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.
Who the fuck is giving a one year old child some mushroom they found in the woods?
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, probably.
Accurate
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 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.
Foraging for mushrooms is one of those activities where the risks far outweigh the rewards, at least to me.
Especially when you can cultivate most of the good ones yourself
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.
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?
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.
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!
Don’t forget the lidocaine. Boy, you only ever make that mistake once.
19 months! Who feeds foraged mushrooms to an infant?!
Ate it off the ground most likely.
There was a big kerfuffle in my community because a bunch of these popped up in the children’s playground at the park so it’s entirely possible
None are ICE goons. I checked.
They only eat McDonald’s.
Goddamn wtf mushroom people is it really worth the risk?
It’s not a risk if you know what you are doing. Then again I don’t forage for mushrooms that look like phalloides, besporigeras or marginatas. I stick with ones that are easily identifiable like Lions Mane, Oyster, Lobster, chanterelles, morels, porcinis, matsutakes and the like.
It gets you outdoors and learning your land, even if you are just observing/documenting and not collecting for food. That said, I don’t get the people that roll the dice with iffy picks or trusting roadside vendors without experience. They are crazy. Amatoxin death sounds gnarly.
Miss Mush: Mushroom surprise to you all!
They must be pretty tasty?
what happens when drugs are illegal
what happens when you don’t read the article
It’s verdant banana. They often come into the comments with bad or straight up ignorant takes. I often see them at the bottom showered in negative downvotes.
I think I’ve said this before; I’d block them, but it’s actually pretty entertaining to see someone who is so consistently wrong
