Mold Avoidance

Mold Avoidance

We should be much more critical of our food.
Crackers are notoriously moldy. Never let your child eat
crackers. Make crisp things in the oven from left over bakery
goods. Just sprinkle with cinnamon.
Dried fruits are very moldy. Soak them in vitamin C water.
Rinse and bake to dry again. Then store in the refrigerator or
freezer. When fresh fruit gets overripe, don't quickly bake it or
preserve it. It's too late.
Peanut butter (store bought) and other nut butters can't be
detoxified by adding vitamin C due to the mixing problem, even
if you stir it in thoroughly. Make your own. Making your own
peanut butter is a great adventure (see Recipes). Mix it with
home made preserves, honey, marmalade, not very homogeneously
so the bright colors and individual flavors stand out in
contrast. Having three or four such spreads in the refrigerator
will give your children the right perspective on food—
homemade is better. Store bought jams are sweeter and brighter
in color but strangely low in flavor and often indistinguishable
from each other. Let your children eat the polluted foods that
friends and restaurants serve (but not rare-cooked meats) so they
can experience the difference. Their livers are strong enough to
detoxify occasional small amounts

Tea is quite moldy if purchased in bags. Although I used to
recommend single herb teas (tea mixtures have solvents), I can
now only recommend single herb teas from fresh sources in bulk
(see Sources). This also gets you away from the benzalkonium
chloride and possibly other antiseptics in the bag itself. When
you get them, store them in their original double plastic bag.
These herbs are so fresh, you'll only need half as much to make a
cup of tea. Use a bamboo strainer (non metal). Bake the strainer
occasionally or put through the dishwasher to keep it sterile.

It comes as a surprise that pure, genuine maple syrup has the
deadly aflatoxin and other molds. You can often see mold
yourself, as a thin scum on the surface or an opaque spot on the
inside of the glass after the syrup has stood some time, even in
the refrigerator. Some mold spores were in it to begin with.
Others flew in. After some time they grew enough to be visible.
In my testing, aflatoxin can be cleared with vitamin C but sterig
and others need to be treated with a high temperature as well.
Fortunately, this is easy to do with a syrup. Heat to near boiling

while in the original jar with the lid removed. Keep refrigerated
afterwards.
Artificial maple flavor
did not have benzene, propyl
alcohol or wood alcohol,
nor molds. Turbinado sugar
had none of these
contaminants either. Brown
sugar had sorghum mold.
White sugar had propyl
alcohol pollution. You can
make your own syrup,
safely, with artificial flavor
and turbinado sugar. Of
course, you'll be missing the taste and nutritional minerals provided
by the natural maple product but in a contest between nutritional
value and toxicity, always choose the safe product.
The mold in our hot cereals can be spotted. Pick out all dark
colored, shriveled bits. This represents most of it. Add honey,
and salt while it's cooking—this raises the boiling temperature
and detoxifies more. At the end, turn off heat and add a sprinkle
of vitamin C powder. Rolled oats never showed molds in my
testing, although they have their characteristic fungi, too. Don't let
grains mold on your shelves simply from aging. Nothing should
be more than six months old. Remember you can't see or smell
molds when they begin. Molds must have a degree of moisture.
As soon as you open a cereal grain, put the whole box in a
plastic bag to keep moisture out. This keeps out Weevils too, so
you won't have to put the box in the freezer later to kill them.
Anything that is put in the refrigerator or freezer and then
taken out develops moisture inside. Store cereals in kitchen
cupboards or the freezer.

No government agency can test for all of these mycotoxins in
all of our foods. Production and storage methods must be better
regulated so as to be fail-safe. Simply sending inspectors out to
look into the bins at grain elevators is not sufficient. Crusts of
mold, sometimes several feet thick, that form on top of grain bins
can be simply shoveled away before the inspector arrives. The
humidity and temperature of stored grain should be regulated,
requiring automated controls. This would soon be cost effective,
too, in terms of reduced spoilage losses and higher quality prices
earned. I believe that zear, aflatoxin and ergot require special
regulations. Products that are imported should be subjected to the
same tests as ours. Test results should be on the label.