Why food spoils

In your book, Our Wondrous World (Chapter 3), it is a sunny Monday morning. Disha finds the lunch box she forgot in school last Friday. Inside is her favourite food, uttapam, left there three days ago. When she opens the box, a foul smell comes out, and the uttapam has coloured patches on it! What happened? Detective Disha is ready to solve the mystery.

At home, Disha asks her Anna (elder brother, in Tamil), Aditya, who is in Grade 8. He says the patches are mould. Tiny living things called microbes grew on the food and changed it. They changed its taste and smell too.

Are microbes like little lice? No, they are even smaller! They are so tiny that you need an instrument called a microscope to see them. We can see mould only because it is made up of a colony of thousands of microbes together.

Disha writes Finding #1 in her notebook: microbes are found in soil, in water and in the air around us; in plants, in animals, and even inside us!