I was recently surpised to discover that Amanita muscaria wasn’t actually all that deadly - I’d been told all my life that it was one of the worst.
I still wouldn’t try taking it for fun, though.
This whole thread makes me hungry for a nice fresh Morel. Only thing is, they pop up in spring. Hmmm. Well, there is a fall mushroom that looks just like the morel. I’ll eat that instead…
Well, that was my point, albeit made circumspectly. 
I was just out for my morning walk and saw a lot of mushrooms had popped up over the last week, and was wondering if any of them were edible. But I don’t know anything about wild mushrooms and (particularly after reading this thread yesterday) was not about to collect a bunch of them and then start searching online to try to identify them.
“Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.” -Lazarus Long-
Let me tell you about Fierra’s mother and godmother, who just last week told me that they routinely went out to pick wild mushrooms they found in the moors and ate them. Because “oh, you can tell the deadly ones, they’re black underneath”, and that’s all they need to know. When I tried to reason with her one of her justifications for why she’ll keep playing Devonshire Roulette with mushrooms is “the economy” and how “pensions can’t cover luxuries like good mushrooms.” :dubious:
…andyet the Destroying Angel is all white, very white indeed.
The name means exactly what is says too.
My in-laws are from St. Petersburg, Russia. They used to go picking ‘shrooms around their dacha and outside the city — it’s a fairly common cultural thing over there (and every year there are stories about folks who perish, not from eating mushrooms, but from getting lost). Every year since we moved out to the country, they visit and wistfully look into the woods asking if we’ve seen any mushrooms. Every year they get just a bit more interested.
They’d better not piss me off or I’ll send them out with a basket 
(ETA: I’m in the Hudson Valley of NY. Not quite the same species selection/presentation as they’d find in Russia.)
Can’t help wondering that myself - but if you’re going to poison yourself, there are far less unpleasant ways to do it.
That’s the whole trouble with it. People want rules of thumb, and in this particular subject area, there are none. Because the knowledge can’t be usefully summed up in a single rule, people think the whole thing is impossible to understand, or they think it’s always a gamble, no matter how careful you are.
It’s not the way I’d pick, that’s for sure. I looked up the symptoms of death cap poisoning on Wikipedia. It was instructive. Amanita phalloides - Wikipedia
Initially, symptoms are gastrointestinal in nature and include colicky abdominal pain, with watery diarrhea and vomiting which may lead to dehydration…These first symptoms resolve two to three days after the ingestion. A more serious deterioration signifying liver involvement may then occur—jaundice, diarrhea, delirium, seizures, and coma due to fulminant hepatic failure and attendant hepatic encephalopathy caused by the accumulation of normally liver-removed substance in the blood… Life-threatening complications include increased intracranial pressure, intracranial hemorrhage, sepsis, pancreatitis, acute renal failure, and cardiac arrest. Death generally occurs six to sixteen days after the poisoning.
Of course, we don’t know what they ate…but knowing that’s a possibility? I’d take some other method.
Is it even legal to pick and take along with you anything you find growing on the property of a botanic garden? Maybe the survivor should be brought up on charges.
Pjen should be along soon to protest this brutal official interrogation.
I do not know why the Google ads are for “toxin cleanse” products, but I sincerely doubt that any wacky Internet supplements will help if you consume poisonous mushrooms.
I think we need a Mushroom option on Pandemic.
And yes, don’t eat anything wild you aren’t 100% sure of.
Great quote, Projammer.
<slight hijack> I won’t answer my door if I’m not expecting company. That being said I think I’d pay attention if loud knocking and shouting were happening outside my house </s h>
Last week my roomate made some awesome pasta with tomatoes we’d grown and other garden grown veggies. Afterword I remarked on the mushrooms and she told me they were wild. :eek: WTF? You gotta tell me these things so I can make informed decisions. Well, I’m here typing today so I guess it’s ok. But I was still bothered that she didn’t tell me ahead of time they were wild mushrooms.
Sure, if one of these are toxic.
uh oh.
But it has been about 6 days for me and no symptoms. I think I’ll be ok. Plus they were chanterelles and those are pretty well known around here.
So what were they doing to not notice their room was filling with smoke that the rest of the neighbors could smell? Hmm… two young women, college freshman, locked door, incense…
I think they were distracted.
You’d really think that the words “cranial hemorrhage” or “cerebral hemorrhage” would be sufficient to make people think twice about these things, wouldn’t you?
Latest reports have named the two individuals
It looks as though they might be from Asia or thereabouts, and they may have mistaken the deathcaps for edible straw mushrooms. In which case, I retract my accusation of stupidity.
Doesn’t look good for the niece though - critical condition with liver damage