Four people have died and three others have required liver transplants after eating the aptly named death cap mushroom that is proliferating in California following a rainy winter.
The California Department of Public Health is urging people to avoid mushroom foraging altogether this year because death cap mushrooms are easily confused with safe, edible varieties.
Since Nov. 18 there have been more than three dozen cases of death cap poisonings reported, including the four deaths and three liver transplants, according to the health department. Many who sought medical attention suffered from rapidly evolving acute liver injury and liver failure. Several patients required admission to an intensive care unit. They have ranged in age from 19 months to 67 years old.
The death cap is one of the most poisonous mushrooms in the world and is part of a small group of mushrooms containing amatoxins, which are highly potent compounds causing 90% of fatal mushroom poisonings globally. They are in city parks and in forests, often under oak trees.
I live in the PNW, where there are several varieties of poisonous mushrooms, including death caps. Apparently people can safely forage for mushrooms - but it scares the crap out of me because of the exact scenario in this article.
I forage mushrooms. I think there is both a healthy fear and an overreaction to how dangerous it really is. A novice can forage for something like chicken of the woods because it is an obvious species that has no deadly lookalikes. However there are mushrooms even I still avoid despite knowing exactly what they are because they have poisonous lookalikes.
What’s really surprising is people seem to think foraging plants to be safer despite there being plants with edible lookalikes like poison hemlock that can kill in minutes.
In the end, a little bit of practice, focus, and understanding safety, mushroom foraging, and plant foraging, is actually much less dangerous than one would imagine. Still, if you don’t know what you are doing you should never eat a mushroom or plant that you aren’t 100% certain is what it is. Never munch on a hunch.
Are you in the PNW? I wonder if there are safer places to forage than others.
Notably Death Cap mushrooms aren’t present worldwide. A number of the poisonings are from people who learned about mushroom foraging in one area, then moved to California and didn’t learn that the safe mushrooms from their home have deadly lookalikes in California.
I’ve foraged and consumed many of the species in my region, but I do not forage amanitas or lookalikes for this exact reason. I don’t care how good matsutake is, I’m not consuming that without independent verification. In Italy they have state officials who will check your mushrooms, in the US we have these mushroom AIs that are bound to get someone killed eventually.
Foraging for mushrooms is one of those activities where the risks far outweigh the rewards, at least to me.
There’s no greater risk in foraging mushrooms than there is in foraging plants. The real reason for the American fear of mushrooms being so prevalent is the dearth of knowledge about mushrooms in American culture. It’s similar to how many cultures in the past believed tomatoes and potatos were poisonous because they were new to those cultures.
The tastiest ones are super easy to identify. Going mushroom hunting is a great fun activity, gets you out in nature, and it just feels so damn rewarding finding the little buddies! And bah gawd do they taste amazing.
Yeah the reward is you get some mushrooms. It’s not like they’re expensive to buy
LOL! Fancy mushrooms are ridiculously expensive, you can even sell them directly to restaurants if you find a good batch and just call them up and offer them.
I got two free meals at a Michelin star restaurant for a few quarts of Chanterelles. No way I could eat them all.
Especially when you can cultivate most of the good ones yourself
I mean just having them is not the main point, getting out in nature and walking about and finding them is more than half the thing!
You can’t cultivate morels or chanterelles. I don’t think you can cultivate porcini? I don’t think there are deadly look alikes for those varieties but folks really need to consult experts if they’re gonna dabble in mushroom hunting.
I think people get into trouble hunting for psychedelics since 1) many of the experts (like at mushroom hunting clubs) won’t help with anything illegal and 2) many of the fun mushrooms are little brown mushrooms which are pretty difficult to identify correctly.
TLDR: If you’re looking to make risotto, you can probably learn enough to do it safely. If you’re looking to expand your mind, just buy spores from a reputable source and grow.
I think morels can be cultivated by now to some extent, but seemingly not yet in any significant quantities. Porcinis cannot not be cultivated and are one of the easiest mushrooms to learn to safely forage. Hunting for psychadelics is risky and in some regions very disappointing. In europe for example there arent many true psychadelic mushrooms that grow in the wild (psilocybe). I have only seen two kinds here but i dont pay to much attention to them either. Problematic when foraging them wild, if one wants to consume them, is also that the content of the psychadelic substance may vary quite significantly making it hard to judge the dosage. And yes they are not as easy to safely identifiy as many common ‘choice edible’ mushrooms. But these are not the main source of poison cases. The main souce are still the destroying angel and such that are mistaken for some agaricus like the ones one can buy in every supermarket. Of course if one approaches this seriously learning the basics for ‘choice edibles’ isn’t to hard, the problem is that some do forage without learning the basics.
Damn. People are getting killed over what they thought was a $2/lb button mushroom? I can see making the effort to hunt and properly identify for a $34/lb gourmet. But a bog standard cremini? Madness.
The are morel lookalikes that are toxic. I think they are easy to distinguish if you know what you are doing, but I don’t know what I’m doing so I don’t forage mushrooms at all
I bet they were thinking of a different kind of good ones.
Are there mushrooms stiff enough for butt stuff?
Depends on the butt
I always assumed people did this to find psychedelic mushrooms because why the fuck would you hike miles into nowhere to find a food item with virtually no taste that could kill you if you guess wrong or leave you lost in a forest?
Psychedelic mushrooms are really cheap and easy to grow yourself. Some people hunt them, and sometimes it’s because they don’t know that. But from what I can tell regardless of the kind of mushrooms the real purpose is to hike miles into nowhere with a fun activity that might leave you a bit lost. It’s why it sounds appealing to me at least. A nice long hike getting a tasty treat to cook up in some risotto or pasta
There are some species of culinary mushrooms that simply cannot be cultivated artificially. My understanding is that like any specialized knowledge, distinctions between safe and not safe are much easier once you’ve been doing it for a while.
Wait how does that work? Can’t you just reproduce the conditions the mushroom requires in an aquarium or something. I can’t see how it’s impossible to cultivate something, like how would it know?
I am not a mycologist or mushroom farmer, but my understanding is that there are either known aspects of the growing environment that cannot be replicated, or more often there is some unknown factor that is missing.
Keep in mind that while some mushrooms or other fungi (think truffles) command high prices per piece, that value is typically due to rarity. The cost of researching and experimenting to find a way to cultivate them would be difficult to recoup when price crashes due to increased supply.
I went to culinary school and they made it absolutely clear that you should never forage without an experienced mycologist with you. Or at least, never eat them before checking with one.
For what it’s worth, the poisonings are almost always children or people who are familiar with safe mushrooms in their home country that look just like the death cap, not local knowledgeable foragers.
That said I don’t eat foraged mushrooms either, even though it’s probably safe, because you only get one liver.
That’s loser talk, get more livers. You can do it, all you need is a scalpel, a ladder, and a cooler!
Can’t be that hard. My butcher sells them by the pound
Don’t forget the lidocaine. Boy, you only ever make that mistake once.