Still, they clearly did not know what they were doing. If you learn to properly identify edible mushrooms, it is perfectly safe. If you don’t, anything could happen.
Or to put it another way: there are fish that are deadly poisonous, and yet it’s safe to eat mackerel; there are berries that are deadly poisonous, and yet it’s safe to eat blueberries.
The point is, how do you know when you are sufficiently trained to identify edible mushrooms? When you don’t die?
This is getting silly. Fungi are identified by a finite number of criteria; if a speciment differs in one criterion (say, smell, or habitat) from the reference, then it may be an atypical specimen, or something else entirely, and you don’t eat it. There’s no mystery.
*If you learn to properly identify edible mushrooms, it is perfectly safe. *
And if you learn to properly swallow a sword, it can be perfectly safe too. Still wouldn’t recommend it just for kicks.
Risk is made up of two factors: the likelihood that something will happen, and the potential consequences if it does. If you focus only on the first, lots of things can seem perfectly reasonable. But if you factor in the second, and in this case the potential harm is huge, the risk assessment changes.
It seems to me you’re saying that you’re willing to bet your life that you didn’t make a mistake when picking those mushrooms, and lots of people are dead from various things because they thought they would never make a mistake.
Not trying to tell you not to eat mushrooms. Eat up. I’m just an observer who’s amazed that people will bet their life on not making a simple mistake. (And yes, there are plenty of scenarios where the can happen, like crossing the street. But why add the risk of disaster when you don’t need to?)
Well, when you’ve grown up from childhood eating wild mushrooms, and all your family have too, and no-one’s ever gotten poisoned other than Mad Drunken Uncle Albert, it’s fairly natural to assume (rightly or wrongly) that it’s not really a disaster risk. Seriously, all over the world millions of people are eating wild mushrooms without getting poisoned. What do you think people ate before they invented supermarket mushrooms?
Or to put it another way, would you stop eating steak because of the chance of food poisoning? After all, someone could have made a simple mistake when preparing or storing it.
The risk exists entirely in your imagination. A little way down the road from me, there is a patch of woodland; there are wild cherry trees there, mixed in with them are also some cherry laurels, which have fruits that are almost identical in appearance to a cherry, but are deadly poisonous. The risk to me of accidental poisoning from picking the wrong fruits is absolutely zero, because I know how to positively identify both plants.
In the same patch of woodland are some sweet chestnut trees, also a horse chestnut, which is superficially similar in many ways, except that the nuts are poisonous. The risk to me is absolutely zero because I know how to positively identify them.
Yet in both of these cases, I’m betting my life on this ability. heck, I bet my life on the ability to discern the difference between grape juice and drain cleaner. You’re inventing a problem that simply doesn’t exist.
Sure, people get poisoned by eating the wrong mushrooms, *because they don’t know how to positively identify them *; people get poisoned from eating horse chestnuts and cherry laurel too, for the same reason, but to someone who knows how to positively identify them, the risk is nonexistent.
Fungi are not in a special mysterious category of things that are impossible to positively identify.
Actually, what usually happens ( at least here in the Bay Area ) is that immigrants that have been safely collecting and eating wild mushrooms for generations in their homeland ( southeast Asia in particular ), come here and use the same folk criteria they used in their homeland to deadly result.
In these cases the culprit is invariably Amanita phalloides, the Deathcap, one of our few truly deadly mushrooms. It is also quite unfortunately tasty. And VERY similar to sought after edible that can grow right next to it - the coccoli, Amanita calyptrata. Now…
I have taken a undergraduate course in general mycology and a graduate course in “The Taxonomy of the Holobasidomycetes.” I can confidently tell A. phalloides from A. calyptrata by sight 85-90% of the time. Give me a microscope and I could do it 100% of the time. But I won’t eat coccoli collected by me or anyone else locally, certainly if it hasn’t been keyed by a microscope. For 2 reasons:
A.) A. phalloides is just too fucking dangerous. It causes most mushroom deaths in the United States and is just not worth the risk.
B.) They’re too damn close taxonomically and as I said they can pop up next to each other - I don’t trust that a weird hybrid might turn out to key to the good one, but still be somewhat toxic.
So in that case, I’d agree, it pays to be cautious.
But otherwise I agree with Mangetout. If you know what you’re doing, properly identifying something like a chanterelle is a piece of cake. Any idiot can learn. And here the worst case scenario of a mistake ( again, very unlikely - the lookalikes aren’t that lookalike, plus they smell like semen and taste worse ) is an upset stomach, not death.
Millions have been eating wild mushrooms for thousands of years and the death rate is quite, quite low. Plenty of those wild picked mushrooms now show up regularly on your standard grocery shelves and believe me Albertsons and Safeway would not be doing that if they feared a small screwup could kill fickle customers and be traced to them.
Me, I don’t do it much, because I don’t really care to crawl around in poison oak infested wet mud under oak trees, which is where the best stuff invariably pops up locally. But I wouldn’t fear to do so. The number of great edibles is actually rather small. So, too, is the number of truly dangerous mushrooms. Most taste blah or yucky and might make you throw up or something. The untrained should never fuck around with wild mushrooms, but for the trained it’s a negligible risk.
