Mycotoxins and Grain Safety
What Home Bakers Need to Know
After sharing about our recent experience with a crop failure, which you can read about here and here, we thought the logical next step would be to discuss what home bakers need to know about grain safety. Here are a few of the biggest concerns about mycotoxins that home bakers face, as well as some useful strategies for mitigating risks.
For help understanding the risks mycotoxins pose to home bakers, I reached out to Aimee Hill, the Baking Innovation Lab Director at Hartwick College. Based in Oneonta, New York, Hartwick is one of the leading institutions for grain research and testing. Aimee shared some interesting resources with me, including an article from Penn State entitled “Mycotoxins You Should Know.” It’s a quick read that makes a complicated subject easy to understand, and I recommend reading it if you’re curious.
The two main takeaways from the article that are relevant to home bakers are the following.
“DON is a heat-stable mycotoxin that can withstand temperatures commonly used for food and feed processing and ethanol production.”
What this means is that baking the affected grain does not make it safe to eat. While some other food safety issues can be resolved by heating ingredients thoroughly, the risk of mycotoxin contamination is not decreased by anything we can do in a home oven. That means that prevention is the only strategy.
“When the fungus infects different plant parts, it produces mycotoxins that will remain in the affected tissues, even when the fungus moves to a different tissue or dies. DON production helps the fungus spread throughout the plant. Therefore, contamination with DON occurs while crops are in the field and may continue to increase if storage conditions are suboptimal and favor fungal growth.”
What this means for the home baker is proper storage is essential for keeping DON in check. The farmers and millers who sell us grain are responsible for DON testing up until the point at which the grain is sold. The FDA allows mycotoxin contamination up to 1 part per million in grain that is intended for human consumption. This means that very small amounts of these mycotoxins are allowed to be present in grain, and the grain is still considered safe. However, if the grain is stored improperly, the mycotoxin load can increase to unsafe levels without us knowing.
To store grain properly, keep it in a cool, dry area. If your house is especially humid, store the grain in an airtight container to reduce the risk of it absorbing moisture from the air. Properly stored grain is considered safe from mycotoxins for up to one year. Farmers and millers who regularly store large quantities of grain for more than a year simply submit a new sample for DON testing to ensure that their grain is still safe. This approach really isn’t practical for home bakers, so we recommend trying to use your grain within a year of purchase.
Aimee also shared a link to Penn State’s Fusarium Risk Tool. This interactive map allows us to track DON and its changing prevalence. While it’s intended more for producers and researchers, it’s still helpful for home bakers to be able to see what’s happening in their local grain regions. Of course, the best way to be aware of the current situation is to simply talk to your farmer or miller. If you’re concerned about the quality of grain you purchase, you can always simply ask if it's been tested for DON recently. Personally, if the grain looks and smells right, I don’t worry too much about the safety of grain if I’m using it solely for my own personal consumption.
That brings us to the last strategy for grain safety which is to use your senses. While mycotoxins are impossible for us to quantitively detect outside of a lab, many of the effects of scab are easily detectable by sight, smell, and feel.
Grains which are affected are usually shrunken, shriveled, and light. Is there a high proportion of ugly grains in the bag? If so, this is potentially cause for concern. Another indicator of unhealthy grain is a pinkish hue. Examine a small handful of grains carefully. Do you see any pink areas or a general pink shine? There are many naturally beautiful colors to different varietals of grain, but pink isn’t one of them. If you see pink, investigate further. Lastly, does the grain smell fresh and a bit nutty? Or does it smell off? A damp, musky odor is a bad sign, as is the smell of cinnamon. Affected grain is commonly reported to smell like cinnamon, so if you catch a whiff of that, it’s a major cause for concern.
While climate change is causing an increase in mycotoxin prevalence, it’s important to remember that humans have been dealing with this issue for thousands of years. Laboratory testing is a wonderful way to help ensure food safety, especially at large scales. But the basic principles of safe storage and using our senses are still excellent ways to keep our grains, and ourselves, safe.