Ziff under fire

Part 8 - Yeast is a fungus

Before she went to work the next day, Grandma woke me up with a boiled egg but I fell asleep again and woke up twenty minutes late. I fell out of bed, jumped into my clothes and ran all the way to Silverwood School before I remember to eat the egg. I was pushing through crowds of chattering students when Boz bumped into me. I stepped back with an automatic apology but he stuck a hand against my chest and pushed me back against the lockers.

'You keep getting in my way, Zippy Doynk.' He pushed me again. 'You should look where you're going.'

I stepped back, feeling a mixture of fear and anger. I looked directly into his eyes and forced a smile. 'I'm sorry. And my name is Ziff Dion.'

Boz glanced at his cronies, Ozzy and Jeff, smirking behind him. 'You ratted to Anti about the spitballs.' He pushed again more forcefully. 'I don't like rats. Wanna fight?' It didn't sound like a question.

'I didn't say anything to Professor Smolkin.'

'You won't fight? So run away, chicken!' Boswell snarled menacingly and pushed me in the chest with both hands but I turned so that he lost his balance and staggered into the lockers. I tried to remember one of the tips about bullying. Distraction! That was it.

'That reminds me,' I said. 'I'm doing a survey on fast food. Do you prefer rutabaga burgers or chicken?'

Boz looked at me as if I was deranged. 'Rutabagas?' he muttered dubiously and then he glanced at Ozzy and Jeff. 'You won't fight? Yellow belly!'

'Do you mean, yellow-bellied, sap sucker?' I asked. He looked puzzled. 'It's a kind of wood pecker,' I explained. 'What would fighting prove? I'd rather be a live chicken than a dead turkey.'

'Who're you calling a sap sucker?' Boswell snapped angrily.

'Gobble, gobble,' I answered seriously. 'You who?'

Boz looked totally confused. He raised his fist and then scratched the back of his neck, laughed contemptuously and walked away muttering. 'I couldn't hit a clown with blond ringlets.' Ozzie and Jeff followed, uncertain whether to or congratulate, or commiserate with, him.

A minute later Miguel arrived. 'What was all that about? Are you okay?'

'I'm fine, thanks. He tried to pick a fight but I distracted him.'

'He's a pain in the butt,' Miguel said. 'You really ought to report this to Principal Ball.'

'I'll think about it,' I said as the bell rang for the first class.

We made it into our desks two seconds before our science teacher, Toxic McTavish, finished checking the class list. She smiled. 'Glad you made it.'

Toxic McTavish was a tall attractive woman of a certain age (as we say in French) with long black hair held at the back of her head with a large comb. Her nickname came from her habit of worrying whether we had concocted some toxic brew with our chemistry experiments.

'Last month we talked about the symbiotic relationship between some bacteria and people,' she announced. 'We provide bacteria with a nice warm home in our stomachs and they help with our digestion as well as producing a foul-smelling gas that deters predators from eating us.'

'Today,' Toxic continued, 'I am going to talk about one of the most fascinating of all living things.'

Myrika immediately suggested, 'Boz,' and most of the class broke into laughter. Boz stood up with a big grin and bowed.

Toxic McTavish smiled. 'I meant the fascinating fungus known as yeast.

'Yeast, like all other fungi (which includes mushrooms and toadstools, truffles, moulds and mildews) get their nutrition from other plants or animals. I don't think it is related to Clif Boswell . . . but maybe there are similarities.'

'Most species of yeasts grow on plants and animals. They reproduce by simple cell division using the enzymes invertase and zymase to extract oxygen from starches or sugars, producing ethyl alcohol and the bubbles of carbon dioxide gas, that cause bread to rise.'

'Louis Pasteur developed the germ theory of disease, in 1854, when he discovered that fermentation was caused by living organisms. He found that one kind of yeast produced good wine but the ethyl alcohol was often broken down by acetic acid bacteria to produce vinegar making the wine sour.'

'He also realized that these organisms also caused putrefaction, infection, and souring of milk. At the time, they were known as germs or microbes but later they were identified as fungi, bacteria and viruses.'

'In 1877 Pasteur prevented anthrax infections in farm animals by developing a vaccine to immunize the animals. In1885 he used a similar technique to cure victims of rabies, a viral disease which slowly destroys the central nervous system.'

'Vaccines alert our bodies immune system to produce antibodies that prevent viruses from harming us. They are our only defence against many lethal viruses like smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, chicken pox and influenza.'

'One of the most beneficial uses of fungus was discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in1928 when he obtained the antibiotic penicillin, the first drug capable of destroying harmful bacteria inside the human body.

Toxic asked us to read several pages of a web site before writing a one page essay on the subject of yeast and its uses.

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