🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com You are standing at the bin with it in your hand and you do not know. A block of cheese with a spot of blue on the corner. A jar of jam with a grey bloom on top.

Half a loaf. A pepper with one soft place. So you either scrape it off and eat it and feel uneasy all evening, or you throw the whole thing out and feel foolish about it.

There is a rule. My grandfather could have told you in one sentence which to do, and he would not have had to look at the thing twice. It is not a rule about food.

It is a rule about one question: can you get to all of it? That spot you can see is not the mold. It is the part that has come up to the surface.

The mold itself is threads finer than a hair running down into whatever they are sitting on. Whether you can cut them out depends on how far they have travelled, and that depends on what the food is. He settled it for me with a knife and two things off the cellar shelf.

He cut a hard cheese straight down through the bloom and it was white and clean a quarter inch in. Then he cut a soft pear with one brown place on the shoulder, and the threads ran all the way to the core. What we go through: The two questions that sort any food, even one that is not on either list The full save list, and the two things that matter more than the inch you cut off The full throw list, including three that surprise almost everybody Why the whole loaf goes and not just the slice Why shredded and sliced cheese is on the other list from the block it came off Why a jar of jam goes out whole, no matter how contained the top looks What a white bloom on a dry cured ham actually is Blue cheese and brie, and the one thing to watch for on them Freezer burn versus mold, and why freezing stops mold but does not undo it Why the smell test is not the test people think it is The habit that saves more food than all the cutting put together Three things said plainly.

Do not put your nose over it and take a good breath; that is a lungful of seed and it does real mischief to a weak chest. A home canned jar with mold on top is not a thing to trim, because the seal failed and something you cannot see or taste may have got in, so do not taste it to check and do not feed it to the dog to check.

And moldy hay, grain, or bread never goes to the stock. I am not a doctor. If somebody has eaten something moldy and is unwell, that is a question for a doctor.

And if anyone in your house is very old, very young, has a weak chest, or is on medicine that lowers their defences, the safe side of this sits further over and I would bin things I would otherwise trim. The rule does not exist to make you throw more out. It exists so you stop throwing out the things that were fine.

A good block of cheddar is real money, and a great many of them go in the bin every week over a spot the size of a thumbnail, by people who would happily eat a blue cheese that is mold from end to end. Tonight, go to your refrigerator and find the one thing you have been eyeing for three days. Put it on the two lists.

Hard and dry, or soft and wet. You already know the answer now. And while the door is open, look at what is uncovered in there.

Tell me in the comments what county you are in and how old your house is. And tell me this: what is the thing you have argued with yourself about, standing at the bin? Cheese is the one I hear most.

Next time we go down into the cellar, because a good many of you are not losing food to bad luck. You are losing it to a damp room, and there is a way to find out in two days whether the wet is coming up out of your ground or sitting in your air. I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com.

The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #Amish #AmishWisdom #EliasYoder #FoodStorage #MoldyFood #FoodSafety #KitchenTips #NoWaste #FrugalLiving #Homesteading #RootCellar #OldWays...