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
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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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
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?
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.
I don’t even get why people do this. They cost almost nothing from the supermarket.
Dopamine reward
People should really look into growing the less common varieties at home. You can get supplies and spores or cultures from reputable companies so you don’t have to worry about identifying them yourself. You can’t grow all varieties easily at home, but you can grow more than you can buy at the store.
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
It’s mostly immigrants from asia confusing them for the Straw Paddy Mushroom, which is native to East Asia and pretty darn tasty.
Supermarket mushrooms are usually just Portobello. And most people who claim not to like mushrooms have only had those. Get you some morels, chicken of the woods, or chanterelles, they all taste different.
The best mushrooms are not found in supermarkets.
So unsettling that some mushrooms are delicious in a risotto or omelette and others will fucking murder you.
I prefer the ones that show me god.
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!
here’s the thing: the poison mushrooms are also delicious
Once.
And some transport you to parallel dimensions to meet magical imps. Fungi are extremely cool organisms.
Plenty of plants are like that…
They’re about a billion different forms of mushroom and they all look mostly the same why would anyone risk it?
Plus they taste horrible and have weird texture. Just don’t even go there.
They taste like you shouldn’t eat them
Yeah. I’ll continue to avoid death by simply not liking mushrooms.
The ones you buy in the shops hardly ever kill you. But there’s no point because they go off within about 20 minutes of you buying them.
I wouldn’t be able to tell if they’re off or not. Even fresh ones are weird and gross to me.
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.
Problem is the immature ones look allot like button mushrooms.
That article was disappointingly light on pictures and even the ones it had were pretty wide angle to get a really good idea of what all the text was saying. I still don’t feel ready to start foraging for mushrooms after reading about half of that article and getting bored.
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.
But this will likely get censored as well.
You posted dangerous misinformation, you got “censored” for telling people you can tell by taste before cooking if a mushroom is safe to eat. I’m glad they removed that comment.
Studied, as at a university? That’s wild.
Removed by mod
Also, anything toxic can be tasted safely before cooking.
You need to edit this, you can’t taste toxins and cooking does nothing to the fungus toxin. You cannot take a bite of a raw mushroom and decide from that if it’s going to kill you, it’s digesting/metabolizing these mushrooms that turns their chemicals into organ-destroying compounds.
Also, I need to say that there are in fact plenty of lookalikes to all of these safe mushrooms that are in fact dangerous, so it takes more than just a single picture to know the conditions and environment and region you’re in, and the details which you need to know to differentiate between a toxic and safe mushroom.
Please stop using toxic as a general term here, it’s not specific and does nothing but introduce ambiguety and fear where it’s unwarrented. Using it this way provides nothing in terms of exposure or specific compounds and amounts to introducing non-specific fear-mongering terminology. Please avoid using it like this.
In addition, using “safe mushroom” makes it worse. For instance, Morels and chicken of the woods along with other mushrooms need to be cooked before eating. Due to a chef not knowing Morels needed to be cooked, 51 people became ill in 2023: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7310a1.htm
Chicken of the wood is fine, so long as it’s growing on broadleaf wood and cooked. If you eat then when they grown on an evergreen wood–you will become ill, even if prepared correctly.
Using the term ‘safe mushroom’ ignorant of the way it needs to be handled in order to be safe is an activly harmful way to deal with this.
When dealing with mushrooms, the spefics and details are what matters. Introducing language on the topic without careful awareness of this is actively harmful.
If you don’t know–that’s fine, but please don’t offer advice when the terms you use introduce yet more ambiguety.
The person I replied to was saying you can taste them to tell if they’re poisonous safely before cooking.
I don’t know if you’re reading someone else’s comment but that kind of misinformation is very, very dangerous so if you take issue with the actual words being used to try to keep people from following bad, dangerous advice. I don’t care.
You are just making statements out of ignorance–or that’s how the writing comes out. You are right in that taste provides no indication if something is going to hurt you or not. I hear lead tastes sweet, as is automobile coolant.
I was picking at your characterization that safe mushrooms exist. If you mean safe to eat, there are relevant specifics to consider, such as what it grew on and how it was preparted.
