Which Moldy Foods Are Safe to Eat in Survival Situations

Everybody is familiar enough with mold to know that if it is on your food you do not want to really eat it. In a survival situation eating foods that are not perfect can be a life saver. Knowing which foods are ok to eat after some mold has set in and how to deal with these olds can be the difference between life and death in a true survival situation. Here I will discuss the basics, breads, cheese, and meats. While there are many other types of foods these are the staples that in a true survival situation will be the most common and easily found or procured.

Since the Earth was created meats have been a major staple for any creature that is anything but a pure herbivore. As a general rule of thumb any meats other that hard salami or dried and cured meats should be immediately discarded as soon as mold occurs. In the case of hard salami or any cured and dried meats simply scrubbing off the surface mold will render the meats edible again.

The next basic staple in foods are beads, which are very susceptible to mold. Any type of bread or baked product that get even a spot of mold needs to be discarded. All breads no matter how dense is porous in nature, these pores allow the mold to spread deeper into the bread and contaminate across the whole container if wrapped with other bread. Most breads today are wrapped in plastic so all the bread inside that package would be deemed inedible. If you happen to have 2 loafs of bread that are the same age, if one of them is moldy and the other one is not then as long as they are wrapped separately then the mold free loaf is okay to eat.

The main difference in rules really only applies once you hit the cheeses, which are dependent on if the cheese was made with mold or not. If the cheese was made without mold as part of the process, like Brie or Camembert, then the cheese should be discarded if molded. If the cheese uses mold during it manufacturing process, like Stilton or Gorgonzola, then simply cut out the mold 1 inch around the mold spots and eat the rest. The same rule of 1 inch applies to the true hard cheeses, these cheeses are really hard cheeses that also do not use mold in the manufacturing process but because of the density the mold generally cannot pass far enough into the cheese to effect the whole cheese.

While eating foods that had mold on them seems unnatural, it is more about survival at this point. Personally I would not sit in my house and spend the time scrubbing the mold off a 2 inch slice of the last bit of that old hard salami just to save some money, but in a survival emergency situation I may need that slice of salami to keep my energy levels high enough to survive. While moldy foods are not ideal they sometimes are edible and needed to live.