Can you eat moldy bread?

What you see: Mold on bread.
What it is: Mold.
Eat or toss: Toss. Since bread is soft, the mold could have spread into other parts of it. Even if you can’t see the mold, it could be there. If, however, there’s just a small amount of mold, you might be able to remove it with wide margins–read on for more details.

Is it safe to just trim off mold on bread?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s guidance on moldy bread is clear: discard it.

This is because even if you only see mold in one area, its growing network of microscopic mold threads could be penetrating deep within the soft habitat of the bread. You may not see those threads of mold, but they could be leaving behind some nasty things that could be unhealthy to eat or could simply make the bread taste bad.

Airborne mold spores can trigger allergic reactions and respiratory issues, which is why sniffing a piece of moldy food isn’t the best idea. Some molds also produce toxins, which can make you sick in the near or long term.

Generally, as USDA advises, it’s primarily soft, moist foods that you should really worry about with mold. If you see a bit of mold on a hard cheese or a hard fruit or vegetable, for example, then it’s OK to just cut off the affected area. Such foods are too firm for the mold to cast out its spindly mold tentacles too far, so it’s unlikely to have penetrated past what you can see. (The USDA breaks down what to do if you see mold on various types of food here.)

Is bread with a small amount of mold OK to eat?

If bread is as mold crusted as the image at the top of this post, you’ll definitely want to pitch it. However, USDA’s advice to pitch any bread with any amount of mold is conservative. If there’s only a little mold, some experts say it’s OK to take a more nuanced approach. For a healthy person, if the bread has only a small spot and you cut around it with wide margins, sample it and it tastes fine, it could still be ok to eat. If you do this and the bread has an off flavor, then you haven’t cut a wide enough margin and you may want to cut even more or give up on the bread.

Don Schaffner, a microbiologist at Rutgers University, and Ben Chapman, a food safety expert at North Carolina State University, discuss this slightly moldy bread scenario on episode 147 of their podcast, Risky Or Not. They concluded that such bread is not risky, based on prior studies that examined toxin diffusion through moldy bread.

Same mold story.

Updated April 2024