The future is fermented: Microbial biodiversity of fermented foods is a critical resource for food innovation and human health

Fermented foods and beverages have been a key component of the human diet for thousands of years, and play an important nutritional, cultural, and economic role in most human societies. Differences in ingredients, local practices, and environmental conditions can impact microbial communities in fermented foods resulting in distinct flavors, textures, and nutritional properties. Despite their ancient roots, omnipresence, potential health benefits, recent hype, and the plethora of tools to study microbial diversity, the microbial and functional diversity of most fermented foods currently remain unknown, while changing lifestyle practices threaten the loss of some fermented foods, with dire implications for gastrointestinal health. In this commentary we discuss the nutritional, cultural, and economic values of fermented foods and (i) introduce FermDB, the largest interoperable database and map of fermented foods to date (https://bokulich-lab.github.io/FermDB/), intended as an extensible community resource for documenting and studying food fermentations; (ii) provide a consistent fermented food ontology for classification of these foods; and (iii) estimate global production values and biomass of some of the most common fermented foods to contextualize the social and economic importance of microorganisms for human food production. We provide a new perspective on global diversity of fermented foods and associated microbial communities as a resource for sustainable food production. Additionally, the introduced database and ontology can act as a roadmap to the path toward conserving microbial biodiversity of traditional foods and studying their associated health benefits.