From the responses, the team learned that the ALS patients were not the only mushroom foragers in town, but they shared an affinity for a particular species that local interviewees without ALS said they never touched: the false morel.
From the responses, the team learned that the ALS patients were not the only mushroom foragers in town, but they shared an affinity for a particular species that local interviewees without ALS said they never touched: the false morel.
I feel like nothing good comes from mushroom foraging yourself unless you’re an expert. Seems very risky.
My mycology professor in university told us he had a doctorate in mushrooms and still wouldn’t ever forage for wild ones
Your mycology professor sounds like they’ve not really experience outdoors as much as in a city (and specifically a classroom).
I was picking shrooms around the same time I got my first puukko, so idk, four to five years of age.
https://yle.fi/aihe/a/20-137224
The implication was that some of the lookalikes are impossible to identify and wildly dangerous
If an edible variety has any lookalikes that similar that can be found in your climate zone, you need to steer clear from it. This isn’t the case for all varieties and all areas though. General mushroom foraging may be dangerous, but certain species can be safely selected, due to not having lookalikes you need to be worried about.
Which these are requires learning specific to your local area though. The skills do not transfer to other regions, and everything you know would need to be reconfirmed if you moved anywhere new.
Exactly. There’s a reason I won’t eat any Amanita: the similarity of edible and deadly species in that genus makes them the main source of mushroom fatalities in North America.
By contrast, messing up a bolete ID is likely to result in a meal that is too bitter to eat. That’s a much more acceptable risk.
Well A muscaria is rather easy to identify, but it’s not really a cooking shroom.
What the earlier dude is what I meant, and why foraging for shrooms is safe as houses if you get taught by a person who has foraged mushrooms in that habitat and knows what’s safe to pick and what isn’t.
Which is why it’s easy enough to teach to pre-school children in certain places. Like here.
It’s not the same everywhere, ofc.
Looking at the wiki page for gyromitra, it looks like it’s sold for consumption in Finland. Were you taught it was safe to eat?
Oh no.
https://fi.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korvasieni this one
We call it “the ear mushroom”, and while it was highly priced and I was taught to look for them, I was also taught it’s poisonous and has to be… (one moment I don’t have the English term for a thing, this hasn’t happened in a while, but I don’t cook mushrooms so) blanched (oh wait really? In Finnish there’s a specific term blanching that is imo mostly only used in context of shrooms “ryöppäys”) for three times, iirc. Edit I checked and you boil them, blanching is more a short term thing but the Finnish term is bendy but anyway I was taught they are poison but also good eatin. At least Twice for five minutes, changing the water in between to fresh and then discarding it. Three parts water to one part shrooms at least.
So yeah. It’s a priced and edible mushroom, but also it is poisonous. For no reason I assume Japanese people might talk to their kids about blowfish in much the same way my dad talked about korvasieni. As in you’d let the kid know not to eat it, but also talk about how good it would be to eat one.
I don’t think I’ve ever even had any.
Or maybe he thought that was the wisest thing to tell a group of 18-20somthings. Not a demographic known for cool deliberation or self preservation. There’s a reason the draft starts at 18 but you can’t rent a car til you’re 25.
Murica
So they decided to lie about not foraging for mushrooms?
Doesn’t really make sense to me.
Honestly, a professor of mycology not being able yo to forage mushrooms? Just where do these people live that there’s no solid edible shrooms which have no fatal similar looking ones, like chanterelles or winter chanterelles?
Idk, maybe in the US there’s similar species in areas with them so it’s kind of a gamble, but we don’t, so foraging is a-okay.
As long as you know how and what to forage for in the specific area you are, you should know whether you can or can’t forage edible shrooms easily.
I wouldn’t be certain I’ve found penny buns although I know how to ID them, roughly, but because of the phenotypical variation and not remembering all the strains which are similar, I wouldn’t confidently forage those. I don’t recall there being anything too poisonous that’s close to it, but still.
I still remember that X-files episode where they were investigating a mind controlling fungi that released a mind altering spore if you inhaled it.
False morel, despite the name, is not really something you’d confuse for a morel. If the only description I gave you of a morel was 1 sentence long, maybe you’d grab a false morel by accident, but if you’ve ever seen a picture, or any longer description than that, you wouldn’t confuse them.
These people know which mushroom they are foraging.
If you know what you’re doing, you get incredible deliciousness.
It’s the same as using wild herbs. You have to really know what you’re doing. It’s not impossible to learn, though. First you need to know an expert and learn some basic species that are hard to misidentify. Then you can just stop there or continue.
There are plenty of forageable mushrooms with no look-alikes. If you’re cautious and thorough, it’s not particularly risky.
And by thorough, I mean:
And these days, that means making sure it’s a book written by someone who knows what they are doing, rather than AI auto-generated bullshit.