Ever since starting to brew my own kombucha, I have been fascinated with wild yeast. Most of us think of yeast as packets of little brown granules that we buy at the supermarket, but yeast is (quite literally) all around us.

It’s thanks to yeast that we can enjoy some of our favorite foods and drinks, like beer, wine and bread. It’s how the beautiful loaf of sourdough rye bread pictured above came to be. We need yeast to keep us healthy.

I tackled the topic of yeast in this month’s Wild Culture column over on Paste Magazine, and I took some time to get the input of journalist Simran Sethi. Sethi just released her new book Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love, in which yeast appears as a very important character. As Sethi says, “Microbes, including yeast, are everything. Not just in beer, but in life. The study of yeast is the study of us.”

You can read the column all about yeast, and my interview with Sethi, here.