Moment of Science: Mold

It’s a kind of fuzzy fungi that can be hazardous to your health... but can also help it. This week, we’re going beyond the petri dish and exploring the microscopic world of mold.

*At a base level, mold is just fungi... but not all fungi can form mold, hence you don’t exactly have red toadstool mushrooms growing in your shower. There are actually thousands, perhaps millions of species of mold, and they all need some level of moisture to thrive -- and some sort of organic food source. All that green moss surrounding a pretty forest waterfall may check both marks, but it’s not a fungi, more closely related to algae.

*Mold formation is simple enough. Tiny spores float through the air and eventually land on a surface -- rocks, showers, fresh fruit, whatever -- and multiply from there. Nutrients, moisture, and time are your key players, as mold can begin to grow anywhere from one to ten days after those conditions are met. It’s not just a skin-deep issue when it comes to food... just because you see mold “only” growing on the peel of an orange or the outside of bread, doesn’t mean you can cut that part out and assume the rest is fine. It’s just about as flawed as the old “five-second rule”.

*As far as structures go, you’re more likely to get mold in airtight homes in the summertime with high indoor humidity, and drafty homes in the winter with inside warmer air condensing. There is a narrow optimal temperature range for most mold to thrive (77-86°F), though it’s been found to grow anywhere from the freezing mark right up to near-average body temperature. Still, most strains can’t get going below 39°F, hence why your best refrigerator temp is there or even a hair lower.

*Mildew is a little different from mold... still made of spores, but that is often just a surface thing. The name actually comes from the Old English for “honeydew”, which wasn’t about a melon, but rather a byproduct of aphids on leaves. They tend to be white instead of all sorts of mold colors like black, blue, green and red. The pink stuff you find on your shower tile or curtains sometimes, is actually closer to a yeast fungi than mildew.

*One last note: Those little microbes can cause eye irritation, sore throat, skin rash, and a slew of other problems in the short or long term... and even after a building dries out from flooding or a plumbing problem, toxin levels can still run high. One type of mold, however -- penicillium -- can help destroy bacteria by attaching to the cell walls. That helpful bit of antibiotic knowledge (and culinary knowledge for foods like blue cheese, soy sauce, and even some dry-aged beef) was only discovered in the last century... though an estimated hundreds of millions of lives have been saved by it ever since.

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