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“It’s safe to say we’ve gone overboard on the war against bacteria,” says Michael Pollan in the “Earth” episode of the Netflix documentary series Cooked. Pollan visits Sister Noella Marcellino, a nun and cheese producer from Connecticut who until recently made cheese with traditional French methods, using wooden barrels rather than stainless steel vessels. Because of a potential outbreak of Listeria—an infectious bacteria—health inspectors forced Sister Noella to stop using wooden barrels. Following her switch to stainless steel containers, the levels of poisonous E. coli in the cheese spiked. In the episode, Pollan finally finds out that it was the bacteria produced by the wood itself that kept her original cheese E. coli-free.