Free The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 by Mary Roach

ten calories out of a bowl of Cheerios."
    Biologists no longer doubt the depth of our dependence on bacteria. Jansson avoids antibiotics unless they're the only option and eats probiotic foods like yogurt and prebiotic foods like yacón, a South American root that nourishes bacteria in the gut. Until we understand more about this symbiosis, she and others say, it's best to ingest the cultures we know and trust. "What's beautiful about fermenting vegetables is that they're naturally populated by lactic-acid bacteria," Katz said. "Raw flesh is sterile. You're just culturing whatever was on the knife."
    When Torma unclamped his jar, a sickly sweet miasma filled the air—an odor as natural as it was repellent. Decaying meat produces its own peculiar scent molecules, I later learned, with names like putrescine and cadaverine. I could still smell them on my clothes hours later. Torma stuck two fingers down the jar and fished out a long, wet sliver. "Want a taste?" he said.
    It was the end of a long day. I'd spent most of it consuming everything set before me: ants, acorns, raw milk, dumpster stew, and seven kinds of mead, among other delicacies. But even Katz took a pass on high meat. While Torma threw back his head and dropped in his portion, like a seal swallowing a mackerel, we quietly took our leave. "You have to trust your senses," Katz said, as we were driving away. "To me, that smelled like death."
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    Katz has lived with HIV for almost two decades. For many years he medicated himself with his own ferments and local herbs—chickweed, yellow dock, violet leaf, burdock root. But periodic tests at the AIDS clinic in Nashville showed that his T-cell count was still low. Then, in the late nineties, he began to lose weight. He often felt listless and mildly nauseated. At first, he assumed that he was just depressed, but the symptoms got worse. "I started feeling lightheaded a lot and I had a couple of fainting episodes," he told me. "It dawned on me very slowly that I was suffering from classic AIDS wasting syndrome."
    By then an effective cocktail of AIDS drugs had been available for almost three years. Katz had seen it save the life of one of his neighbors in Tennessee. "It was a really dramatic turnaround," he told me. "But I didn't want my life to be medically managed. I had a real reluctance to get on that treadmill." In the summer of 1999, he took a road trip to Maine to visit friends, hoping to snap out of his funk. By the time he got there, he was so exhausted that he couldn't get up for days. "I remember what really freaked me out was trying to balance my checkbook," he says. "I couldn't even do simple subtraction. It was like my brain wasn't functioning anymore." He had reached the end of his alternatives.
    Katz doesn't doubt that the cocktail saved his life. In pictures from that trip, his eyes are hollowed out, his neck so thin that it juts from his woolen sweater like a broomstick. He got worse before he got better, he says—"It was like I had an anvil in my stomach." But one morning, about a month after his first dose, he woke up and felt like going for a walk. A few days after that, he had a strong urge to chop wood. He now takes three antiretroviral and protease-inhibitor drugs every day and hasn't had a major medical problem in ten years. He still doesn't have the stamina he'd like, and his forehead is often beaded with sweat, even on cool evenings around the commune's dinner table. "I wish this weren't my reality," he told me. "I don't feel great that my life is medically managed. But if that's what's keeping me alive, hallelujah."
    It's this part that incenses some of his readers: having sung the praises of sauerkraut, revealed the secrets of kombucha, and gestured toward the green pastures of raw milk, Katz has surrendered to the false promise of Western medicine. His drug dependence is a sellout, they say—an act of bad faith. "Every two months or so, I get a letter from some well-meaning