“Fermentation-food-product profits.”...Of course, lol! How did this "match made in... H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks Even start out? Glad you asked... -- Pfizer became a major penicillin producer in the 1940s During World War II, Pfizer developed a large-scale fermentation process to mass-produce penicillin. This required growing microbes in giant fermentation tanks. --After the war, they had huge fermentation capacity When wartime demand dropped, Pfizer had: - massive fermentation equipment - microbiology expertise - industrial-scale production facilities They needed new products that used fermentation. * Cheese enzymes were a perfect fit One key ingredient in cheese production is rennet, an enzyme that coagulates milk. Pfizer scientists figured out they could produce enzymes using microbial fermentation, which worked "perfectly" with their existing infrastructure. So Pfizer began producing microbial rennet (cheese-making enzymes) for the dairy industry. (Yay us...) Most practitioners—and patients—don’t realize that the majority of cheese consumed today isn’t made with traditional animal rennet. Instead, about 80–90% of cheese uses something called fermentation-produced chymosin (FPC)—an enzyme made through genetic engineering and microbial fermentation, a technology first commercialized in the biotech industry (including early work by Pfizer). Here’s why that matters. Traditional cheese uses animal rennet, a mixture of enzymes (mainly chymosin with a small amount of pepsin) naturally found in the stomach of young calves. These enzymes curdle milk and influence how cheese digests and ages. Modern industrial cheese often replaces this with lab-produced chymosin, where microbes are engineered with the gene for the enzyme and fermented in large tanks to produce it at scale. From a regulatory standpoint, it’s considered safe. But from a functional medicine perspective, there are a few reasons this is worth understanding: 🧬 Food processing complexity