Ever have one of those yogurt smoothie drinks? Pretty good! Anyways, one I had had 6 active cultures in it, which is pretty cool.
What else do we eat/drink that contains active cultures (that’s supposed to, that is; moldy bread that you accidentally ingest doesn’t count)? I know some yogurts do, and I know blue cheese dressing is made of moldy cheese (and you can buy moldy cheese, too), but are those cultures active? Or do those contain Mayans and Aztecs? 
The term “culture” refers to a living organisms bred and sustained over time. Often it’s a monoculture (a single strain or substrain, winnowed by successive selection). Oddly, many hoegher end products don’t use cultures, per se, but rely on natural innoculation. It’s more traditional, and generally less predictable, which adds to the cachet. Most commercial beers are created from cultured strains, for consistency, but Belgian lambic beers are innoculated by local bacteria and fungi that drift from the environment into special attics with louvers on the ends. Genuine Roquefort cheese is innoculated by natural mold as it is initially aged in the caves around Roquefort France, but inexpensive Roquefort is probably made from cultured Penicillium roquefortii grown from genuine Roquefort cheese, long ago. The same applies to most moldy “blue” or “green” cheeses (like Roquefort – hey, I just got that old “moon is made of green chese” myth)
Almost no beer sold commercially contains live cultures, because they are brewed, and the boiling kills the culture. This doesn’t necessarily apply to traditional ethnic beers, though–and by “ethnic”, I don’t mean minor European variants, like Polish beer, I mean world variants, like Bantu beer (rather well known in medicine for being very high in iron – high enough to cause iron overload!) or the native “beers” of the Amazon or southeast Asia.
True sourdough bread is always made explicitly from a culture, passed down from a previous batch. You can buy frozen cultures on the internet (and probably other corms, like dried) but based on what I know of the life cycles of yeasts in microbial systems, it’d probably be more authentic after a) several generations of dough; and b) accidental outside contamination during handling and preparation. Authentic sourdough cultures are probably mixtures of yeast strains and a few co-cultured bacteria, and it’s unlikely that all these strains would respond to (or recover from) freezing (etc.) identically. In any case, it wouldn’t be live culture, because baking is a pretty tough process to survive.
Young wines may contain a little live culture (or live mixed microrganism, or spores thereof), that survive after the bulk died off from alcohol poisoning and other unconducive biochemical environmental conditions, but young wines in this country are usually factory-processed (sterilized, filteres) jug wines, where the culture wouldn’t survive. Older wines? well, they are probably as near to sterile as you could expect of a food–more than fresh produce or meat.
Commercially raised mushrooms, on the other hand are PURE culture. they are fungi, and one of the big advantages of commercial rearing is that the spores are free of potantially dangerous strains, and are highly consistent. Other mold foods vary by to their biological nature. Truffles, for example, are usually harvested in the wild: I don’t believe cultured/seeded cultivated truffles have achieved much commercial production or culinary acceptance
Are these fungi “live cultures”? maybe, if you eat them fresh vs cooked.
Yogurts all start with live cultures, but some a re pasturized (etc.) which kills the culture. If stored too long in the fridge, even (most of the) the organisms in a “live culture” yogurt can die, even if the yogurt is still tasty and safe to eat.
How much “live culture” you eat depends both on storage and your diet. In Japan (and, I belive, Korea) large live shrimp are a delicacy, but I don’t believe shrimp are cultured; they can be, but they are still too plentiful from wild sources, so it doesn’t offer any commercial benefit. Some kinds of oysters are cultured, however, and commonly eaten raw in the US. Fresh raw eggs from commercial chicken strains are arguably from the thoroughly bred commercial strains are arguably a culture, so one could argue that steak tartare would contain culture – if commercial beef processing and distribution didn’t take so many weeks/month that every single cell was certainly dead.
Our guts have so many flora and fauna that one or two more, even 6, will make nonevermind.
It’s the e-coli, samonella and other nasty beasties that initiate Montezuma’s revenge!
Lots of commercial Belgian beer and other microbrewed beer still has live yeast-- you can keep the yeast from the bottom of a bottle of Chimay, treat it well, and brew again with it. You add the yeast after the wort is boiled, of course (although macro-brew brands will additionally pasteurize it later on, but that’s different).
Actually, over 50% of bacteria in the colon is E. Coli. It is only particular strains of it that are deadly. The one that causes a lot of traveller’s diarrhea is the ETEC strain. Campylobacter jejuni, Salmonella, and Shigella species also cause it, in addition to protozoans and viruses.
I’m unaware of any fungal strains that commonly cause diarrhea in healthy immunocompetent people, although outbreaks of cryptosporidium have affected large, healthy populations episodically.
During the course of antibiotic treatment, most of the normal bacteria in your gut are wiped out. Many doctors advice eating yogurt to restock your gut with microorganisms at these times.
Any ‘bottle conditioned’ ale has dormant (but not dead) yeast in the sediment at the bottom; bottle conditioning is a process whereby fermentation occurrs in the bottle; the CO[sub]2[/sub] produced by the yeast during this process goes into solution under pressure and gives the ale its sparkle. Same sort of thing for Champagne (at least by the traditional method), however, the sediment is removed in this case.
In either case, you don’t normally ingest the sediment, if you can help it - so maybe it doesn’t count.
Pretty much any cheese contains live cultures of bacteria; blue cheese contains live bacteria and live moulds, but moulds are also present on the rind of most unwaxed whole cheeses.
Fresh fruit - particularly (but not exclusively) berries have living cultures of yeast and other micro organisms on the skin.
Certain e-coli will.