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.
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.
That sounds similar to lupin beans.
In America, we have pokeweed, which everyone knows is toxic, but people eat it after boiling 3 times (I don’t think we have another word for that).
A lot of foraging books talk about boiling and/or soaking to make things edible, but usually it’s to remove bitterness/astringency like with acorns. For something neurotoxic, I don’t think I’d trust it, though.