Know Your Mushrooms documentary
I'm looking forward to seeing Know Your Mushrooms, a documentary by Ron Mann (who also directed Comic Book Confidential).
KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS follows uber myco visionaries Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans (two of the more expert and unforgettably mercurial characters in the community) as they lead us on a hunt for the wild mushroom and the deeper cultural experiences attached to the mysterious fungi.Combining material filmed at the Telluride Mushroom Fest with animation and archival footage along with a neo-psychedelic soundtrack by the Flaming Lips, KNOW YOUR MUSHROOMS opens the doors to perception, takes the audience on a longer, stranger trip and delivers them to a brave new world where the fungi might well guide humanity to a saner, safer place… with extra cheese…
When I was young my grandmother would take my family on mushroom hunting trips. She really knew her mushrooms. Once when we were in the woods, my mother and grandmother got into an argument about whether or not a mushroom they'd found was poisonous. My mother said it was poisonous and my grandmother said it wasn't. To make her point, my grandmother ate the mushroom on the spot. (I have to assume she was right, because she lived to be 107.)
Last week in Colorado, my mother (who knows her mushrooms too, just not as well as her mother did) found and dried some mushrooms. Photos here.
Know Your Mushrooms documentary
- Mushroom Magick art book - Boing Boing
- Mushrooms in Helsinki - Boing Boing
- TED 2008: Paul Stamets on how mushrooms can help the world - Boing ...
- Dancing man wearing a horse mask cooks wild mushrooms (video ...
- Wall Street Journal discovers psychedelic mushrooms - Boing Boing
- Netherlands bans magic mushrooms - Boing Boing
- Boing Boing: Mushrooms as insulation material
- Willie Nelson's mysterious "narcotic" mushrooms - Boing Boing
- Shrooms to cure headaches - Boing Boing
the latest
latest episodes
Some of them look like flowers...
psylocibius!
As the result of befriending "wildman" Steve Brill years ago, my parents are both mushroom fanatics, belong to the local mycology club and whatnot. My brother and I would get dragged into the woods on mushroom hunts all the time. Even now I'm still in the habit of keeping an eye out when I'm out and about. CT harbors quite a few choice varieties.. morels,for one (nom nom nom NOM NOM), chickens, oysters, lobster, chanterelles of all varieties.. etc (now I'm hungry :/).
I know my parents will be extremely enthused to see this. They've been lucky enough to attend an event or two with Mr. Linkoff and seemed to like him.
Obligatory mushroom poisoning story: So there was this family whose brother-in-law came to visit from China while the father was out of town. You know, to keep his sister-in-law and her kids safe. He went out, in a foreign country, and picked wild mushrooms which he insisted that the family eat. He himself did not partake of the delicacy. When the father got home from his trip, the brother-in-law was back in China and his wife and two children were having liver transplants. Who knew that Darwinism was transferable?
I want that poster, for medicinal reasons.
{giggle}
I'm no mycologist, but I'd think that there is a term for someone who trusts a video documentary to provide them with the skill at telling the difference between safe and dangerous mushrooms: corpse.
A buddy and I went fishing near Cadillac MI circa 1995. We were obsessed with trout, and everyone else was thinking, "MUSHROOMS!"
Mushroom chainsaw art, mushroom hunter specials at the motels, mushroom dishes at the diners, mushroom maps at the gas station. It was weird.
We canoed, camped, caught and ate trout, and went home, lotsa fun. But the mushroomers were surreal!
I can see why they would get Larry Evans to be a star of this. He's quite a character. It doesn't say anywhere - do they get him to sing some of his mushroom songs? He actually has CDs of them he's done.
Mark, you should warn your mother that the mushrooms in the photo are from the genus Leccinum, and we've had a few poisonings in Colorado from an as yet unknown species of Leccinum with an orange cap like the one in the photo. The symptoms amount to a long evening of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Whatever toxins are involved are not destroyed by cooking. As far as I know all of the poisonings came from specimens collected under aspen, so if these were collected under pine with no aspen nearby they should be safe.
The story about the poisoning from misidentification by a person from China is unfortunately all too common. There is a common edible mushroom in southeast Asia (Volvariella volvacea - the Paddy Straw mushroom) that resembles a deadly mushroom on the west coast (Amanita phalloides). Apparently they don't have that deadly mushroom in Asia, so this particular misidentification has happened several times. The mushrooms in Asia (or Europe or Africa or wherever) are different enough that expertise in identification from one place doesn't necessarily translate to elsewhere (for amateurs - I haven't seen that problem with professionals (PhDs)).
