Bread gets moldy because it provides a good food source for fungi, which can be found almost everywhere. Fungi are flexible about their food choices and reproduce exponentially until all available nutrients are depleted. Mold can be destroyed by baking, but airborne spores can find their way onto bread and multiply, even in the cold conditions of a refrigerator.
Bread goes moldy because it provides a good food source for some types of mushrooms. The air is usually filled with tiny mold spores, and under the right conditions, they can land on almost any organic matter and begin digesting it. In bread, these enzymes break down the cell walls of the organic material that makes up the loaf, releasing compounds that are molecularly simple and easily digested. This is how bread gets moldy.
Mold, found on stale or unrefrigerated bread, comes from fungi, one of the most ubiquitous and successful life forms on the planet. There are tens of thousands of species, which can be found almost everywhere. Scientists who study fungi, called mycologists, say that about one in 20 living species is some form of fungus.
Mushrooms cannot receive energy directly from the sun because they lack chlorophyll and must therefore live off other plants and animals. Some fungi are parasitic, actively attacking a host for nutrients. Most, however, are scavengers, turning organic matter into soil. Without fungi, many plants would die, because they need rich soil to thrive.
Most Mushrooms tend to be flexible about their food choices. They feed on a wide variety of organic molecules and their flexibility is largely responsible for their ubiquity. Fungi produce dozens of digestive enzymes and acids, which they secrete into a material as they grow on it.
Unlike humans, mold first digests, then eats, not the other way around. Under the right conditions, there are forms of mushrooms that eat just about anything but metal. Special fungi produced through selective breeding are sometimes used as agents to target specific cleaning compounds.
Fungi reproduce exponentially until all available nutrients are depleted. Some forms of mold can double in mass every hour. They reproduce by means of spores, tiny vectors that are mass-produced by the fungus. The spores are extremely small and numerous—there are probably millions of fungal spores in every room at once.
Fortunately, these spores can be destroyed by baking, which is why bread doesn’t become infected with mold immediately. Over time, however, the airborne spores find their way onto the nutrient-rich surface of the bread and begin to multiply, even in the cold conditions of a refrigerator. At the freezing point, the mushrooms go dormant. If they are exposed to heat again, they can perk up and continue to grow.
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