Is safe to eat jerky with white mold

food-safetyjerkymold

I recently ate a jerky with white mold on it (see below), I donot know if I should be okay with that? The mold grew on jerky because I placed it in a moist environment days before.

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Best Answer

There are some kinds of mold which are safe to consume (blue cheese is a common example) but in general they are not. While you might often be fine eating a bit, there's no guarantee, so to be safe you should throw out moldy food like your jerky.

See the FDA's advice, for example.

Note that mold is okay on some kinds of cured meats:

Hard salami and dry-cured country hams: Use. Scrub mold off surface. It is normal for these shelf-stable products to have surface mold.

But I'm not sure it's normal for jerky. For those examples it's normal and even common to have mold, but for jerky it's not common, so I wouldn't be confident it's normal. (Indeed, it grew there when you left it somewhere moist, so it's not part of the normal production and storage of jerky.) Additionally, jerky is generally more fibrous and less solid than those things, so there's more potential for mold to grow inside it, where you wouldn't be able to scrub it off.

Your example does look like it's mostly on the surface though, so if you want to take a small chance, you could see if you can really scrub it all off.