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.
Please educate yourself extremely well if you plan on eating wild mushrooms
Just cook a beef wellington and blame the Asian grocer. At least one women thought it would work.
Or if you plan to feed them to anyone else, ICE agent perhaps? Don’t want people accidently murdering feds.
In this post: some very confident sounding people with very, very bad ideas about how toxic mushrooms work.
Please don’t pick and eat mushrooms in the wild unless you’ve had actual experienced people teach and train you.
Here are some facts you need to know:
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You cannot cook fungus toxins out. They are not potatoes.
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Every “obviously” safe mushroom has at least one species of look-alike that can be dangerous. You need more knowledge than a single picture in a field guide.
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You cannot taste mushroom toxins, they taste just like any other mushroom.
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A poisonous mushroom doesn’t kill you fast, it takes days or weeks for the toxins to work on your organs. These toxins can exist in a spectrum from “mild stomach ache” to “you’re doomed without several new organs very soon.” depending on what you ate and how much.
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Knowing how to identify safe mushrooms is not an identity, don’t act like people are stupid if they can’t tell as easily. There are a lot of people who don’t know how much they don’t know.
I appreciate the intent here, but overall, I don’t think it helps with the specific phrasing here.
Some mushrooms contain toxins, in fact, depending on what specific mushroom and what specific toxin it contains it can be cooked out in some cases. In fact, it is common practice to not cover wild mushrooms while cooking as the process of cooking them allows them to evaporate and leave during the process of cooking.
Some mushrooms are differentiated based on ‘tasting’ a small bit of it–in certain safe cases. But this is part of investigating and trying to find out what you are dealing with. This is one or the practices used to differentiate mushrooms taxonomically–again in some specific and known cases.
Saying “You cannot taste mushroom toxins” and that “they taste just like any other mushroom” assumes you have tasted every mushroom and have some sense of what that might taste like–it’s not something that can be taken seriously.
What damage is done when you injest a ‘poisonous mushroom’ depends on the toxin and the amount, it is utterly dependent on what specific toxin is involved, how much was injested and the specifics of the person who has injested it. Even choice edible mushrooms may cause gastrointestinal distress to somebody who has an innate allergy or is predisposed to such sensitivity. Some mushrooms contain componensts that don’t mix well with alcohol for instance–so the entirety of the meal eaten in the evening should be taken into account when preparing wild edible mushrooms.
In the case of the “Death Cap” mushroom, the consequences are well known, severe and devastating. No need to make the toxicity somehow mysterious or exotic–it’s well understood.
Again, if you are curious and want to understand more start here: https://namyco.org/
No need to continue spreading vague terminology or half-reasoned guesses.
You aren’t really providing the helpful exchange you think you are here, and you are literally personifying that final point I made there.
At this point I’m willing to admit that this applies to the both of us!
No, I kept it simple and gave broad, easy to digest guidelines for staying safe if you’re a casual browser who doesn’t know a lot. It was a well-received comment according to votes. Your comment came off contentious and pedantic and was not as well received. This is about communication not textbooks.
Yeah, you wouldn’t want to be pedantic when death is on the line.
Nobody is going to learn everything they need to be safe from making mistakes in mushroom collecting on a fucking Lemmy post. So I kept my pointers broad and applicable to a large swath of people and situations. My margin is towards safety.
I sure as shit ain’t going to tell people “No no, you really can tell poison mushrooms apart by taste” like some people here are insisting. This isn’t a place for exploring nuance.
I’m not saying that you should give better advice. Just don’t shit on other people for providing some nuance.
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All of those involved in this were people who used to forage in their respective home countries. They knew regional edible species before moving to California, as a result they identified what they thought was edible, but as it happens was deadly poisonous.
Please don’t come away with the opinion that you cannot identify mushrooms or that the process is somehow mysterious, that’s not the case. If you are considering getting into mushroom identification, please get in touch with your local mycological society: https://namyco.org/ as they are an excellent resource and it’s a whole lot of fun. Don’t rely on anyting a “AI” will provide you, either forward or backward. Don’t ever just guess or YOLO it. When in doubt, throw it out.
Articles like this come out every time these unfortunate events occur, and since mushrooms are culturally stigmatized, the facts of the events are brushed over and uneducated attitudes and stigmas are spread and continue fester–which is a shame as it provoakes a very fearful attitude towards mushrooms in general.
