Contrary to the HBO show ‘The Last of Us’ where eating pancakes turn people into zombies, fungi in flour have been making people sick for a while. In the series, a fungus called Cordyceps is added to the world’s flour supply which when it’s used in food like pancakes reacts and turns people into zombies.
As a food scientist, I study how fruits and vegetables – like the flour they use in pancakes – are affected when they are processed. Even though it won’t make you turn into a zombie, sometimes the flour can contain fungi that causes people to get sick. But if you cook and process it properly, then you’ll usually stay safe.
The video game ‘The Last of Us’ is based on an imaginary situation where a dangerous virus spreads around the world quickly and causes chaos.
Reconnecting with Our Past
The world around us is filled with wonders. From the vast forests and deserts, to the tall mountains and oceans, there are so many interesting things to be found everywhere you turn. But even more amazing than these natural features are the creatures that inhabit them. All kinds of animals live in our environment — from tiny bugs to beautiful birds, majestic mammals, curious reptiles and huge sea creatures. These creatures all work together in a beautifully balanced eco-system that helps keep our planet healthy.
For ages, people have been loving to eat wheat-based bread for about 14,000 years and farming with wheat even longer than that – around 10,000 years. In 1882, people in Russia began getting sick from a type of bread they ate and experienced feelings like dizziness, headache, trembling hands, confusion and vomiting. It seems weird but this mold-related sickness has been happening since long before the Russian incident too! Chinese peasants were voicing out their unpleasant findings of consuming pinkish wheat which made them feel bad. Clearly, fungi causing illnesses dates back a long way!
Fungi can infect various food plants such as wheat, corn, rice, even fruits and vegetables when they grow. In the game “The Last of Us,” an epidemiologist predicted that climate change is making the fungi mutate so it can also infect people now. Unfortunately, due to rising temperatures, fungi are becoming more common and turning into a major problem.
A study from 2017 showed that more than 90% of wheat and corn flour samples in Washington, D.C., had live fungus growing on them. These were mostly Aspergillus and Fusarium types of mold, which cause a disease in plants called fusarium head blight or “scab”.
Farmers use various methods to combat a devastating plant disease, such as crop rotation, planting resistant crops, applying fungicides and keeping irrigation at a minimum during flowering. After gathering the grains they remove any contaminated wheat before turning them into flour. Even though they are able to get rid of most of the funguses while sorting, there is still a chance small amounts may remain in the flour.
Baking Your Dough
Good news! Most fungi and other microorganisms die when heated to 71-77 degrees Celsius (160-170 Fahrenheit). Usually, pancake temperatures reach between 88–93 °C (190–200 °F) and cakes or breads reach temperatures of 82–99 °C (180-210 Fahrenheit). So, if you bake or fry your dough like in “The Last of Us”, the fungi will be killed.
The issue is that if people eat flour without baking it first, such as when they eat raw cookie dough or “lick the bowl clean,” they may be ingesting tiny germs (like E. coli and Salmonella) that can make them really sick.
The flour that you find at the store isn’t actually safe for eating raw. This is because it still has some little living organisms in it, which we can’t see with our eyes. Most of the time, people will cook any food that has flour in it so that these microorganisms are killed off. It might technically be possible to try and heat-treat the raw flour at home, but this wouldn’t work very well as there’s a chance some tiny organisms could still survive.
Fungi and some tiny microorganisms, like plants, can produce spores – which act like seeds to help them survive bad conditions. These types of spores are so powerful that they even can stay alive after cooking, drying or freezing! There’s also evidence that 4500-year-old spore yeast has been brought back to life, being turned into bread. In most cases, these fungi and spores don’t make humans sick – except if their immune system is weakened.
Foods have chemicals that can stop mold or fungus from growing. These are called sorbates, benzoates and propionates. You won’t find it in flour or pancake mix because fungi don’t survive in dry powder. It’s likely to find these additives in bread since fungi can grow on the wheat or on the baked bread. That’s why you can find such additives in bread but not a powdered mix.
Mycotoxins
Fungi can be dangerous because they can produce something called mycotoxins. These mycotoxins can end up in food like wheat if the wheat is harvested and ground into flour. Eating these contaminated foods can be bad for your health.
Cooking doesn’t always do the job when it comes to something called mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are a bad thing because they can cause all sorts of problems, like vomiting, diarrhea and even cancer. There are certain types of mycotoxins found in grain, such as aflatoxins, deoxynivalenol, ochratoxin A and fumonisin B – and these can be really dangerous!
Ergotism is an old-world disease mentioned in the Bible that causes hallucinations. It has been around since 800 A.D. Some people believe it caused the Salem witch hunts in America.
Today, wheat is less likely to cause such a sickness due to mycotoxins, so much so that people think it helped reduce death rates during the 18th century by changing diets from rye to wheat.
Don’t worry about eating pancakes because farmers use different techniques to stop mold from making grain dangerous and the government keeps watch on how much mold it is in crop production and stores. Just make sure your bakery foods are cooked before you eat them, and don’t try anything that has started to have green or dark spots on it.
