Scrape off or throw away? : consumer attitudes to mouldy foods at home

Sammanfattning: Knowledge about how consumers handle mouldy food products at home is limited. It is of interest to investigate these aspects more closely, since some moulds can produce mycotoxins and other secondary metabolites that could be harmful to human health. A mainly picture-based survey regarding how participants would handle a variety of mouldy foods was distributed through social media and email, with a target of collating answers from both genders and a range of age groups. The participants were presented with a photo of mouldy foods with numbers indicating where they would remove part of the product, alternatively if they would discard the whole mouldy product. The survey generated 650 full answer-sets from people resident in Sweden. Participants were not evenly distributed by gender (84% women, 14% men), and this was treated in the statistical analysis of the results. About 39% of the participants agreed that if the mouldy part of the product was discarded, the rest of the product would be safe to eat. About 79% of the precipitants disagreed with the statement ?mouldy food is not dangerous, and the mouldy food could be consumed?. When looking at the responses to the picture-based questions, products that the majority of participants would discard substantially or completely if mouldy were salsa, b