So far my one semester of college mycology has put more food on my dinner table than my Bachelor's Degree, by a mile.
We played this at the Downtown Independent in Los Angeles in june, such an awesome film:
http://www.downtownindependent.com/events/know-your-mushrooms
we could possibly bring it back....
Toxicman -- we did find the mushrooms under Aspen trees, which we thought was a little unusual. Thanks for the warning.
Saw this in SF a month or so ago. It was really cute. Gary and Larry are fun guys.
I seen this. It's not actually an educational movie about mushrooms, you probably won't learn much of anything. It IS a movie about mushroom hunters and their subculture. It's a little light on substance for my taste, and the cutesy graphics get tiresome quickly.
The Matthew Lesko of 'shrooms.
The mushroom in Mark's photo looks a lot like this one:
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Leccinum_versipelle_3.jpg
Coincidentally it is called "podosinovik" in Russian, meaning "under aspen". The Russian variety is considered 100% safe though...
I definitely don't know my mushrooms, which is a big disadvantage in Finland. I can't even name all the presumably safe and edible varieties found in the supermarkets here, let alone the ones growing wild. Hopefully my daughter will learn to know her mushrooms from her grandmother (who most definitely does know her mushrooms).
btw - some mushrooms that were thought to be safe a few years back are now considered harmful.
Another obligatory mushroom story:
My mother was working in the kitchen, when in waddles three-year-old me happily holding a mushroom with a great big bite out of it.
"Mommy, is this a good mushroom to eat?"
My mother's eyes flick from the deadly Amanita phalloides in my hand to the great big bite taken out of it. Her heart stops and she can't breath.
Then she hears the sound of giggling and discovers my father and six-year-old sister in the next room falling over themselves trying to keep in the laughter from the brilliant trick they played on mommy.
For some reason, my mother was not remotely amused.
i have flay agaric growing around my property. the deer eat them.
erm, that should read "fly agaric", ie, amanita muscaria. the red kind.
I am also looking forward to the documentary "Know Your Mushrooms." Most people are not aware of the great variety of mushrooms or of how to distiguish the poisonous from the non-poisonous.
This is one of those cases where you HAVE-TO-BE-RIGHT every single time. Humans make mistakes all the time. Find a hobby that won't kill you, or at least gives you something that is worth the risk of being killed.
If mushroom hunting is your hobby, then I kind of understand why someone would do it. For any other reason, however, the potential cost of making a mistake vastly outweighs any potential benefit of finding free mushrooms in the forest.
Your grandmother took a huge risk, some mushrooms are edible when cooked, but poisonous when raw. An example of this is the morel.
-Renee Una
I actually have an irrational fear of mushrooms, or "Mycophobia."
I can't tell if this will help me or be my worst nightmare.
My husband is a Russian biologist and grew up with mushroom hunting as part of routine life. Over 20 years he has taught me the obviously safe ones (Boletus) and I feel comfortable gathering those. There are probably 50 or more species in our forests and most are edible. We have one iron-clad rule in our house, though. "When in doubt, throw it out."
Actually the aspen bolete isn't completely poisonous. Some people enjoy them with great gusto, and have no problems, while other people do have problems digesting it. There's a nice blurb about it here.
I saw that movie at the Downtown Independent when it screened here in LA, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I found it informative, though not in a way that would help you pick wild mushrooms on your own. If you want to do that, there is a mycological society, though I don't think they focus on edibles only, as they are not a foraging society.
It is not mushroom season at the moment though.
Actually on the east coast it is mushroom season. My general experience is that it's always mushroom season somewhere.
If you want to learn more about mushrooms check out the Mushroom Observer (http://mushroomobserver.org) [disclaimer: i'm the webmaster]. The site helps people identify mushrooms they find, record their findings, learn about mushrooms and potentially contribute make meaningful contributions to mycology.
I live in Colorado too. For the past few weeks, I have been mushroom hunting in the Rockies, just east of the continental divide. I have been having a blast (and quite a feast).
http://ruckusrefinery.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/mushroom-foraging/
This isn't actually the case at all. Mushroom fatalities are greatly over stated. According to the Wikipedia article, only 32 species of mushrooms out of many thousands have ever been associated with fatalities, and the vast majority of mushroom poisonings are not fatal. In 1989, out of nearly ten thousand people going to hospital for mushroom poisoning, only three people died. In 1998, there was only one death.
So, sure, it could kill you, but you are much more likely to be killed in a swimming pool. And probably also from eating shellfish, but I can't find the statistics on that.
Anyway, the worst you can reasonably expect from finding the wrong mushroom is a very bad stomach ache for several days.