• Question: WOULD YOUR FOOD TASTE DIFFERENT IF IT HAD NO MICROBES ON IT

    Asked by pickle to MarkF, Mark, Michael, Panos, Sarah on 15 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Panos Soultanas

      Panos Soultanas answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      Most food is cooked and therefore most microbes get killed during the cooking process. However, some foods do have microbes. For example, some tasty cheese is full of microbes that contribute to its great taste. So yes in some cases microbes make our food tastier. Microbes also are useful in fermentation processes to produce tasty beer and other foodstuffs and drinks.

    • Photo: Sarah Burl

      Sarah Burl answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      yes, probably, think about blue cheese, without the blue mouldy part the cheese would taste very different! The bacterium Brevibacterium linens, responsible for the pungent smell of many blue cheeses, is also the cause of human foot odor! Mould that grows on your foods that have been kept for a long time would taste horrible and may cause you to be very sick so it is best to not eat anything with mould on it if it was not supposed to be there. Obviously there could be many small amounts of different microbes on food that we don’t see and probably don’t make any difference to the taste. It is best to stick with eat before dates on food so that you don’t get sick!

    • Photo: Mark Fogg

      Mark Fogg answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      It depends really. You need microbes to make things like cheese and yogurt so yes, these would taste very different as they’d pretty much be just milk.
      Most fresh food that’s been cleaned only has small amounts of microbes in it or on it. When it’s cooked they’re killed and it’s unlikely they would effect the taste.
      If the food was rotten in the first place, that means it’s probably covered in billions of bugs, even after cooking it would still taste revolting.
      Bacteria make food rotten by eating it and producing their own ‘waste’ products, that’s where most of the smell and bad taste comes from.

    • Photo: Mark Travis

      Mark Travis answered on 14 Jun 2010:

      For some foods definitely yes, for some probably not! All food will have some kind of bacteria on it, as bacteria are all over the place! For some foods, bacteria are vital to make them……for example yoghurts and cheese need bacteria to make them and wouldn’t be the same without them! In terms of other foods, you cook them to get rid of microbes, which affects the taste, but for the better usually (unless you are a lousy cook)…..

    • Photo: Michael Loughlin

      Michael Loughlin answered on 15 Jun 2010:

      Yes…some foods like yoghurt and cheese would still be milk if there were no bacteria in them…other liekbread wouldn’t rise without the fungi inside them…

      some meats and left to hang..this allows the meat to be part digested by the bacteria that gives it a softer texture so yes without bacteria food would taste different

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