So you can't always safely scrape or cut the mold off food. These guidelines will help you in avoiding mold growth and handling the moldy food you encounter anyway.

Once a food shows heavy mold growth, you can bet that the"root" threads have invaded it deeply. In dandergous molds, the mycotoxins are often contained in and around these threads. In some cases, the toxins may have spread throughout the food.

Suggestion: Clean the inside of the refrigerator every few months with 1 tbsp. of baking soda dissolved in a quart of water. Rinse with clear water and dry. Scrub visible mold j(usually black) on rubber casings with 3 tbsp. of bleach in a quart of water.

Keep disrags, dish cloths, sponges and mops clean and fresh. A musty smell means they're spreading mold around. Discard items you can't clean or launder.

Fresh meat and poultry are usually mold-free, but cured meats and smoked turkey may not be. Examine them carefully. Expceptions? Some salamis-San Francisco and Italian types - have a characteristic thin, white mold coating. They shouldn't show any mold.

Don't want moisture buildup? Cake and cheese keepers with their own covers will protect those foods without excess moisture buildup. For breads, use clean paper towels as a cover-this lets bread"breathe."

Empty opened cans of perishable food into clean refrigerator dishes and refrigerate promptly. Reseal boxed food as tightly as possible to keep air that contains mold spores out.

Don't sniff the moldy item. You don't want respiratory trouble. If food is covered with mold, discard it. Put it in a small paper bag or wrap it in plastic for disposal in a covered trash can children and animals can't get into. Clean the refrigerator, if necessary, where the food was sitting. Check nearby items it might have touched. Mold spreads quickly in fruits and vegetables.

If the food shows only a tiny mold spot, follow these guidelines. Generally, we suggest that you can save hard or firm foods with only minor mold problems, but most soft or liquid foods showing mold should be discarded.

You can cut mold off dry-cured country ham if it's only a small, surface spot. You can cut away a small mold spot on the inside of country ham too, following the cheese rule. But if the ham is covered with brown or black mold, discard it.

Discard moldy bacon, hotdogs, sliced lunch meats, meat pies or opened canned ham.

Carefully check any food you've had a while that the store or seller sold as"natural". Processed without preservatives, they are prone to mold growth.

Take sufu, sometimes called Chinese cheese, which is tofu inoculated with the prettily named Actinomucor elegans and fermented three to seven days, then aged in a mixture of brine and wine 40 to 60 days.

Another product cultured with A. elegans is mentauza, the solids from soybean milk pressed into cakes and fermented 10 to 15 days. Chifan is basically a sort of sufu fermented with a different mold for a week and then aged in wine for a year.

Fermented minchin is wheat gluten rotted with a whole bunch of molds (Paecilomyces, Aspergillus, Cladosporum, Fusarium, Syn cephalostrum, Penicillium and Triochethecium) for a coupld of weeks, then salted and aged two weeks longer and finally cut into strips and used as a condiment.

Ang-khak, also known as benikoji or Chinese red rice, is used as a food coloring for fish, cheese and wine in China and the Philippines. It's made by allowing Monascus purpureus, a pigment-producing fungus, to grow on rice kernels for three months. On Taiwan, it colors a reddish local rice drink named anchu.

The Indonesian product ontjom has its own special mold, Neurospora sitophila. It comes in cakes like the soy product tempeh, but it's made from the"press cake" left over after oil is extracted from peanuts. Fried ontjom is said to taste like mincemeat. To serve, sprinkle with sugar and salt and cover with ginger sauce.