Mould is an excellent place to go to talk about the application of interrogated disgust. There are a lot of cases were foods are intentionally laced with mould for the flavour it produces. We control rot and mould in a lot of ways in food - kimchi, stilton, sour cream, they’re all produced by allowing things to rot in specific ways. And some ways are more blatently obvious than others! You can look at stilton and see the green penicillin moulds used to create it, whilst you might look at bread and go ‘this isn’t going off’ - but yeasts are creating alcohol and CO2 inside the bread, which is a sort of spoilage.
In relation to food in the back of the fridge, absolutely throw it out. You’re not harming anyone by not wanting to eat food you know is past its best. But there are cultures who ferment foods in ways we might immediately balk at because your brain connects the mould in your fridge and the sensible ‘probably not good to eat’ warning with something harmless, and that’s the danger of disgust.
You might genuinely find them disgusting. Icelanders can do what they want, nothing about kæstur hákarl (fermented greenland shark)* appeals to me and I think I’m fine in saying I’m disgusted by it. All theirs.
But, you can see how this could be weaponised, yeah? There are plenty of cultures and peoples where ‘they’re disgusting, vermin-like’ were used as legitimate reasons to oppress and destroy. In that case, their food - harmless and controlled as the spoilage might be - might be used as evidence to prove their point UNLESS you interrogate your initial gut reaction to their fermented foods.
Back to our questions - Does the person telling you about the fermented foods have an agenda? Yes, they do, bigotry. Is your unfamiliarity playing in? Yeah, you’ve never actually tasted the food, you don’t know what it’s like. Is there cultural context you’re missing? Might be! Again, in the case of kæstur hákarl, Iceland is a hard place to grow food and you make edible what you can. Has someone told you to feel disgusted? Yes! Do other people disagree with the speaker? Yes - the culture that created the food think it’s swell!
In this case, you might want to hold back on acting on your disgust. There’s enough rhetorical evidence here to suggest it might be displaced.
(* I’m using kæstur hákarl as an example because the sort of strongly fermented fish products scandinavians make are a good example of food you might not want to eat that doesn’t have any other strongly anti-Scandinavian things attatched to it. I can discuss a theoretical here in a way that means I don’t have to walk into someone’s pre-existing biases. White Scandinavians don’t have to worry about it, no-one is actually using kæstur hákarl to oppress Icelanders.)
I had things like kink culture, purity culture ect. in my mind when I wrote the original post, and you might be able to see now how weaponised disgust is used against fandom and kinksters. A gut-level disgust is what drives a lot of homophobia and transphobia too, when you scratch down deep enough.
I hope that gives you some more context on why I wrote what I did and how you might apply it to the real world!