- Tamerlane
Thanks, Tamerlane for reinforcing and expanding upon my point so eloquently. For the record, I also simply pass over all specimens of any Amanita - the point is that even though I can only positively identify a few species in that genus, there’s no possibility of me mistaking any Amanita for, say, a member of Boletus or Agaricus. Of course the possibility of misidentification within Boletus, or within Agaricus exists, but by passing over all but a couple of easily recognised, easily distinguished species in those genera, all risk is avoided.
For example, I was out walking on the weekend and came across a patch of nice-looking mushrooms at the meeting point of an area of coniferous wood and an area of mixed deciduous woodland. They were very obviously Agaricus and probably edible, as they didn’t stain yellow or smell unpleasant, but I was unable to positively identify the species, so I just left them there. Reasonable certainty that they are probably edible isn’t nearly good enough.
That looks to be a Horse mushroom from my experience. Although you would have to do a complete the identification to be sure. You should always be 100% sure. Most mushrooms (minus the common killers, Destroying Angel, Death Cap, etc.) are just fine once they have been cooked. Unless you have picked a few “majic” ones then the usual complaints are of the gastro-intestinal variety. Always cook wild mushrooms. The Shaggy Mane (ink cap) should not be consumed with alcohol. Even if it has been dried and powdered and sprinkled into a soup or stew. Big no-no. Tummy-no-like-it.
The best book IMO is David Arora’s “Mushrooms Demystified”. Another of his which is a good “pocket guide” (if you are so inclined to search out some of the local common varieties) is called “All that the rain promises and more”. Then again…I’m a mushroom hound!
Dunno; those scales on the cap make me wonder if it could be an Amanita. If I had the thing in my hand, I could tell in a second.
Okay, so maybe you mushroom people aren’t as whacked as I thought. But…
Now see, those sound like famous last words. I don’t doubt for a minute that you know your mushrooms and your risk is much lower than that of someone who just reads a book one weekend and then goes mushroom hunting. But absolutely zero? That’s the attitude that gets you in trouble, whether you’re talking about mushrooms, driving on the expressway, or slicing a tomato.
I don’t avoid driving on the expressway or slicing a tomato, but I still wouldn’t say my risk of harm is absolutely zero because I’m an experienced driver and tomato slicer.
Are most mushrooms that grow on trees safe?
That’s because when you drive on the expressway, you are somewhat at the mercy of other drivers, or vehicle failure, no matter how careful you are, and when you slice a tomato, you are at the mercy of variables in material properties and your own motor control.
Identifying fungi (or any other organism, for that matter) isn’t like that; of course it’s possible to be uncertain or undecided, and in those cases, the default action (in the context of gathering fungi for the table) is to leave them alone. But as I said, there is a finite set of identification criteria; if all the criteria match exactly, the identification is positive.
There’s no reason at all why the worries you express should apply to fungi, but not to, say, blackberries or wild strawberries. Once again, fungi are not in some special mysterious category of objects that defy positive identification.
There are no reliable rules of thumb. Many fungi that grow on trees are simply tough or inedible for aesthetic reasons; some are edible and delicious, but I’m sure there will be some poisonous ones too.
There are no reliable rules of thumb. Perhaps this is why people seem to regard mushroom identification as some kind of mystery.
Okay, point taken. It’s not as mysterious as I might have thought. But I’m still troubled by your repeated assertion that you simply can not or will not make a mistake. Who talks like that about anything, much less something that could kill you if you do make a mistake?
I mean, really, nobody ever expects to make a mistake, right? But they still happen.
If I said that I go out picking blackberries, or wild strawberries or bilberries (our local equivalent of blueberries), and it was impossible for me to mistakenly pick something else, how would you react to that.
But people do pick the wrong berries and poison themselves; it’s just something that isn’t going to happen to me; this isn’t some blasé handwaving; I just happen to know what I’m doing. Mistakes happen, yes, when people don’t know what they’re doing.
Could you mistake a cow for a horse, given five minutes with it in a well-lit farmyard with no distractions? Would you stake your life on it? Plenty of people can tell those two apart and never ever ever make a mistake.
Could you tell a Jersey cow from a Guernsey cow? Not so much - that’s maybe one for cow experts only, but for them, still not a problem. Particularly when they are allowed to reject any “don’t knows”.
That’s about the size of it.
I think what’s happening here is that people are projecting their own (quite understandable) unfamiliarity with the subject upon the subject itself as if it were an intrinsic property.
Well, either you’re grossly underestimating the skill needed to identify mushrooms just to make your point, or all this talk about years of experience, skills, and depth of knowledge is moot.
If it were as simple as telling a cow and a horse apart, then I could study a few pictures of mushrooms for 60 seconds and then collect a big bucket full for my family’s dinner. But everything in this thread suggests otherwise, that it takes experience and knowledge to be safe and NEVER even run even the tiniest risk of making a mistake.
I’m trying to think of anything that I could do and claim to never, never, never make a mistake. I can’t think of anything, because you never know what variables will be at play. You describe a situation in which you are 100% focused, 100% on your game that day, in perfect conditions regarding lighting, your own vision, etc. But is that the real world? Could I ever see a cow in a field and think it’s a horse? Maybe, if the lighting is poor, my contacts are cloudy, I’m distracted by the helicopter flying overhead, etc.
I’m glad you enjoy your mushrooms. And I’m glad you’re perfect.