Mold
Read the 4 mold items: raw mean, concrete examples, missing responses and interpretation limits.
Add the 4 numeric 1–6 ratings and divide by 4, rounding to one decimal. Any unscored response withholds this part’s mean. The eight means are separate; no total, norm or cutoff is calculated.
The four mold-related source situations
- These four items ask about eating the mold-free part of a moldy tomato, bread after mold was cut away, hard cheese after mold was cut off and marmalade after surface mold was removed. They are hypothetical prompts from the published scale. Their appearance in a questionnaire is not advice to prepare or consume any such food.
- Rate the imagined disgust the stated scene evokes, if you wish to do so. The item does not test what you know about mold, how you handle food or whether a particular food is safe. No image, tasting, handling or real-world demonstration is required.
Four complete numeric ratings
- For ratings of 2, 4, 5 and 6, the raw sum is 17. Dividing by four gives 4.25, displayed as 4.3 after rounding to one decimal. The unrounded arithmetic is not a probability, and the rounded mean is not a percentage of contamination or a measure of food safety.
- All four must have numeric 1–6 responses. If one is unscored, the mean is not calculated even when the other three are identical. This avoids presenting an incomplete part as the full four-item result. Other complete parts remain visible and this entire guide stays accessible.
Read reported disgust without a safety inference
- A larger mean indicates greater reported disgust at these four named hypothetical situations. It does not establish the amount of mold present, what happens beyond a visible surface or the consequences of consuming anything. A feeling rating and a practical food-safety judgment are different kinds of information.
- A smaller mean does not demonstrate tolerance, knowledge or a willingness to eat a named food. It also does not give permission to do so. The guide offers no normal range, clinical cutoff or recommendation based on where your mean falls.
Different objects can evoke different reactions
- A person may imagine the bread scene vividly but find the marmalade scene difficult to picture. Another may give numeric ratings to both but respond differently because of the image they have in mind. The mean does not decide which imagined detail is most important.
- The response review keeps the four choices available on this device, including unscored answers. You may use it to check that an option was selected as intended, rather than treating the mean as evidence that the same reaction occurs every time you encounter a food.
Mold is separate from fruit or vegetable changes
- The fruit part includes overripe fruit, black spots on a banana, pressure marks and apple browning. The vegetable part includes brown avocado pulp, a bendable overripe cucumber, shrunken radishes and less-crisp salad. Those wording-defined parts are not merged into the mold part or assumed to represent the same process.
- A person can give different means to these parts without contradiction. The source categories organize reactions to named situations; they do not create a guide to identify spoilage. None of the three means can replace practical information about an actual food item.
A counterexample about the same mean
- Four ratings of 4 produce 4.0, as do ratings of 2, 4, 4 and 6. The second pattern contains a strong contrast that the first does not. A shared average therefore does not establish the same experience, and comparing two people solely by that average loses relevant details.
- A strong reaction to one scene is not a diagnosis or proof of an excessive response. Likewise, a mild reaction is not evidence that a practical concern can be dismissed. The questionnaire does not collect the information needed to reach either conclusion.
A reading-only comparison is enough
- You may simply note which item wording felt clear and which felt difficult to imagine. If a response was not what you intended, you can retake and choose differently. No attempt to reduce a reaction, handle a moldy object or test yourself with food is part of this activity.
- You can end after reading this guide, without another test or a discussion with others. Public sharing contains only the test title and entry link. It does not reveal which mold scene you rated or whether your personal mean was available.
Source, edition and attribution
- The 32 English prompts come from Supplementary Table 2 of García-Gómez L, Romero-Rebollar C, Hartmann C, Siegrist M, Ferreira G, Gutierrez-Aguilar R, Villalpando S and Pacheco-Lopez G (2020), Food Disgust Scale: Spanish Version, Frontiers in Psychology 11:165, DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00165, reused under CC BY 4.0. The document was supplied through NLM’s PMC open-access collection. This page selects the complete English bank and the article’s 1–6 endpoints; the Spanish table’s printed 1–5 format is not used.
- Changes comprise a fresh Chinese working translation from English, optional unscored responses, complete-part missingness handling, one-decimal display and original explanatory readings. This is not the validated Spanish administration or a validated Chinese version, and source research does not validate this website. No original-author endorsement, norm, diagnosis or food-safety judgment is implied.