You offer advice without clarifying things–perhaps you could use the term “known to be safe to eat when cooked wild mushroom”.
Safest advice would be: contact your local mycologist for a 100% accurate guarantee that it is what you think it is.
I get your intentions and am sorry to have caused offense!
I think you’re earnest about getting the terminology right, but that’s very distracting to the broader message, which is avoiding situations where you are harmed by not knowing enough about what you’re eating. It’s counter-productive because it sounds like you’re saying my information is wrong rather than just broad.
For example:
your characterization that safe mushrooms exist. If you mean safe to eat, there are relevant specifics to consider,
This kind of pedantry is insufferable, I know you don’t mean it to be, but it turns people away from the whole topic. See: Reddit and The Fall of Unidan. You can have the best intentions and miss the train completely because you’re trying to force a conversation to use a specific language when the point of the conversation is very simple and aimed at non-experts in the field.
I know more about guns than I do mushrooms (But I do know quite a bit about both) but if I saw someone say “Don’t point the gun at something you don’t intend to shoot” I wouldn’t attack that and say “YoU MeAn ThE bARReL of tHe Gun…” it would make me sound like a clown, when everyone knows what’s trying to be communicated.
I’m really not trying to attack you here, I’m sure you know more about mushrooms than me, but I know I’m not broadly wrong for giving people advice for staying safe if they know less than either of us.
You wrote things that were blatantly false while offering advice on a subject you don’t know about–why?
For instance:
You cannot cook fungus toxins out. They are not potatoes.
Is broadly wrong, there is nothing specific to mushrooms here, and this is entirely incoherent.
You cannot taste mushroom toxins, they taste just like any other mushroom.
Also incoherent and wrong.
when everyone knows what’s trying to be communicated.
Also incredibly presumptuious, and again wrong.
I can’t and won’t make a single statement regarding guns. I happen to have been foraging for mushrooms for the majority of my life and care deeply about it.
I’m really not trying to attack you here, I’m sure you know more about mushrooms than me, but I know I’m not broadly wrong for giving people advice for staying safe if they know less than either of us.
I feel attacked, and I find your statement entirely disingenuous!
For all of your intentions, you haven’t listed one relevant resource or factual article that will actually be of help to anybody who wants to know more on the subject, just a series of things and are incoherent and make no sense.
This kind of pedantry is insufferable, I know you don’t mean it to be, but it turns people away from the whole topic. See: Reddit and The Fall of Unidan. You can have the best intentions and miss the train completely because you’re trying to force a conversation to use a specific language when the point of the conversation is very simple and aimed at non-experts in the field.
Please suffer my padentry! For the sake of the dialog here, I can’t presume to know what readers will or won’t think about what I write here. I find that sort of paternalistic condensention revolting. It’s the height of arrogance to presume you know anything of those who are reading, be they your lessers or betters. But please don’t let me dissuade you for your own sake.
I’ve written my bit and that’s done.
fwiw, this obviously isn’t reddit and I have no idea what he reference to Unidan has to do with this.
Mmmmmmm chicken of the woods.
I don’t think that person who named that has ever soon a chicken before
Doesn’t look like a chicken however tastes like a chicken.
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.
It’s a yummy death mushroom!
Who the fuck is giving a one year old child some mushroom they found in the woods?
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.
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.
Accurate
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
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 forage mushrooms. I think there is both a healthy fear and an overreaction to how dangerous it really is. A novice can forage for something like chicken of the woods because it is an obvious species that has no deadly lookalikes. However there are mushrooms even I still avoid despite knowing exactly what they are because they have poisonous lookalikes.
What’s really surprising is people seem to think foraging plants to be safer despite there being plants with edible lookalikes like poison hemlock that can kill in minutes.
In the end, a little bit of practice, focus, and understanding safety, mushroom foraging, and plant foraging, is actually much less dangerous than one would imagine. Still, if you don’t know what you are doing you should never eat a mushroom or plant that you aren’t 100% certain is what it is. Never munch on a hunch.
Are you in the PNW? I wonder if there are safer places to forage than others.
