Horse Whisperer author poisoned by wild mushrooms
(Photo of Cortinarius Speciosissimus from Mycocheype)
Author Nicholas Evans and three family members are seriously ill after eating poisonous mushrooms in The Highlands.
There are about 10,000 species of mushroom found in Britain and Cortinarius Speciosissimus is known to be one of the most deadly. Found mostly in Scotland, where it grows in conifer woods, it causes damage to the liver, kidneys and spinal cord. As other members of the Cortinarius family are also dangerous none are recommended for human consumption.Horse Whisperer author, Nicholas Evans, poisoned by wild mushrooms
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He should have asked the horses which mushrooms to eat.
I can't whisper to horses, yet even I know not to eat "mushrooms found while out on a stroll". Unless you know what you are doing, which he apparently didn't.
Darwin swings, and misses.
Ugh, sad. Isn't "don't eat wild mushrooms -- EVER, EVER, EVER -- unless you REALLY REALLY REALLY know what you're doing," something that everyone learns at an early age? I remember being taught that in elementary school. Completely deadly mushroom species look exactly like completely harmless mushroom species in many cases.
if you pinch them, and they turn bluish at the pinch-point, then they are a-o.k.!
@#3
Joanna Blythman, the leading food writer, urged caution following the incident but said there was no reason for people to stop picking wild mushrooms as long as they were well informed.
“Collecting mushrooms to eat is a perfectly reasonable thing to do,” Ms Blythman, author of The Food We Eat, said. “On the whole it is not a dangerous thing to do.
“My advice would be that unless you are a trained botanist, stick to clear groups that are safe to eat. One is chanterelles, which have a very distinctive appearance and aroma, girolles, and the cep family.”
We had a whole family come in for emergency liver transplants because their visiting brother-in-law picked wild mushrooms and fed them to the family. Of course, he didn't eat any of them himself.
And who takes toxicology advice from a food writer?
There's lots of people who go out and pick wild mushrooms. And mistakes happen. I've known people who have used the Meixner and Wieland tests to detect amatoxins, but they still don't trust themselves to eating wild mushrooms.
However, some farmer markets sell wild organic mushrooms. Many, many years ago when I was up in Mendocino, we saw this one guy illegally picking grocery bags of wild mushrooms. Purple, red, yellow, brown, white. At a certain time of year there is a forest just south of there where it literally looks like Smurfville. I stopped him and asked him how he knew which were poisonous, and he told me he didn't know. He just brings them to his uncle who sells them at the farmer's market.
Geez, I wonder if HE ever made a mistake...
@ 3 & 4
But "really really really know what you're doing is still relative"! The problem is that there are deadly mushrooms that are nearly identical to the tasty, benign ones.
Last year, a close friend of mine was accidentally poisoned by mushrooms her grandfather had picked. He had been picking wild for many, many years and had never encountered a problem. Luckily, my friend survived with some mild delirium and severe stomach pains.
Nobody REALLY knows what they're doing unless they have a degree in fungal botany or the like.
mintphresh, blanket rules of thumb like that are a bit dangerous. You must identify an individual mushroom with certainty (including ruling out any toxic kinds that look like it).
However, eating wild mushrooms isn't quite as dangerous as some people say-- again the key is good identification, and stick to varieties that you know are good and *don't* have any poisonous look-alikes. You need to learn what both the good *and* the bad ones look like. Chanterelles are a good one to try, and they're one of the most tasty!
(And it doesn't hurt to try a small one, and wait a while to see if you feel sick).
The Audubon book of mushrooms is pretty good.
OR, you could just grow your own mushrooms indoors or in your garden - www.fungiperfecti.com
Hate to say it, but that's natural selection in action. As an Australian, it was drummed into me at a very early age that unless you're absolutely certain what something is, and there's no way you could mistake it for something else - DON'T EAT IT.
While foraging for wild mushrooms might be a popular thing to do, I'd rather go bungee-jumping for my adrenalin kicks.
@gwbyrd: indeed! i would hope that everyone does learn that one early, but even amongst "experienced" mushroom hunters it's still easy to make mistakes for two important reasons:
1) there's a *huge* evolutionary advantage to looking like the local poisonous variety. at certain stages Amanita Virosa looks a lot like the common grocery store Agaricus Bisporus. oops!
2) mushroom don't know what they're supposed to look like, and some change their outward appearance dramatically depending on how much sun/rain/moisture they've gotten.
look-a-likes have been found to grow right next to each other. As Paul Stamets famously pointed out: the *LBM to left could make the walls melt, the one to the right could put you six feet under.
(*Little Brown Mushroom.)
#10 - But it's easy in Australia, everything is poisonous. I learned that on TV. The place is paved with things of all shapes and colors and sizes that will make you dead.
