Each subject was asked to swab cells from a particular area of their body—including food writer Michael Pollan’s belly button and artist Olafur Eliasson’s tears—and those microbes were then used to craft wheels of cheese. From there, the actual cheese-making process was similar to that of a normal cheese.
Plate a traditional washed rind cheese next to the wheel made from the bacteria inside cheese maker Seana Doughty’s mouth, and you’d really have to take a gamble on which is ok to eat. Agapakis says the dairy on display at the Science Gallery doesn’t smell or look much different than what you’d find at your local cheese shop. So the fact that a cheese was made with the bacteria from a human’s armpit sweat, doesn’t necessarily mean that the dairy will smell—or taste—like an armpit after a basketball game. “One of the main points of the project is that these are just normal cheeses,” she says. “There’s much more to a person’s body odor or a cheese odor than the few strains we collected and grew to put into the cheese.” In other words, you probably won’t die if you eat this cheese, but taste it at your own risk.
Image Credit : Science Gallery
From Wired
