Condensed story: two women pick a carrier bag full of indiscriminately assorted wild fungi, take them home and eat them. One is dead, the other is ‘conscious and stable’ (but will probably die, IMHO, due to the nature of the poisoning)
Stupid and tragic, but mostly stupid. How dumb do you have to be to reach adulthood without ever knowing that there are such things as poisonous fungi?
And what irks me personally about this is that now, I’ll have to endure a bloody lecture from loads of people on how I shouldn’t be picking wild mushrooms because it’s dangerous. I won’t be permitted to say that I know what I’m doing, because it’s dangerous. Period.
I mean, I’m sorry that people died, but people dying of sheer stupidity makes me more mad than sad.
I can see it now. The reporter asks the coroner, “What do you suspect?” And the coroner responds, “I suspect the woman was stupid.”
Last year, two college freshmen in an apartment of the first floor of my building decided to burn incense sticks but lacked something appropriate to hold the sticks. Their solution? Why, a roll of toilet paper, of course! Yeah, they didn’t answer the door when the neighbors beat on all the doors yelling, “We smell smoke! Is anyone in there?” The two frosh finally opened the door when the Fire Sergeant announced he’d chop the door down. The FS asked them, “Why didn’t you answer the door when your neighbors were yelling?” No kidding, the two morons answered, “We weren’t expecting company.” The FS processed that and then, with a smile, said, “Look, you need to be careful. Your neighbors don’t want to lose their homes or their livesbecause you two are STUPID!”
If you’re anything less than 100% certain about the identity of the mushrooms, you leave them all uneaten. Knowing that you ate deathcaps only really helps the paramedics with their paperwork, not your treatment, because there isn’t really any very effective treatment.
The mistake that a lot of people make about this is to imagine you need to be an expert. You don’t - it’s not necessary to be able to identify every single species - you only need two things:
-The ability to know when you’ve performed the identification absolutely right.
-The common sense to err on the side of caution in all other cases.
We had a couple of similar cases in Sweden this summer, too. I believe it was death cap in one case, and in the other some poisonous fungi was mistaken for tube chanterelle.
I pick mushrooms every year, but I have the common sense to only pick stuff I know, or at least look it up if I’m uncertain. Quite frequently before eating them, too.
On edit: What Mangetout said. Scaring people works, but is kind of silly, IMO.
The problem with scaring people is that this will result in a lot of fungi just getting indiscriminately destroyed by scared people, in case someone eats it.
Happening upon a patch of what would have been delicious edible mushrooms, crushed or kicked to pieces by idiots, is quite heartbreaking.
As others have said the “trick” for the non-expert is to simply memorize the appearance of a few common and distinctive edible species, and avoid everything else. Same as picking berries really - you pick the obvious blueberries and rasberries, not evey colourful berry in the forest.
Fact is many mushrooms are not exactly deadly poisionous, but as one mushroom book puts it, eating them is “… an experience neither soon forgotten nor repeated”.
The lethal ones here are Amanita species. There’re others that don’t rise to that level of toxicity but that will make you dreadfully sick.
Luckily, we have still yet others that are delicious and don’t look like anything else. If you learn what a couple of these look like, you can enjoy wild mushrooms in safety. The sheep’s head is my personal favorite, though most around get more excited over the edible morels in the spring.
Is there any chance the women described in the OP were attempting to deliberately kill themselves?
