Ack! Moldy bread!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So this morning, I head to school at the butt-crack of dawn. Before leaving the apartment, I make myself a peanut butter and banana sandwich. Breakfast of champions, ya know. Actually, I’m sick of them. Incredibly sick of them. But peanut butter and bananas were on sale, and the loaf of bread was all of $0.89, so I’ve been eating them for breakfast for a while. I have to finish off the last two bananas today though. They’re almost too ripe for my taste.

I digress.

I get in my car and drive to campus. Not eating while driving, because I’m dreading biting into another pb&b sandwich, so I’m postponing as long as possible. Once at campus, I collect every thing from my car that I need for the day - backpack, umbrella, diet coke, car keys. And, of course, the sandwich. I begin eating as I’m walking into the building, continuing as I take the elevator from 1 to 3 and head across campus to the library. I’m getting ready to take another bite - at this point I’m about halfway through the sandwich, mind - when I look down and see it.
The telltale green area on the crust of the bread. Not a small dot of mold, no. But neither was it so big that I would have had to be blind not to notice it when I was making the sandwich.

Now, I know that there are people starving in the world, and I know that the nuns would have told me that I was going to go to hell for not finishing the sandwich - wasting food, you know. And I really was going to just pull off the moldy section and finish the rest. But then two things happened.

First, I realized that the moldy section was incomplete. That’s right, I’d already eaten part of the moldy bread. This ooked me out beyond belief, and even after I pulled a small bit out of the middle, well away from the moldy section, I couldn’t bring myself to eat much more.

Second…I realized that now I had an excuse to NOT eat pb&b today. YES! Freedom (for the day at least, and tomorrow when I go to the grocery, there will be NO bananas in my cart)!
I just hope that the mold wasn’t poisonous. Or something that will affect my brain strangely while I’m trying to write this paper and prepare for tonight’s presentation. Of course, that could be fun, if unintelligible.

2

This only relates in that it’s a food-related tale from a student.

In one of my previous apartments, we were pretty good about keeping things at least hygenic and occasionally tidy. The kitchen was tiny but had high cabinets and after the beginning of the year, we just stopped using the higher shelves as it was a pain to wiggle a chair in there to get up high enough.

So … end of the year, moving out, cleaning out the kitchen. I figured I’d double check to make sure the top shelves were clear. And found a 6+ month old potato that had completely engulfed a box of Jell-O. The thing was huge. It hadn’t punctured the box yet, but it was sure ready to. If it would’ve gotten to the sugar, I’m sure we’d all be done for as it would’ve killed us in our sleep. Really.

3

Well, they make Penicillin from moldy bread, so maybe you just gave yourself a shot of antibiotics. :wink:

On the other hand, ergot, a form of wheat mold, can cause an LSD-like experience. Some scientists think that St. Vitus’ Dance was caused by people in olden times eating moldy grain. This is also thought to be the the basis of the “Pied Piper” legend. :smiley:

4

Then there’s the fact that some common bread molds make proteins known as aflatoxins, which are among the most potent carcinogens known to science. But I’m sure you’ll be fine. :smiley:

5

Ergot is actually a rye mold, not wheat. And it does indeed cause an LSD-like experience if you’re lucky, mostly because LSD used in early experiments was extracted from ergot.

If you’re not lucky, as many were not, it will kill you. St. Anthony’s fire is another name for gangrenous ergotism. Sufferers felt like their arms and legs were on fire, and skin and small body parts (fingers, toes, earlobes, noses, sometimes even as much as arms and legs, apparently) turned black and fell off. Often, the sufferer died from the resulting infection.

The other type of ergotism, convulsive ergotism, results in convulsions that apparently remarkable resemble strychnine poisoning or severe grand mal epilepsy, vomiting, and diarrhea. For hours, and sometimes days.

Both of these are usually accompanied by delusions and hallucinations of varying intensities - apparently most very unpleasant, to put it mildly. I watched a show on ergotism that interviewed survivors of one of the last major European outbreaks, and they described it as hellish.

St. Vitus’s Dance is now known as Sydenham’s chorea, which seems to be a type of strep infection.

And the Pied Piper was rats…the Black Plague.

Just so’s you know.

I’ll go back to my cave now. :slight_smile:

6

Well, since I’m still alive, and I don’t think I wrote anything insane either in the assignment or the presentation slides…I suppose that I’ll survive.
It’s still icky though.

7

An acquaintance of mine had a high school science teacher who would leave a slice of bread to mold on his classroom’s windowsill and, on the last day of class, shake off the dust and eat it. Plain.

shudder

Didn’t kill him.

8

Geez, I feel like a real @ss. I’ll throw out a bread roll if there’s even a minute speck of mold on it. In the past, I’ve tried cutting off the offending area of a piece of bread, and a large safety perimeter, but when I try to eat the rest, it tastes “funny” to me. I’m sure it’s all in my head, though.

That said, here’s a tale from seventh grade. In junior high-school, our lockers were actually in our homerooms, lining the back of the class. Two students would share one locker. Each locker had one large area with three coat hooks, and a small area shelved off at the top.

I was sharing a locker with my friend Dean, who wasn’t very organized, to say the least. I, on the other hand, tend to be a perfectionist, and like things neat and tidy. So, I took the top shelf, and he got the bottom of the locker. While my stuff was sorted and arranged in a particular order, Dean’s stuff tended to just pile up on the bottom.

Half way through the school year, and again at the end of the year, the homeroom teachers would make everyone clean out their lockers. I truly had nothing to do, but I wasn’t going to help Dean. While he wasn’t the only student who was reunited with unwashed gym clothes and stinky sneakers, he did find a particularly nice package at the bottom of his pile…

…a nicely discolored brown paper bag containing an orange that wasn’t orange and seeming to be breathing, and a ziplock bag containing a terrible looking mystery lunch. We believe it was a sandwich of some kind, but with little certainty. Needless to say, it got a lot of attention and remarks from the rest of the class, and a few pleas from the teacher to please keep things from getting out of control.

Anyhoo…

9

So, Lsura, are you dead yet?

10

keels over in response to phall0106’s question.
Nope, not dead. Not even feeling ill.
I suppose that means I have to go to class. Dang.

11

Green mold on bread is usually either Penicillium or Aspergillus, a little won’t hurt you. But I do agree on the ookiness. I might saute up mushrooms but I pass on the mold thanks.

Re: throwing away the whole piece of bread-mold sends out microscopic thread-like structures called hyphae. These can travel quite easily throughout a porous piece of bread. So there could be mold you can’t see all over the bread. Now if it was cheese, say, that’s different. Hyphae can’t penetrate very far into the denser cheese so cutting out the offending moldy spot would likely get all of it.

12

Hm, my take on it was some form of revenge by a hired ratcatcher, possibly having been a serial/mass child killer…

But my german friend pointed me at this when I was visiting him this past Feb:
http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~jonas/piedpiper.html