No matter how you store food (unless it’s in the freezer), it always get moldy eventually. How does this happen? Mold is a fungus, and fungi spread through spores, right? So are these mold spores just everywhere all the time, looking for food? If so, then does that mean that mold is on everything we eat, but it’s just not toxic until you can see it? And why does refrigeration slow down this process?
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I make sourdough and beer as a hobby, from a decade before the pandemic, I feel compelled to add 🙂 and most of these comments are pretty close: mold is everywhere. They aren’t mentioning the most key part though.
When you make a sourdough starter people say you “capture the cultures from the air” but by and large that’s not really right. For one thing this seems like it would create huge differences in the flavor and activity level of the culture, but making a sourdough starter feels more consistent than this – you almost always end up with bread yeast instead of black mold or Shiitake mushrooms or what have you.
That’s because you’re not capturing the culture from the air, you’re reactivating spores *in the flour*. Think about it, what’s going to be better at eating flour than the yeast growing on the wheat? It’s still there after being ground into flour, and it’s this yeast you’re hydrating and waking up.
This is also why sourdough starter is more consistent in the cultures it grows than baked bread: you killed the innate culture with baking and now you really do have a good nutrition source for any old mold to find.
The mold is very frequently *already on the food* before you even buy it or try to store it, so a hermetically clean environment isn’t going to help. You’d have to like irradiate all your incoming food to prevent it from spoiling. And it’s not a big deal to eat these yeasts and bacteria anyway so long as you don’t eat too many of them, so we just try to slow them down instead of eliminating them.
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