A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
If your family has been hunting mushrooms in the area for a few generations and you've been going with them as a kid (and you're not dumber than the mushrooms) you're almost certainly fine.
If not, don't bother, you'll end up poisoning yourself (and possibly others) and probably ruining the forest for those who know what they're doing.
Some of the good tasting butterfiles evolved to taste foul to increase their chance of survival. Mushrooms on the other hand have mastered the art of deception. What can heal the brain can also force you to die a painful death.
Don't be a shitty.
Never had a problem in middle temperate Europe or heard about anyone who had.
I even pick up these fuckers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrolepiota_procera though many avoid them because of relative similarities to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_phalloides.
It is delicious and like the best nature has to offer here. You coat it in breadcrumbs and cook in oil on a pan. It tastes better than any steak. However it is a pain in the ass to find and a real treasure.
Not so much Amanita phalloides as Amanita pantherina, that one looks much more similar. But I agree, if you know what you're doing and don't pick mushrooms with which you don't have experience with and aren't sure about, you're good.
I used to pick up even Amanita rubescens, an acual (although edible and tasty) Amanita, so even more similar to poisonous ones. But I didn't have an opportunity for quite a few years and now I wouldn't dare, until I got an opportunity to verify with someone experienced and trustworthy.
Can be confused with these deadly mushrooms too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echinoderma_asperum (they are much closer looking than wiki suggests).
Still, one of my two most favorite mushrooms.
Honestly even if I happened to eat a mildly poisonous shroom (which never happened) it would be fine for me personally. There is huge amount of edible mushrooms but we stick to few select safe ones that are hard to mistake.
I have done much worse things to my body with drugs and alcohol poisoning every other day. One instance of light poisoning per year or something like that would be like nothing. Not that it ever happened because I stick to the rules my parents teached me and their parents teached them and so on.
I had food poisoning more times (above zero) than mushroom poisoning.
I wouldn’t dare to pick mushrooms abroad. I wonder if climate change will fuck us one day though.
Yep. Years ago I interviewed someone for a radio program here in the Netherlands. This was a forest ranger, on the topic of people foraging for mushrooms. It was the hip thing to do at the time.
He explained how wildly dangerous it is for average people to do. Especially when looking up things online.
He showed me two images that looked basically identical. He explained to me that one mushroom was edible and delicious. And that it could be found in the forests in the United States. The other, identical looking mushroom can be found in European forests. That one liquifies your internal organs and causes you to shit yourself to an agonising death.
He explained that each year a handful of people die from eating it. Because they looked up a guide online, and failed to understand that there’s regional differences between edible and deadly mushrooms. And by the time they got medical attention, there was nothing that could be done.
I’m not a fan of mushrooms anyway, but I’d certainly never be dumb enough to go pick some myself. That shit’ll get you killed.
He explained to me that one mushroom was edible and delicious. And that it could be found in the forests in the United States. The other, identical looking mushroom can be found in European forests. That one liquifies your internal organs and causes you to shit yourself to an agonising death.
Oh god, this wasn't "chicken of the woods" (big orange mushroom that grows out of dead tree trunks), was it? Adam Ragusea did a video not long ago about it and acknowledged that mushrooms could be dangerous but figured this one was so easy to identify that there was no risk to telling people to forage it. Even if a mistake is a one-in-a-million chance, the dude has like 2.5 million subscribers so he might have killed 2 or 3 people with it.
Probably not Chicken. We get it here in Europe as well, though it's not as abundant as far as I know. We picked it in a course here, but I haven't eaten it since America where it's more trendy.
It sounds like the answer to your question is probably within that same video you watched.
In France you can take them to a pharmacy and they will be able to determine the mushrooms for you
Neat, I didn’t know that was a thing that they offered. Sounds like a good idea to keep people safe from stupid mistakes.
The local pharmacist in my parent's village died from accidentally eating poisonous mushrooms ☹️
Modern witchdoctor. Haha, metal.
Should've done the French Pharmacists' education instead :p
I will never understand impulsive people who just DO things, with little thought or worry of consequences.