This whole topic - which mushrooms are and which are not safe to eat - illustrates the very high cost of certain types of knowledge. We learn from the mistakes/misfortunes of others, sadly.
I heard that you can cook certain varieties of mushrooms with (drum roll) garlic to determine if it is poisonous or not.
If your garlic goes black before it burns, you might want to toss the rest out.
Disclaimer: Could be an urban legend.
liberty caps are nice.
Things I've learned from the comments section of this post:
Eating wild mushrooms is a perfectly safe thing to do, except when it isn't.
You can learn to identify safe varieties of mushrooms, but sometimes the poisonous ones look just like them and grow beside them so they're impossible to distinguish.
Only eat wild mushrooms if you know what you're doing ... and no one can ever be entirely sure of what they're doing.
^_~
#6
Look, picking good to eat mushrooms isn't some complex feat requiring a knowledge of toxicology: Just make sure they are from a safe family and make sure you have correctly identified what you have.
Thousands, if not millions of people do it all the time without ill effects.
@ekricoyte: #14 - That's a good way to get accidental liver failure. Some other myths from the california poison hotline:
http://www.calpoison.org/public/mushrooms.html
The report says they thought THESE mushrooms were chanterelles! I guess because they're orangish (even though everything else about them is all wrong). So chanterelles are clearly not unmistakable enough to be collected by beginners.
#8
"The problem is that there are deadly mushrooms that are nearly identical to the tasty, benign ones."
Are you speaking from experience? They can be very similar--they are not identical.
"Nobody REALLY knows what they're doing unless they have a degree in fungal botany or the like"
Even if you did have a degree you can still make a mistake. You do NOT need a horticultural degree to safely consume wild mushrooms.
Gosh, Do you folks ever get out?
@Dofnup #16 - I would sum it up as:
Don't.
If you want fresh mushrooms buy them from a mycologist supply like fungiperfecti.com or farwestfungi.com. They'll be tasty, fun to watch growing, and best of all: not crawling with maggots.
@redfield #19 - No kidding, Omphalotus olearius (Jack-O-Lantern) looks a bit like a chantrelle. Except that it glows in the dark and well make you puke your guts out.
Fun! :)
#19
Those mushrooms don't look remotely like chanterelles to me.
These are chanterelles:
http://www.jupiterimages.com/popup2.aspx?navigationSubType=itemdetails&itemID=23031990
Color, shape and size are all different. I don't know what he was thinking.
#21
They'll be tasty, fun to watch growing, and best of all: not crawling with maggots.
Maggots are good protein.
Agree with #9; I used to pick wild mushrooms for my own consumption in the Pacific Northwest U.S. but always stuck to varieties that were distinctive and easy to identify and which I knew had no poisonous look-alikes; I knew about a half-dozen species that fit those criteria. I didn't pick anything that I wasn't familiar with and never had any problems.
won't eat them picked wild unless it's with someone old who shares the meal
Botany is an inexact science. You don't really know what you're doing unless you tested that actual mushroom (not the similar-looking one next to it) on something human-like whose health you were not overly concerned about.
Like your mother-in-law.
Though chanterelles are impossible to mix up for a novice/amateur, they are easy to screw up for a beginner. "Hey, those look like these orange mushrooms my brother brought home from the woods one time..."
Those of us who know how to identify mushrooms learn to recognize the different components (cap, stem, gills, spore print, type of tree or environment, season it appears, and 30 other variables). We know how hard a good ID is. Because of that, we stick to edible species which are hard for a novice/amateur to screw up. The vast majority of accidents come from beginners whose sole method of identification is color.
Ranking 2nd for accidents are usually novice/amateurs outside the environment in which they were trained. Many Asian families are poisoned because the safe mushroom from home looks like the North American 'Destroying Angel' mushroom which does not grow in Asia.
My advice, learn to identify 50 mushrooms of a wide variety of families first. Then you can scout for edibles and take your first bite. Never eat mushrooms outside the climate/environment in which you were trained without some research hours invested.
I strongly disagree with people who say you need professional training or need a degree to make IDs. All you need to do it have the time and perhaps a mentor (online communities are great resources for this).
"I strongly disagree with people who say you need professional training or need a degree to make IDs."
I'll second this. Foraging for wild mushrooms is a safe and enjoyable hobby if you know what you're doing. Go with someone experienced a few times, over several seasons, and you're good to go on your own. Get a good ID book - I recommend All That the Rain Promises (http://www.amazon.com/All-That-Rain-Promises-More/dp/0898153883) even though it's kind of hippy-dippy.
Having lived in the PNW for over a dozen years now I've had several successful seasons of Chantrelle, Morel, and King Bolete hunting. I've never seen a Death Cap in the wild that I know of, because they are so obviously not what I am looking for. I know that there are a handful of deaths attributed to the Death Cap yearly, but most of these are Thai nationals unaware that the DC is not the same tasty shroom they have at home.
