I regularly have food that’s gone passed it’s sell by/use by/best before date in the fridge and cupboards, no I’m not a slovenly git, my mother asks me to buy her something then doesn’t want it, or only eats some of it and refuses to touch it again after, or I buy food and my back goes out (and with no one else to help out) I can’t cook, so the food spoils.
Currently I have 4 jars of mouldy jam, 3 of honey [crystallised] and half a loaf of very mouldy bread.
I don’t have a bio bin (our refuse company doesn’t provide them in this area), I can and have thrown food out to the birds and whatever wildlife happens by (I never put anything out at night time to avoid rats and foxes coming to visit).
But it’s the mouldy bread that’s stumped me. Should I throw it out to the wildlife? Put it in the normal bin? Put it in a paper bag and put it in the fire? Nuke it from orbit? Send it to a lab in case it provides a cure for something?
It’s really really blue, almost turned to dust, if it hadn’t been in the bag I might not have known what it had once been…
Crystallized honey isn’t spoiled, just solidified. Some varieties solidify more easily than others, to the point where some are more likely to be solid than not at 30ºC, but all you have to do to liquify it again is heat it up (best way is in a pot of water, heated on low). It can also be used solid.
As for the bread, just put it in the regular bin. It probably won’t be anything harmful either to you or the birds, but touching it would be likely to transfer spores to your current loaf of bread or to other foods, so just bin it.
Yep, just chuck it in the trash. I have a fridge cleanout about once a month where I find a container of whatever that was shoved in the back and forgotten. If it’s a disposable container, I toss it all. If not I carefully open, empty, and wash the container.
Mold is not poisonous. In general, if you can see or smell something, it’s harmless; the color and smell are to keep it from being eaten, since it can’t survive in the stomach. They evolved as a way to warn animals and people away so that they can continue to grow undisturbed. (This does assume nothing dangerous is also present – but it wouldn’t be in bread of jam).
The things that can harm you have no color or off smell. They do best when eaten, so it’s an evolutionary dead end to announce their presence to the eater.
Yes, I was surprised at the number of people in this thread that are perhaps unaware of this.
Some moulds produce mycotoxins. These can make you very ill or even kill you and are (basically) not affected by cooking. Moulds on grain-based foods like bread are some of the most likely to produce mycotoxins, which is why the Food Safety and Inspection Service advises to throw out mouldy bread (cite).
Note also that even if a slice doesn’t have any visible mould on it, mycotoxins can soak through because of the texture of bread. Basically if any of the loaf is mouldy, it’s not worth the risk.
[Brick Top]You’re always gonna have problems lifting a loaf in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut it into six pieces and pile it all together. And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it’s no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up loaf will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the crusts off your bread, and pull the seeds out for the sake of the piggies’ digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don’t want to go sievin’ through pig shit, now do you? They will go through rye like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a challah that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of mouldy bread every minute. Hence the expression, “as greedy as a pig.”[/BT]
Fun fact: some common molds, including some bread molds, produce a type of toxin called “aflatoxin”. Aflatoxins just happen to include some of the most potent carcinogens known to science. Whee!
