I've been eating and drinking after heating in a moldy microwave

March 14, 2024 6:42 PM

Will I be okay?

I knew my microwave was a bit dirty, but upon closer inspection I found dark mold in it. I'm sure it's been like this for a while and I have been heating food and beverages in it.

I cleaned it with CitraSolv and will do a more thorough cleaning with vinegar according to instructions I found online. But did I potentially expose myself to anything harmful and should I eat the chili I just warmed up?

posted by This Is My Superhero Costume to Health & Fitness (7 answers total)

You are fine. I think the chili is low risk, but personally I'd probably dump it just on general "ugg, gross" more than rational risk calculation

Most mold is harmless. More importantly, the main risk of eating moldy food is eating a toxin that will hurt you in the short term--a sort of variant on food poisoning. If you have a standard immune system, it's not going to infect you because you ate it. So you don't need to worry about the stuff that you ate earlier; you'd already know if it caused a problem.

Mold is ubiquitous in nature, and a little bit of mold in the kitchen is common enough, especially if you regularly keep fresh fruit beyond apples and bananas. You throw it out and move on.

The really scary stuff with mold--the reason people worry about it--is when it infects you. This is rare, usually only a risk to people with compromised immune systems, and more likely to happen via inhalation. The CDC has pages on mold if you are curious, though I wouldn't encourage looking them up if you're the type to worry. There's really not a reason to think your microwave has heightened your risk in any way.
posted by mark k at 8:21 PM on March 14 [4 favorites]

Eh, there's little bits of mold everywhere. Even the folks who are really alarmed about airborne mold toxins / "black mold" (note this is a specific type of mold and not every mold that is dark in color), you're looking at issues with long-term breathing primarily. Otherwise it's mostly an index of cleanliness in other senses.
posted by Lady Li at 11:18 PM on March 14 [3 favorites]

I should say I'm assuming this is the kind of mold spots you find "on closer inspection" - like a spot of pasta sauce turned black - not "and then I realized the shadow over the entire back half of the microwave / the smudge on the ceiling I had thought was grease, was a big fuzzy mold patch!". If it's a huge amount of the surface area of the microwave then my "oh gross" gets tripped too.
posted by Lady Li at 11:20 PM on March 14

A few weeks ago I realised that inside of the black plastic mouthpiece of my water bottle had become entirely coated with mould the same colour as the plastic. Everything I'd been drinking since it grew there had been passing through a tunnel of mould. I was grossed out, and I've stepped up the frequency of cleaning out my water bottle, but as a person with a standard immune system I've had no noticeable ill effects from essentially drinking mould.
posted by terretu at 11:59 PM on March 14 [3 favorites]

Are you sure it's actually mold, and not something else, like spots of dried spaghetti sauce or some such thing? It seems to me that the microwave radiation inside the oven would kill any mold before it really had a chance to grow much. A few years ago, I encountered a health inspector who dinged my business for having mold inside the ice machine. It wasn't mold. It was small, dark spots of corrosion on the metal (not that I could convince the health inspector of this).
posted by JD Sockinger at 5:50 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]

Eat your food and then clean your microwave. You are exposed to mold all the time, it just Is Everywhere, and while you don't want to eat (most) foods that have mold growing on them mostly because if it's old enough for that it's old enough for other really dangerous bacteria to be leaving toxins behind, by far the primary danger of mold is a very specific kind of mold that generally grows in wet organic and/or soft material (wood, fabric, drywall, carpet, car upholstery) and the spores are bad news to be inhaled or ingested. Your grungy microwave, shower, or washer/dryer seals are not especially dangerous.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:21 AM on March 15

I found mold in a microwave that came with a place I was living in. They were tiny spots but my vision is pretty good and they were definitely mold. Someone else might have thought they were just little sauce spots or something, but nope. They were furry! I was also really shocked that this could happen.

Anyway, I had no noticeable ill effects from any of the food I'd been heating up and eating during that time, fwiw.

After I cleaned it up I started leaving the door open for a few minutes after anything that left the interior steamed up. It did make me wonder if moisture wasn't exiting the microwave somewhere it should have, or if its fan was clogged up somehow. The unit died about a year or so later--no idea if there's any connection.
posted by wintersweet at 8:46 AM on March 15