The kind of mold is important here. Mold on cheese is often not harmful to people. Mold on meat is typically indicative of stuff that will peel out your insides.

Where I live there was recently the case of a woman that is now permanently disabled (botulism) after eating an expired commercial vegetables soup, it’s not mold but be careful with not meat = harmless.

My dad was always worried about botulism. I don't know what happened, but he would refuse to eat dented cans and things like that, just in case.

Botulism is why home canning is dangerous - more so than a factory.

Maybe lived through the famous nationwide botulism scare (the reason black olives are in cans to this day).

That was 1919: My dad was born in the 50's. His grandparents would have lived through it, though I'm not sure if one half was in the US at the time. I'd ask why, but he died some years back. I know that particular botulism outbreak still affects folks' attitudes towards pans.

I figure it was either stories from his parents - his father ran a grocery for some years. I know they had cans with missing labels around, but I don't think they had dents. Or it could be that someone (maybe him) got really sick. I just cannot remember - either one would make my father anxious, though. (He was cautious with car jacks, and always put a tire underneath. Something happened to someone he knew).

I do know that canned goods have gotten a bit safer, but not if the can has been dented or damaged.

Source? All I found was in line with https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/botulism-outbreak-gav... that covered olives being part of the scare, but no source said black olives were only to be sold in came because of it.

I also thought black olives can be purchased in glass jars ...

That makes a lot of sense, considering that we’re made of meat. A mold that grows on meat could grow on us.

Lot of people I know pay more for moldy french cheese. It obviously does not work for all cheeses, but for most you can just cut it off.

The rule of thumb I've picked up somewhere is that for hard cheese you can just cut mouldy bits off. For soft cheese you should throw it out.

This is of course talking about the kind of mould that grows on it while its in your fridge. Not the outer layer some cheeses acquire during production.

The soft cheeses from france are often quite moldy. I'm not a big fan of them but my family eats them ; the moldier and smellier, the better.

IIRC, all cheese has mold. Some of the mold is safe and/or desirable to eat (blue cheese's blue is mold).

But those soft cheeses can grow other mold: If it does this, you have to throw it all out as it could be dangerous. In general, you don't want mold where you didn't expect it.

Sorta. Fresh cheeses, like curds or paneer, don't have significant bacteria or mold colonies, outside whatever natural stuff happens to be on all food. All aged cheeses have bacterial colonies, that's what does the aging, fermenting the milk's sugars into acid and other tasty byproducts. Some cheeses have mold as well, but not all. Usually it's on the surface, and breaks down the milk's proteins which turns it soft. That's why when you slice into brie or camembert, the outside is the softest part: the white, fuzzy mold on the outside has done its work on the proteins there. Blue cheese has holes poked in it where they insert the blue mold spores, to more evenly colonize the entire cheese instead of the outside.

Many cheeses actually benefit from acquiring wild mold colonies. There are ways to tell which molds are "good" and which are "bad," which home cheesemakers can learn. Here[1] is a properly aging cheddar, wrapped in bandages and allowed to mold. The mold gives some flavors, but more importantly dries out the cheese's exterior and acts as a guard to prevent nasty bacterial infections from getting into the "good stuff" in the middle.

[1] https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/cheesemaking-supply-co/ad..., from https://cheesemaking.com/collections/recipes/products/chedda... . More information here https://cheesemaking.com/blogs/learn/how-to-bandaging-chedda... .

There are fermented raw meats that people seem to be able to eat safely. Lookup "high meat", it's a trend among people doing the raw carnivore diet.

I mostly eat cooked foods, but it's interesting to think about what fermented, rotten foods people have been eating for thousands of years.

Mold on meat == bad? Not entirely. I'm fine and I've on occasion and unintentionally eaten moldy beef jerky. Probably the water content determined mold strain prevalence.

That's mold on a preserve. It's a completely different ecosystem. My personal theory is the stuff that kills us, usually will also kill an animal, so the really deadly fungi and bacteria usually don't form until after the animal has died and the immune system has stopped functioning. That's why raw meat from a fresh kill is generally safe but if the meat is left alone for too long it becomes poisonous.

I think you're basically right. Many of the major foodborne pathogens are mammal or vertebrate-specific.

Given a choice, I'd eat a pound of grapes rotten to a mush before I ate a bite of green raw chicken.

Chicken is notorious for developing bad bacteria when it gets old. I know two people who got badly sick from eating chicken, and so they'll never ever eat it again. I like it though, but I'll never eat it past the expiry date.

AFAIK if meat products start smelling, especially ammonium, then it's time to ditch it.

> AFAIK if meat products start smelling,

The smell is telling you that the meat is rotting and needs to be destroyed. But meat that is fresh and has no bad odour can be contaminated. You cannot use smell to tell if meat is contaminated or not.

We don't eat raw chicken, even if it's very fresh, because of the risk of food poisoning from things like campylobacter.

You need to be careful with cooked then chilled rice because of the risk of bacillus cereus. It won't smell bad. It can be an unpleasant food poisoning.

Our dog once ate some bad meat and got sick. Since then we’ve used her nose to tell us of questionable meat is bad or not. If she will eat it, it’s okay. So far she hasn’t lead us astray.

My dog has a great nose and loves to dig up the nuts squirrels bury in our yard for a snack. But he also eats cat poop so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Chicken doesn't need to be bad or even have a smell to make you sick: It merely needs to be improperly stored or improperly cooked. Back when I ate meat, I tended to overcook chicken if I couldn't test the temperature (and preferred it a bit overcooked, honestly).

Exactly. If you aren't careful around chicken it's almost Darwin at work.

I assume this is why chicken is usually overcooked in restaurants.

I recently learned that eating raw chicken is possible (Torisashi in Japan).

Torisashi causes a lot of food poisoning.

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2019/11/study-reviews-campylo...

> Rise in eating raw chicken meat and liver

> Between 1997 and 2018, the number of incidents and patients varied from 257 to 645, and from 1,551 to 3,439, respectively. One large outbreak involved 875 patients and was traced to sushi topped with raw or undercooked chicken at outdoor events in Metropolitan Tokyo and Fukuoka Prefecture in 2016.

> Epidemiological investigations of Campylobacter infections have shown that chicken meat products are the most important source of infection. Consumption of raw chicken meat and liver is not common but has been increasing.