Counteracting the effects of rotten food

Question

I'm helping w/ working on what's essentially a zombie survival game (Though that'd be a bit of an understatement), & I've got a question: Do y'all know how to counteract rotten food? I ain't talkin' about preservation (Lord knows we've got too much of that),but using rotten food as ingredients in soups & other meals.

Answer 1

You can not safely repurpose spoiled food for human consumption. While heat treatment can neutralize some pathogens, there are too many that produce heat stable toxins that can easily kill someone.

If this is for a game, I assume you could play loose with the reality of the dangers of spoiled food (some kind of special zombie dust that neutralizes pathogenic toxins), but the only real thing I can come up with is to use spoiled food as compost to produce something safe and edible.

Answer 2

“Rotting” is a casual blanket term for a huge number of chemical and biological processes. “Rotting” generally connotes unwanted processes (one would not refer to brewing beer or leavening bread dough as rotting), but beyond that it’s as vague as things get.

The negative effects of different types of rotting include:

• The production of unwanted, noxious substances by microorganisms, ranging from alcohol and lactic acid to cadaverine and botulinum toxin. Some of these substances are merely unpleasant to experience. Others are fatally poisonous. A subset of them can be inactivated by cooking, but most cannot.

• The growth of infectious microorganisms and parasites, such as campylobacter and trichina. Most but not all of these can be killed by pasteurization.

The problem of heat-stable toxins means that there is rarely a practical way to transform accidentally rotten food into edible food, other than using it to fertilize crops. And without the ability to perform comprehensive lab testing, there’s no way to determine the presence and concentration of these toxins.

Spoiled food is unrecoverable. Zombies don’t change that.