Citric Acid and Mold

This meme was posted by a person on Facebook.  It is supposed to instill fear of citric acid also known as ascorbic acid or Vitamin C.  Here's a surprise:  He's basically correct here with the information.

The majority of the manufactured citric acid (MCA) that is produce is manufactured with the use of black mold, specifically Aspergillus Niger (A. Niger).  In 1917 James Currie discovered that the strains of mold could efficiently produce citric acid. A. Niger are fed a sucrose or glucose-containing medium to produce citric acid. Afterwards, the mold is filtered out of the resulting solution. Citric acid is then isolated by precipitating it with calcium hydroxide to produce calcium citrate salt. From this it is treated with sulfuric acid to produce citric acid.   The use of calcium hydroxide and sulfuric acid is the same process used to extract citric acid from natural fruit juices.

It has been discovered by using gamma radiation to cause mutagenisis, A. Niger can increase its production of citric acid two fold.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20632114

Now is any of this a problem.  No.  The citric acid is chemically exactly the same as the citric acid found in oranges.   Where a substance comes from has no bearing on its safety.  Any properties of concern that one may have about A. Niger does not magically imprint (or whatever these people are thinking) onto the final product.  It almost seems these fear-mongerers are playing an adult game of "cooties". 

To stress the point, the person who posted this meme on Facebook considers himself a "truther" and spouts a lot of nonsense and conspiracy theories.  Paranoia and tinfoil hats may be an understatement when following this guy as can be seen in this post:

Yup.  He's one of those people.