What makes and intelligent person eat mold and fungus?!
As adults, we can't get enough of them.
Think about it:
Sour cream... We age cream to "moldy perfection", pay more for it than we did when it wasn't old, and then we bring it home and slather it on our food.
Then there is cheese. It's moldy. We even eat the visually moldy cheese, but we call it "blue", and act like it's special... fancy... deserving of great expense.
Fungus: Mushrooms. When you eat a mushroom, you are ingesting fungus. Mmmmm.
What is the appeal of eating mold and fungus?
Answers: As children, we must be convinced to eat the sour tasting sour cream, the moldy cheeses, and the nasty mushroom. When you're a kid, your taste buds are pure, and these things taste terrible.
As adults, we can't get enough of them.
Think about it:
Sour cream... We age cream to "moldy perfection", pay more for it than we did when it wasn't old, and then we bring it home and slather it on our food.
Then there is cheese. It's moldy. We even eat the visually moldy cheese, but we call it "blue", and act like it's special... fancy... deserving of great expense.
Fungus: Mushrooms. When you eat a mushroom, you are ingesting fungus. Mmmmm.
What is the appeal of eating mold and fungus?
have you seen the show bizarre foods with andrew zimmern? there are much worse things than you mentioned that are considered delicacies in some parts of the world....
I'm an adult & STILL like food fresh. I hated when we used to have to drink SOUR milk & stale corn flakes when we were little.
Mushrooms are good for us as it is a vegetable and has lots of nutrients.Cheese has a lot of calcium for us.
Children don't have the ability to appreciate many flavors in part because their tastes - literally, the sense itself - is not mature. Children don't like earthy flavors - like most vegetables. They don't like bitter flavors - like most greens, and they don't like anything sour....come to think of it, they tend not to like fatty either....
Left to their own devices children would perish from malnutrition. So much for their "pure" taste buds.
The answer to your question then, is its because my taste buds and central nervous system are mature enough to appreciate more than sweet and salty.
i dont eat blue cheese mushrooms I'm not eatin anything grown on s**t and i stay away from salami mold cured not for me
I've never been a fan of cream, sour or otherwise unless I am cooking with in. I love cheese and mushrooms - still do and did as a child. I absolutely love mushrooms they are good for you and tasty. I love making porchini mushroom risotto and will gladly pay $5 (aust.) for a small packet. Different people like different things, just because you think they are terrible doesn't mean everyone else does.
As a child I never ate anything I didn't like or didn't want. As an adult I haven't changed. As my taste buds developed I would try something new, in case I was missing something. I found I liked cheese (not too far a stretch from my love of butter) in the intervening years I must say I haven't met a cheese I didn't like. Mushrooms...wouldn't eat them either until I tasted them raw in a salad. The rest is history on that one as well.
I was never forced to eat anything as a child and I never forced my children either. But they never tasted a fast food until they were 8 years old and out with a friend of mine. They became more accommodating at home after that.
little kids don't like to eat anything unless it's buried under a mound of sugar. when we are older, we have a more refined palate, and more exposure to the finer things of life; sour cream, buttermilk, yogurt, cottage cheese, pizza cheese, mushroom soup. truffles sourdough, aged ham (complete with mold), wine.......when a kid, your taste buds may be pure, but they are also dumb!
by the way, these cultured and fermented foods ARE special. it takes special care and processing to produce them. this extra attention deserves the extra expense. otherwise, why would we continue to seek them out and devour them at such a rate?
Not all children find sour cream, cheeses or mushrooms "nasty" in the first place and many of them do not have to be convinced to eat them at all. Given the opportunity to make their own food choices, most children raised around a varied diet eat just about anything, often including things they will no longer touch as adults.
It is an absolute fallacy that kids don't like certain flavors or have to be forced to eat anything other than sugar. Most children who are "picky" about things like that are picky because they have been made that way by the adults around them who expect them to be picky about food. Even the pickiest of children will generally consume almost anything when they are forbidden to eat it on the grounds that it is only for adults rather than being forced to swallow it.
Think about this: the "average" human body contains something on the order of 67 TRILLION cells. For each and every one of those 67,000,000,000 cells there are present on or in you about 14 bacteria - and they are supposed to be there. These "good" bacteria are the natural army that is the first line of defense against harmful bacteria. They protect you by taking up space and resources, thus denying that space and those resources to bacteria that might kill you.
Sour cream is not "aged to moldy perfection" - it has been acted on by beneficial bacteria and contains no mold or fungi at all. Those beneficial bacteria are also present in yogurt and cultured butter/buttermilk.
Cheese also often contains these beneficial bacteria, but it can also contain beneficial molds. Not all molds are harmful. Penicillin comes from a mold - the same one that is present in that "moldy" blue cheese that you don't like.
As far as the fungus family goes, if you would like to throw that out of our diets, then be prepared to do without virtually all breads, wine, beer, alcoholic beverages of any other sort, ginger or root beer, all cider or wine vinegars. . . . these things are all made with yeast, a member of the fungus family.
What's inherently odd about fungi? I think this is an aversion to the word rather than the item itself.
Mushrooms have varied and complex flavors. In the US, you're usually looking at people eating them sauteed or fried, in which case the mushrooms are just sponges that soak up oil or whatever they're cooked in and add a bit of an earthy flavor to it.
Fermentation and other forms of aging and decay are just one more way of making food edible. For example, humans cannot really digest soy, but fermented soy, as in tofu or natto, is easily digested and high in protein and other compunds that are considered beneficial to one's health.
We eat a lot more aged food than you might realize. Yeast, as in bread, is a mold. All alcohol is essentially the refined side of rot. Most red meat is aged, especially higher quality meat. Cured meats, such as ham, are aged and moldy by definition.
In the case of cheese, aging it can give the acids and molds in it time to kill unhealthy bacteria, which is why the United States prohibits the importing of all almost all "young" cheeses.
Ultimately, though, most people eat different foods because they enjoy the different tastes and textures. There's nothing inherently worse for you about common aged foods than common fresh foods.
Mushrooms have the added appeal of being mystery. What makes them pop up and when? How large to the fungi get? Why are most types so difficult to cultivate? Is this mushroom going to kill me? All of these questions make your dinner just a little bit more interesting.
Children tend to dislike many things adults enjoy. Simply put, children, who are growing, have different dietary needs and different instincts from adults. Kids love sweets because their bodies consume calories at a higher rate relative to their size than most adults and sweetness is a sure sign of a food rich in simple carbohydrates - lots of energy.
Bitterness and sourness are acquired tastes. Think of all the wine lovers who dislike the treacly stuff, or the massive popularity of beer, coffee, tea, or liquor. Not many young children are fond of those things.