I’m in the Northeast US. There is a lot of overlap in species but there are also a lot of differences. I wouldn’t say there is any region in the world that is safer than others. What makes it safe vs dangerous is how much time you spend learning about your region and safe practices.
Notably Death Cap mushrooms aren’t present worldwide. A number of the poisonings are from people who learned about mushroom foraging in one area, then moved to California and didn’t learn that the safe mushrooms from their home have deadly lookalikes in California.
I’ve foraged and consumed many of the species in my region, but I do not forage amanitas or lookalikes for this exact reason. I don’t care how good matsutake is, I’m not consuming that without independent verification. In Italy they have state officials who will check your mushrooms, in the US we have these mushroom AIs that are bound to get someone killed eventually.
and here we have smartshops where you can aquire mushrooms safely and see the world in a whole new way
Foraging for mushrooms is one of those activities where the risks far outweigh the rewards, at least to me.
There’s no greater risk in foraging mushrooms than there is in foraging plants. The real reason for the American fear of mushrooms being so prevalent is the dearth of knowledge about mushrooms in American culture. It’s similar to how many cultures in the past believed tomatoes and potatos were poisonous because they were new to those cultures.
The tastiest ones are super easy to identify. Going mushroom hunting is a great fun activity, gets you out in nature, and it just feels so damn rewarding finding the little buddies! And bah gawd do they taste amazing.
Yeah the reward is you get some mushrooms. It’s not like they’re expensive to buy
LOL! Fancy mushrooms are ridiculously expensive, you can even sell them directly to restaurants if you find a good batch and just call them up and offer them.
I got two free meals at a Michelin star restaurant for a few quarts of Chanterelles. No way I could eat them all.
Especially when you can cultivate most of the good ones yourself
I mean just having them is not the main point, getting out in nature and walking about and finding them is more than half the thing!
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.
You can’t cultivate morels or chanterelles.
I love Lemmy, write something wrong and get 15 upvotes.
You can buy spores on Amazon.
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.
Damn. People are getting killed over what they thought was a $2/lb button mushroom? I can see making the effort to hunt and properly identify for a $34/lb gourmet. But a bog standard cremini? Madness.
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?
Psychedelic mushrooms are really cheap and easy to grow yourself. Some people hunt them, and sometimes it’s because they don’t know that. But from what I can tell regardless of the kind of mushrooms the real purpose is to hike miles into nowhere with a fun activity that might leave you a bit lost. It’s why it sounds appealing to me at least. A nice long hike getting a tasty treat to cook up in some risotto or pasta
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.
Wait how does that work? Can’t you just reproduce the conditions the mushroom requires in an aquarium or something. I can’t see how it’s impossible to cultivate something, like how would it know?
I am not a mycologist or mushroom farmer, but my understanding is that there are either known aspects of the growing environment that cannot be replicated, or more often there is some unknown factor that is missing.
Keep in mind that while some mushrooms or other fungi (think truffles) command high prices per piece, that value is typically due to rarity. The cost of researching and experimenting to find a way to cultivate them would be difficult to recoup when price crashes due to increased supply.
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.
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!
Can’t be that hard. My butcher sells them by the pound
Don’t forget the lidocaine. Boy, you only ever make that mistake once.
None are ICE goons. I checked.
They only eat McDonald’s.
McDonald’s with the “secret sauce” of quiet protest.
Filet-O-Fish seasoned with tartarjizz.
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.
You have a point with the “gets you outdoors and learning your land” thing. When I worked at a nursing home, sometimes we brought the residents into a courtyard. One of the ladies loved going around and spotting different types of mushrooms. Not to eat, just to observe. We were impressed with how many different ones we found in such a small area, which makes me wonder how many more I’d be able to see if I were to go into the nearby woods. Either way, it was a pleasant way to enjoy the outdoors, especially as this was during the Covid lockdown when we couldn’t even take day trips out of the facility.
Everyone always claims to know what they’re doing. That’s the problem. They buy a book of Amazon and then claim that that makes them an expert.
There are literally hundreds of millions of people who go mushroom hunting every year and don’t die horrifically, you only hear about these few cases specifically because they are so rare. It is a very common pastime.
Miss Mush: Mushroom surprise to you all!
