Sorry - no magic in this thread.
I visited my friend and his family last weekend. On Sunday morning I woke up earlier than the others and took a hike in the woods. In no time I had collected a basketful of mushrooms and got back to the house. My friend sees the mushrooms and forbids me to eat them. Not that they are poisonous, but because there is a factory nearby. Well, wasting the mushrooms was not a big deal, but was my friend right? He lives near this factory and works there also. So he has been inhaling the same air that “polluted the soil around the factory” all his adult life.
What kind of factories besides nuclear power plants should I avoid and what fungi genuses have the most exposure to air pollution?
If you don’t know what you are doing - NEVER eat mushrooms that you picked. It’s just not a good option, too many ways of killing yourself with mushrooms unless you really know them.
Beyond that, soil pollution may be very different than air pollution. Lead poisoning, for example, is often in soil but not in air. But mushrooms are too dangerous IMO to even contemplate if you’re not experienced in picking them for other reasons.
If you know nothing about local bushes, would you go out in the woods and try eating all sorts of berries of all different colors? That’s crazy. And mushrooms, mushrooms are worse, especially for the toxins which cause massive liver damage which only shows up many days later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_poisoning
Besides the warnings about not eating mushrooms if you don’t know them well, AFAIK, mushrooms are very “efficient” at accumulating toxic stuff, like heavy metals or similar things, from the soil. I might be mistaken, though.
It’s been my hobby for more than three decades, so I know which ones to leave behind. This factory manufacturers medical equipment, and I cannot see how it would be so hazardous. What are the worst heavy metal pollution sources? Traffic used to be prior to the unleaded era.
There are three mushrooms that AIUI are generally considered safe* for an amateur to collect per Peterson’s A Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants: Eastern and Central North America; Morels, Giant Puffballs, and Chicken of the Woods/Sulphur Shelf.
*Bearing in mind that one (or two?, can’t find any of my multiple copies :() could be confused with a toxic genus, the Morels vs the False Morels, but the differences are mind numbingly easy to remember.
CMC fnord!
who can’t even get past his front [del]weed-patch[/del] flower bed without finding ten wild edibles to munch on.
I guess I’m going to ask for some kind of citation for this. I don’t see how mushrooms can accumulate soil toxins any more readily than plants. I’ll be happy to be enlightened.
Lactarius trivialis
Lactarius rufus
Lactarius torminosus
Cantharellus cibarius
Cantharellus tubaeformis
Albatrellus ovinus
ETA: Because I learn at least one new mushroom every year there are over 30 to be picked up safely.
Chanterelles!
Delicious! And once you have been shown they are difficult to confuse with anything else.
The one nice thing about this cold, wet non-summer in the Pacific NW is that it should be an excellent year for them. I’ll find out next week when hunting season starts.