It's bacteria. They could probably go on a prophylactic antibiotics course and be fine. I'd be more concerned with how the favor changed due to the waste products over the years.
I'm no cheesologist but I bet it tastes like garbage in its current form. I'd also bet they could analyze it and come up with a similar recipe they could try.
Antibiotics wouldn't protect from any toxic byproducts of bacterial decomposition. For example, recooking imroperly canned goods can kill the botulinum bacteria, but leaves deadly amounts of the botulinum toxin. There's lots of reasons to not mess around with consuming questionable substances.
My mother, who believes in never, ever throwing food away until you can actually see the mold growing, bought a giant plastic jug of honey that she used for most of my childhood. It got sludgier and sludgier as the sugars solidified. Eventually, you could only get it liquid enough to use if you put it in the microwave for a while. And then, even that didn't work and it was basically just a solid mass of amber sugar gunk.
So I always found that story hard to buy and now I know it wasn't true. Thanks.
Skin chips! There's still mummia for all your cannibalistic cravings.
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Insane that this lead to and crossed the age of colonialism right? Super bright people, the lot of us.
The usage of mumiya as medicine began with the famous Persian mumiya black pissasphalt remedy for wounds and fractures, which was confused with similarly appearing black bituminous materials used in Egyptian mummification. This was misinterpreted by Medieval Latin translators to mean whole mummies. Starting in the 12th century and continuing until as far as the 19th century, mummies and bitumen from mummies would be central in European medicine and art, as well as Egyptian trade.
After Egypt banned the shipment of mummia in the 16th century, unscrupulous European apothecaries began to sell fraudulent mummia prepared by embalming and desiccating fresh corpses.
Tosh just had an astronaut on his podcast. He said they grew romaine lettuce in space, but NASA told them not to eat them because NASA wanted to test them for microbials.
The astronauts ate the lettuce anyway. I'm thinking someone might have took the chance and tried ancient cheese or honey. I know I would have, but I might have been dead too.