So this morning I encountered fuzzy mold in a place I really shouldn’t have let it get to in the first place (gotta clean more/better). Anyway, that got me thinking: for a while now, my apartment’s been closed up because of seasonal temperatures. I know mold just doesn’t appear out of nowhere; you gotta have fungal spores.
So how exactly did it get to my kitchen? I keep all the doors and windows shut, except when I leave, of course. Perhaps I’m underestimating how many mold/fungal spores are everywhere; Wikipedia does say about one type that they’re “ubiquitous in nature.” Does that just mean we’re surrounded by spores whenever we step outside (barring somewhere like Alaska or Arizona)? How do they stay airborne long enough to get to where they grow in my twist-tied bread bag or whatever? Or am I completely asking the wrong questions?
if you open the door they come with the wind and you and your clothes. it can also be on some foods already just waiting for time and moisture and heat to do moldy things.
In the lab components of intro cell biology classes, they tell students that, when inoculating a petri dish of agar with bacteria, you shouldn’t remove the lid entirely; just hold it over the dish at an angle. Otherwise, the odds of wild fungus spores landing on your agar are actually pretty good.
Fruit that falls from a tree will often ferment with the help of natural yeast (“Wild Yeast”) that arrives on the wind.
Before man was able to cultivate yeast to mass-produce beer, the water and energy source were just left in open vats until nature took its course. In the UK yeast used to be a completely unknown ingredient, leading to beer being called God is Good.
In many cases, it’s already abundantly present on the outside of the fruit. for example, if you press apples, then leave the juice alone, you quite quickly end up with cider, unless you take explicit steps to prevent fermentation such as pasteurisation.