There are old mushroom hunters and there are are bold mushroom hunters. There are very, very few old, bold mushroom hunters. There are only a few deadly mushrooms so why not aquatint yourself with them before eating them, and dying?
So unsettling that some mushrooms are delicious in a risotto or omelette and others will fucking murder you.
This is also kind of true of plants in the nightshade family like potatoes and tomatoes where they can be pretty poisonous if you eat the wrong parts, we just know which parts we can eat. We also don’t have cultural stigma against eating potatoes so more people know about them. Knowledge is power!
Also, tobacco and chile peppers are in the nightshade family as well, but the “poisonous” chemical in those is slightly altered in each case to make nicotine and capsaisin respectfully. Neat!
I prefer the ones that show me god.
And some transport you to parallel dimensions to meet magical imps. Fungi are extremely cool organisms.
here’s the thing: the poison mushrooms are also delicious
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
Are these linked to “AI identification”?
Not likely, all the victims were migrants who had a practice of forraging where they grew up natively. I’ve read about cases like this across the country on either coast of the US.
However, there seems to be a spike, either due to the rains in California or perhaps another reason–not going to go as far as plaming ‘AI’ identification. I certainly wouldn’t trust “AI” to do that job.
The California health department is providing video and documentation in order to help people identify the “Death Cap” mushroom in multiple languages:
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/EHIB/Pages/EIS/Poisonous-Mushrooms.aspx
They’re about a billion different forms of mushroom and they all look mostly the same why would anyone risk it?
Real talk! I studied mycology, and the only culinary mushroom I feel comfortable identifying is morels.
If you can’t tell a death cap from Chicken of the Woods or Chanterelle or Oyster, you need to take more courses.
Again, it’s not just what they look like, but where they grow. Huge difference between Chanterelle and Jack o lantern.
But this will likely get censored as well.
Because they are tasty. It’s really not that hard to learn about local mushrooms. There is usually just a handful of edible mushrooms with a poisonous look-a-like, just avoid these.
“It’s easy” says guy about to eat a death cap mushroom because his Google reverse image search came back as okay.
I guess I could get some else to eat them to work out the difference but you can’t get away with that for long.
Frankly, unless it’s the elixir of life mushroom, then it’s just not worth it.
Instead of relying on google, get a proper guide book and actually read it (the text descriptions, not just looking at the pictures).
Again, there is only a handful of mushrooms were there is potential for a mix-up, but you can just skip those and stick to the ones that are and easily and unambiguously identifiable.
I guess I could get some else to eat them to work out the difference but you can’t get away with that for long.
Yeah you can. My family has mushroom picking almost every year for decades without incident.
I don’t even get why people do this. They cost almost nothing from the supermarket.
Dopamine reward
Supermarket mushrooms are all basically different stages of the same kind. They’re the white bread of mushrooms. If you’re lucky, you’ll find enokis or shiitakes. Stuff like lionsmane, oysters, hen of the woods, and wood ear are FANTASTIC and nothing like the supermarket kind - that’s what people forage for. Basing all mushrooms on what’s available at the supermarket is like basing all cheese on mild cheddar.
Not sure why anyone would eat a death cap though. That and amonitas are probably the most famous “this shit will kill you” mushrooms
The best mushrooms are not found in supermarkets.
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.
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.
Who the fuck is giving a one year old child some mushroom they found in the woods?
In my country we even avoid giving mushrooms we know are safe, nearly impossible to harvest incorrectly, to children under 4 because they may be hard on the digestive system.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, probably.
Probably no one. Kid probably found it and parents didn’t know or couldn’t stop some of it from getting into the kid. Children at that age are on a mission to speed run life.
That doesn’t really make it any better, that just means they were negligent.
Tell me you’ve never had a newborn without telling me you’ve never had a newborn. It seams the sole purpose of new born babies is to do everything they can to speed run their existence. It’s like watching a potato, that normally coos and rolls around, going full Sea Biscuit the moment you have to attend to anything else.
There’s a reason the saying it takes a village to raise a child exists (well, multiple reasons). Anything less than several sets of eyes and it’s a matter of when, not if, they eat something they should not. Most of the time it’s something benign like dirt or a crumb off the floor. The parents of the child in this article were just unlucky probably! Before having my own, I thought the same way as you and others do about the parents of children who get hurt.
Seems to me that you have never had a newborn.
When you have a baby in your home, you make damn sure your house is safe and doesn’t have poison accessible to the baby.
It does not “take a village” to put poisonous material in a locked cupboard or other inaccessible area.
