Mold can cause all kinds of negative health effects to us and it has done this for thousands of years, but what about all the good things that we have gotten from the presence of mold? We have been using mold to make different foods and medicines for years, but these days on the news most of what we hear about mold is negative. Perhaps we do not hear about the benefits of this organism so much because they have become such a part of our daily lives.
There are a lot of different foods that have been produced using mold for many years and the most famous seems to be cheese. Blue cheese was accidentally invented a long time ago when mold had contaminated a block of cheese that had been left sitting out to age. Most people either love or hate this cheese because of its salty taste and crumbly texture and because of the blue veins of mold that run throughout the block. It has also become very popular as an ingredient for salad dressing. Since it was first invented, experiments have been done to culture just the right mold to make the cheese taste just right. Gorgonzola and Roquefort cheeses are also produced using molds. These three cheeses are often called the “kings” of cheeses.
The mold Aspergillus oryzae is used in Japan to make the alcoholic beverage called sake. Sake is an acquired taste for those who are used to other European liquors, because sake is made with rice. The mold used to ferment the rice is referred to in Japanese as “koji” and the development of this mold has been almost perfected over the years, even though there are different ways to culture it. This mold begins to break down the rice and produce the sugar that the yeast used to ferment the rice needs in order to keep growing. The process of growing the mold can be extremely effected by temperatures, the type of rice that is used, and the kind of water, among other factors.
One of the most famous uses of mold was the invention of Penicillin by Alexander Fleming back in the first half of the 1900’s. This has been used since then to help in the fight against bacterial infections, even though it has been discovered that some people are allergic to the medicine and cannot receive it due to their skin breaking out or in rare cases, hospitalization or even death.
Jim Corkern is a writer and promoter of quality
water damage restoration companies and
Dallas Residential Water Damage Restoration Contractors.
