resident at the Astera Institute and a Fellow in the Big If True Science program at Renaissance Philanthropy.
Preservation isn’t the only benefit of fermentation, however. It also completely transforms raw ingredients, adding new flavors, textures, and aromas. These changes are dictated by microbial metabolism, which produces not just primary products of fermentation like acids, but also a diverse collection of enzymes and flavor molecules.
Cassava is the third most important dietary staple around the world after rice and corn. The fermented starch that comes from this quick-ferment is used as the starting point for many different staple foods such as fufu in Nigeria or pao de quiejo, also known as Brazilian cheese bread.
In his essay on Metchnikoff, blogger H.D. Miller writes “Unfortunately, reports of Bulgarian longevity seem to have been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the best current guess is that Bulgarian life expectancy at the turn of the last century was actually only 40.08 years, more than a few decades short of a century. As with Sardinians and Okinawans more recently, Bulgarians were better at convincing outsiders they were very old than actually being very old.”
Today, we know that many, if not most, species of microbes on the planet do not grow well under standard lab conditions, which limits the usefulness of earlier culturing methods.
A single serving size for yogurt is 170g (or ¾ cup), cheese is 42g (about a 1 inch cube), and sauerkraut is 30g (2 tablespoons). Based on the reported average annual per person consumption in the US, the average daily consumption is 0.1 servings of yogurt, 1 serving of cheese, and 0.06 servings of sauerkraut.
Well, yes. This is, in fact, how "workload" works under capitalism: labor is perpetually squeezed to do more, to generate more surplus value, to create more profit for the boss. Technological advancements -- that's what "AI" purports to be -- enable more to be done during the work day (which certainly extends well beyond some 40-hour week as everyone checks their email, their texts, their messages after hours and on weekends). Computing has not made us more productive, even though we feel as though we're doing more, and doing it more quickly, more intensely.
I am reminded, no surprise, of the children's book Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (which I talk in Teaching Machines), published in 1958 -- which is to say we’ve known this exploitation is happening for a very long time now. In it, the titular character Danny and his friends Irene and Joe program his next door neighbor’s mainframe computer -- remarkably for the era, housed in Professor Bullfinch’s laboratory at the back of his house -- to do their homework for them. The trio believe they’ve discovered a great time-saving device, but when their teacher ascertains what they’ve done, she assigns them even more homework to do.
Another story from Teaching Machines: when I was researching the book, I poured through hundreds and hundreds of letters sent to and from Sidney Pressey and B. F. Skinner. It’s easy to imagine their world of letters -- pre-computer, pre-Internet, pre-email -- as slow: slow to be written, slow to be delivered; their wording careful, their responses deliberate. But as both psychologists struggled with the commercialization of the machines they’d designed, the tone and frequency of their correspondence became more frenetic. Sometimes they would send two, three, four letters a day to the same person, dashing off angry, half-baked responses before stewing for a couple of hours and dashing off another one.
They were manic. But they were scientists; they were entrepreneurs.
So maybe it’s a side note, and maybe my main point: I think the media has been focused on only a small sliver of “‘AI’ psychosis,” the stories that are the most violent and tragic. The delusions and mania are much more widespread, but most of these are tolerated, even encouraged, as long as people continue to perform “productively” at their jobs.
Much like the furious quest for “personalization” in the digital classroom, one side effect of “AI” will be the further loss of community. Everyone works in isolation, clicking away endlessly with their chatbot of choice that sycophantically assures them that they don’t need anyone else. No longer will people turn to their colleagues for collaboration, for support, for advice, for mentorship. With “AI,” solidarity and trust are deliberately undermined -- the classic labor-busting tactic. “I can do it myself” (or rather “Claude tells me that it can do it for me, but I can put my name on the project”), people tell themselves; while everyone else second-guesses as to whether or not Claude actually has.
It’s the sad sociopathy of the tech elite, the sad paranoia of the conspiracy theorist, “democratized.”
This week, venture capitalist and techno-authoritarian Marc Andreessen triumphantly pronounced that he has “zero” levels of introspection — “as little as possible.” This is the Randian ideal, something every entrepreneur should aspire to, he tells the podcast audience, adding “and you know, if you go back 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective.”
According to Andreessen, civilization had none of that until that “guilt based whammy showed up from Europe, a lot of it from Vienna” -- a remarkably stupid reading of history, religion, culture, literature, so much so you might wonder if the man has ever opened a book, let alone his mind, in his life.
It is notable that Andreessen – one of the biggest proponents of (and, he certainly hopes, profiteers from) “AI” would dismiss introspection, arguably a core facet of “intelligence” that computers do not cannot will not ever possess. “AI” does not “know” anything really, but even more, it does not “know” about its “knowing.” It has no introspection; no meta-cognition; no embodied awareness of how it feels when it learns and when it knows; no meta-contextual awareness of where and when and why and with and from whom it knows; no reflexivity; no self-efficacy. It serves Andreessen’s interests then to deride and dismiss other ways of knowing; to limit “intelligence” to the cognitive flexes of what his “AI” machinery can quickly spew; and to imply, in turn, that humans are inferior, irrelevant.
But mostly, I'd argue, when Andreessen proudly states that he rejects introspection what he really means to say is that he eschews accountability. He will take no responsibility for his actions. He is a billionaire; he doesn’t believe he has to.
This is a moral problem, of course – a grossly immoral one at that. But it is also a policy problem, and one we can rectify, I’m certain.
Today’s bird is the red-throated loon, the smallest and lightest of the loon species. Its feet are located quite far back on its body, making it incredibly clumsy on land. And yet it is the only loon that can take off into flight from land. The bird is associated with weather prediction -- its cries supposedly indicate whether or not it will rain.
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Image Credit: Ted Byrom, via the "Photos of Evansville, Indiana" Facebook group
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