Don't let this unfortunate mishap prevent you from exploring a fantastic and tasty hobby!
There are certain types of mushroom that are absolutely distinct, with no poisonous duplicates at all. These are pretty safe bets for foraging purposes.
I am fond of the audubon society guide to north american mushrooms (at least for those of us in NA).
And yeah, those mushrooms look NOTHING (well, very little. the KEY characteristc of chanterelles, the gills that sort of bleed into the stem, is missing, which is why I reacted so strongly..) like chanterelles, someone was being a raging idiot.
Telling you though, now Im having a serious yen for some chicken mushroom, or maybe some lobster, been a while.
*sigh*
Oh, and for the record, all video gamers know if your mushroom popped out of a block, has beady eyes, and is either red or green with white spots, it's fair game.
/me ducks a fireball.
"And it doesn't hurt to try a small one, and wait a while to see if you feel sick"
Oh yes it does! The fatal toxic dose some poisonous mushrooms (e.g. Death Cap, Destroying Angel, Satan's Bolete [that's Boletus Satanus, not Boletus Satanoides]) is frighteningly small, even ingesting small doses leads to liver damage.
In addition, the damage done by some varieties doesn't immediately manifest itself with nausea (e.g. Paxillus Involutus, which has lukemia like symptoms, Gyromitra Edulis, which is carcinogenic).
The basic rule is if you aren't sure what it is, leave it well alone!.
So you never have enough experience until you screw-up multiple times, and then you have enough experience to know you screwed up and will screw up again?
Also the Dancing Hose Mask guy ate some Amanita Muscaria, a psychedelic but otherwise non-deadly mushroom (it might, however, make you nauseous).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffDPTKn7HiY
Would cooking it or the standard american "cow-patties" reduce the psychedelic effects?
I demand a DNA test.
"You're NOT the fungus!"
NOT A DOKTOR: "Would cooking it or the standard american "cow-patties" reduce the psychedelic effects?"
I'm not a botanist, but I have seen people cook with them like normal mushrooms and brew them into tea, with only magnified results (I think it has more to do with ingesting larger quantities if prepared in these ways than becoming more powerful in actual effect.)
I guess I was trying to say cooking did NOT reduce their entheogenic effects.
Someone up the thread suggested, if one wasn't sure, that it was okay to taste a small bit and wait to see how you feel. No it's not. It's a really bad idea.
@31, EKRICYOTE, Unfortunately, a beginner may confuse either of these for the similarly shaped brown-with-black-spots variety, with deadly results...
This is a stupid conversation.
Here's the thing: Given infinite chances to pick wild mushrooms and eat them, anyone--even an expert--is eventually going to make a grave mistake and die. Why for Ah Pook's sweet sake would you go for that, when you can just go buy known-good, cultivated mushrooms? We started doing that for exactly that reason. You're never going to buy something at Whole Foods that is going to send you on an 8-hour descent into psychic hell or an eternity in the real one. And they'll still be damn tasty.
The stakes are just too high, folks. Don't eat wild mushrooms. Don't. There are a lot of things out there that are safe to eat and much easier to identify (or test to see if they're not); leave the mushrooms to the cultivators, please.
Given infinite chances to get Salmonella from cultivated tomatoes or jalapeno peppers, why would anyone go for that, when you can just pick wild mushrooms?
And FYI, there are mushrooms that evade cultivation; some of them are even available at Whole Foods. If your argument is that deadly mistakes are inevitable, then I'd stay away from WF.
Also, for those commenting about these mushrooms being mistaken for chanterelles: that was speculation on the part of the expert interviewed in the article, and not taken straight from the horse-whisperer's mouth. We really don't know what he thought they were.
Even if I were given to eating things I found in the woods, I wouldn't eat those mushrooms - they look really sinister!
No one commented on #4? Of course everyone should try those type at least once or twice in their life. Question is, do all the good ones like that turn bluish purple when pinched?
#20
"Even if you did have a degree you can still make a mistake. You do NOT need a horticultural degree to safely consume wild mushrooms."
This is exactly the kind of statement I'm talking about. It makes my brain get boggled @_@
This has just further convinced me to stay away from wild mushrooms as a matter of course. I'm with Kyle (#39)
Like posted earlier. Pick only the ones you know. When in doubt throw it out. I am a novice picker who has an "old timer" with me teaching along the way. He states he will never in his lifetime know all there is to know about wild mushrooms- They vary from different regions. The whisperer thought they were chanterelles- they do have a species of subpruinosus that favor the poisoned ones they ate in Scotland. But as a rule in NA they are very distinguishable. Happy picking!!
@39 you're asking why someone would would forage for free food when you can buy the same thing at Whole Foods? you're kidding, right?