Products From the “Food Aversion Test” That Are Actually Unsafe to Eat

The food aversion test is the latest silly way to waste time online, and like any good test, it reveals things about us that we might never have thought to question. Is it disgusting when they serve fish with the head? Do you eat bananas with black spots on the skin?

The test, based on the Food Disgust Scale , developed by scientists Christina Hartmann and Michael Siegrist, divides your disgust into eight different scales. For example, you might be more disgusted by seeing that fish head than by eating jam with mold scraped off, or vice versa.

But after you take the test, you may be wondering: how many of these things are actually bad for us? In particular, mold products have caused a lot of discussion: if jam adjacent to mold does not annoy me, should I?

Let’s take a look at how some of the most controversial items on the test align with food safety guidelines.

Mold on jam

There is a statement in the quiz that you have to decide if you agree with it: “I will not eat marmalade with mold removed from the surface.”

This is confusing because the advice has changed over the years. It used to be that mold that grows on the surface of jams and jelly is not harmful and does not spread throughout the jam. Scoop them up and you’re good. Healthy Canning collected answers to this question from various sources around the world and found that famous British chefs, for example, tend to say that it’s OK to eat jam if you’ve removed the mold with a healthy margin around. This.

But recent research has shown that mycotoxins (toxins produced by molds) are sometimes found in jams and jellies that have mold on the surface.

It is common to scrape mold off jams and jellies and eat the rest, but this is not safe. So yes, people scraped off the mold, ate the jam, and everything was fine. But the current recommendation from the USDA and others is to throw away the entire can if you find mold on the surface.

Mold on tomato sauce

And what about tomato sauce? This wasn’t included in the quiz, but it’s another jar product where mold usually grows on the surface or top of the jar while the sauce still tastes good.

Unfortunately, it’s clearer: moldy tomato sauce has a body number. Healthy Canning cites Putting Food By about a case in which two people died of botulism poisoning after consuming tomato sauce that contained botulinum toxins. Botulinism is a bacterium, not a mold, but the problem is that the mold has changed the chemical makeup of the tomato sauce.

Tomato sauce, like jams and jellies, keeps so well after canning because it is too acidic for botulinum and other bacteria to grow. But once the mold has set in, the mold can raise the pH of the sauce, making it less acidic. (This is a potential hazard with moldy jam, too.) So ditch that moldy tomato sauce, too.

Mold on bread

“It’s disgusting to eat bread with mold cut off,” the quiz prompts. Agree or disagree?

The test wants to find out how much you hate this idea. The USDA, on the other hand, simply says “throw away”.

There are many different types of mold that grow on bread, although they are generally not fatal. However, some of them can cause allergies or breathing problems if you sniff the spores. In rare cases , they have infected people. And they tend to make the bread taste disgusting.

By the time you see soft fluffy spots on the surface of the bread, you can be sure that the almost invisible filamentous mycelium (in a sense, “roots”) has been growing all over the bread for some time. If you cut off a large piece, say half a loaf, you may have gotten rid of the mold on that part of the bread. But there’s a good chance you’ll get more mold spots on what looks like a still-fresh piece of bread.

Again, this is the case when people cut off the visible part of the mold and lived to tell about it, but if you don’t want to consume the mold, you really should throw away the loaf.

mold on cheese

“I hate to eat hard cheese with mold cut off.” How do you feel about it? If you don’t agree, congratulations – you can eat hard cheeses after cutting off the mold.

The USDA recommends cutting a whole inch of cheese around the moldy spot and making sure your knife doesn’t cut through the mold in the process. (Then it may contaminate other foods.)

However, soft cheeses do not separate easily. If you eat cheese made with mold, such as Penicillium soft-skinned brie, that mold is fine. So if you find some old brie cheese in the fridge and mold has grown on the edges of the cheese cut, don’t worry about it. But if you find mold on your soft cheese that wasn’t used to make the cheese, it’s time to say goodbye. The USDA does not provide guidance on how to determine the difference, but if it is clearly not the same as the rest of the form, you should consider it an intrusion.

When to Eat Mold

Before we get into mold-free food, I’d like to give you some more good news from the USDA: It’s perfectly okay to eat moldy hard salami; just wipe off the mold.

You can also eat non-mouldy parts of hard fruits and vegetables such as cabbage and bell peppers. Do not eat soft fruits and vegetables after they become moldy, such as peaches and tomatoes.

Blood in a steak

The quiz asks us whether or not we agree with the statement, “I don’t like eating steak that still has blood in it.”

It’s not technically blood; you see how myoglobin (the protein in the muscles) flows out of the meat. In either case, myoglobin appears red at low to moderate temperatures, but turns to brown or gray compounds at higher temperatures.

So if “bloody” steak disgusts you, you probably won’t eat anything less than average. This means your steaks will be cooked to 140-145 degrees or higher, exactly following the USDA’s advice to cook steaks to an internal temperature of 145 degrees and then let them rest for three minutes.

Although rare steaks are riskier than medium rare steaks, they are safe to eat because they are a whole piece of meat. Harmful bacteria will most likely remain on or near the surface, and firing should take care of these germs, even if the internal temperature is still below recommended. Again: the risk is not zero, but low enough that many people prefer to take risks.

But ground beef is a different story. Surface germs can end up mixing with the entire batch, so the inside of your burger is inherently no safer than the outside. The USDA recommends cooking hamburgers to 160 degrees.

worms in apples

“I wouldn’t eat part of an apple that had a worm in the other part,” says the quiz. I used to make applesauce from homemade apples, and if I had to throw away every apple touched by a worm, there would be no applesauce.

Fortunately, wormy apples can be eaten. Unlike mold problems, you can see worms. And their footprints, and their meal (a dry brown substance that I regret to tell you is worm excrement). In fact, you could probably eat the worms themselves if you really wanted to; they are not known to be poisonous.