David Zilber: Rewriting the future of food, one microbe at a time

What’s your story?

I’ve loved science since I was very young. But I got such poor grades in school that I couldn’t get into university. My mother was a fantastic chef, coming from the Caribbean, and I was always by her side in the kitchen. So instead, I got a job at a four-star restaurant in Toronto. 

I thrived in kitchens as a teenager, but I missed understanding how the world worked. So, while I worked my way across Canada, I started reading popular science books, and my bookshelf grew. 

Then I was hired as a chef de partie at Noma, the world’s best restaurant. In this kitchen, broad scientific knowledge wasn’t overlooked – it was rewarded. The head chef saw my potential and offered me a job running the fermentation lab. Within six months, I was tasked with writing The Noma Guide to Fermentation. It was a huge swerve in my life, and I learned so much.

Today I’m a food scientist at the bioscience company Novonesis. By design, it removes some of the surprise and complexity from the natural fermentation processes I’ve worked with in kitchens. But I’m a realist. There are eight billion people on Earth, and more than half live in cities. Not everyone can get vegetables from a local farm. Access to fermented foods, even industrially produced, is good for the world.

Tell us about a moment on your journey that stands out in your memory.

Whenever I’ve seen traditional fermentations that have existed for thousands of years, I’ve seen how anything that lasts for a long time does so by participating in nature’s cycles.

My trip to a village in Bulgaria’s Rhodope Mountains was the most powerful impression of this I’ve ever had. There was an old couple who had one cow and a calf, which they grazed on the hills. In these traditional societies, people don’t drink fresh milk; it’s always transformed into yoghurt. They consumed minimal meat – cans of rillette made from a male calf from last year, cooked with yogurt, grains and vegetables from the garden.

You realise that the microbes we’ve learned to cultivate keep not just our food healthy, but us healthy too. And though a modern dairy plant is a very different thing to a Bulgarian grandmother, we still rely on these ancient processes. 

What’s the impact you hope to make?

I would like to have a recipe in a grocery store. It has happened a few times already. At Novonesis, I found a strain of wine bacteria that improved the flavour of texturized vegetable protein – the basis of all plant-based meat.

That spun into a new product, now used by one of the largest meat packers in South America in their hybrid meat products – not just because it’s sustainable, but because it’s cheaper and matches flavour parity. This recipe makes a real difference to millions of people. Those are the kinds of small wins I strive for.

Whose stories have inspired you?

Trevor Warmedahl is a cheesemaker who got his start in large-scale cheese manufacturing in Washington State. The further he got into [commercial cheesemaking], the more he realized, this ain’t it. Now he travels the world, researching, writing and living a frugal life with a van. We met for the first time in Mexico at the Oaxaca Fermentation Festival. I’ve never met someone like him.

I’m also inspired by my dad. He exposed me to my earliest science education, sending me to science camp and air shows instead of places like Disney World. I credit my love of science to him.

How would you like your story to change the world?

Maybe my trajectory is testament to other ways of being in the world: I flunked school, but here I am, doing real science in a lab. I came at it from a completely unexpected direction. And on the flip side of that, another world is possible – even inevitable. I’m not saying you shouldn’t lament the loss of biodiversity or the irreparable changes we’ve brought upon Earth, but the Earth will be fine – it has been through bottlenecks before. The lesson for us is that the only way to survive is by working with, not against, other organisms.