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I once took a group of young people foraging for mushrooms in the Willamette valley on a farm that had loads of these newts. I warned every body not to touch th

I once took a group of young people foraging for mushrooms in the Willamette valley on a farm that had loads of these newts. I warned every body not to touch them. After preparing dinner, one girl got very ill, as did I, while other people who ate the dinner were fine. I was so worried I'd mis-identified some mushrooms. But turns out she had handled one of these newts and the bacteria had transferred to the mushrooms she picked. I contacted it from washing the mushrooms. I threw up several times that night. In hindsight, had we not washed the mushrooms as thoroughly as we did, things could have gone much worse.

sbierwagen 1y ago
Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  Eating plants at random must be more dangerous than eating mushrooms. I have heard that there are far more poisonous plants than fungi, and greens have almost no calories.
  - lithocarpus 1y ago
    Hopefully nobody is eating plants or mushrooms at random!
- crazygringo 1y ago
  Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories. All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in. I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor!
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor! That's not the appeal of spices. People don't stop using the spices they like in quest of newer, worse-tasting ones. By far the most common case when a person is eating spices is that there's nothing new about the flavor.
    - MisterTea 1y ago
      Could also be used to mask stale or spoiled foods that if cooked enough, wont kil you and still contains nutrition. Nothing goes to waste. Another could be preservation as is the case for salt.
      - thaumasiotes 1y ago
        Salt is much simpler than that. It's a vital nutrient and if you don't eat enough of it, you'll die. It's useful for preservation, sure, but you're not eating it because you couldn't find fresh food. You're eating it because it's salt.
    - AStonesThrow 1y ago
      Many spices, as well as actual oil extracted from actual snakes by actual healers, and mushrooms as well, gained reputations in antiquity as medicinal and/or beneficial to health in some way. And this often fueled increased trade and increased cultivation volumes and increased prices and tariffs and wars and cruel laws. In antiquity. And often, the actual medicinal benefits became overhyped, and crept from their scope, and each nation's crown jewel of a spice became a miracle cure-all, and cue the trade wars and sword-wielding knights defending their spice. Basically the "Snake Oil Salesmen" of the Wild West were white hucksters who diluted the actual snake oil down so much, or didn't bother adding any in the first place, then sold the elixirs on Main Street between the saloon and the whorehouse. So the Native Americans were nonplussed that their shamanistic remedies had been subverted as a trope of quacks and hoaxers. Most of all, these spices and mushrooms have been gradually enshittified, perhaps literally, and many of them are a shadow of their former selves, bred for mass-production. And Americans sit there and dust our burger and fries with gray sand that doesn't even taste like black pepper anymore. Not to mention the salt that's been refined until there's nothing but sodium in it. Perhaps mushrooms are the least likely food to be enshittified or deliberately commercialized, except for about 4 types in the grocery stores. From what I've learned about mushroom foraging, it's never worth it; just go buy mushrooms in the store, I mean for crying out loud. The risk is too great, and aficionados can claim "easy identification" all they want, but "easy" is relative and not for you to judge, because there's a fine line between tasty and fatal.
- Vilian 1y ago
  You can say that to any mildly dangerous hobby
  - busterarm 1y ago
    How many people in the US do you think actually forage wild plants and fungi? The number of hospitalizations is somewhere around 10k a year. For ~1500 of those it's at least life threatening. ~100ish end up with organ failure or permanent neurological problems. ~10 of them die. That's every year. That might be mildly dangerous compared to other hobbies, but if you isolate for actual practitioners of the hobby, suddenly those numbers look extremely dangerous.
    - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
      Where are you getting your data? Is this a specific country/worldwide/what? If you're just talking about the US, a quick Google search shows your numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude. This article from the CDC estimated 100 hospitalizations for mushrooms in the US in 2016: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010a1.htm Foraging for mushrooms is not dangerous if you know what you're doing and stick to easily identified mushrooms that aren't easily confused with poisonous varieties.
      - busterarm 1y ago
        AAPCC annual reports, linked to from an actual mushroom foraging guide. Also I said plants and mushrooms. Not specifically mushrooms. AAPCC doesn't track mushrooms separately and I would consider the CDC to not be the authority on poisoning -- their specialty is diseases.
        adamweld 1y ago
        Here's the relevant section from the 2023 National Poison Data System: https://i.imgur.com/vIXenG8.png https://i.imgur.com/vIXenG8.png 8294 case mentions, 3039 hospitalizations. for outcomes check the table.
- mock-possum 1y ago
  Oh come on - Making cost benefit analysis of foraging and eating wild mushrooms into a matter of calories is wild. The calorific value of a meal is one of the least important aspects - you might as well complain that the mushrooms don’t come in sufficiently varied colours to make it worthwhile. It’s not about the calories. It’s about the experience - the taste, the texture, the satisfaction of knowing you did it yourself.
  - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
    Yeah, when I read the comment about calories I thought "This is a prime example when engineers only think about numbers and completely miss the forest for the trees (err, mushrooms)" Also, for many mushrooms, the risk of consuming a toxic variety is extremely low if you know what you're doing. People love to bring up examples of "But the head of the Mycological Society of XYZ died of misidentified mushrooms!!", but a while back I dug into those examples and found 0 evidence for any of them - they're just popular Internet old wives' tales that people love to regurgitate.
    - a_shoeboy 1y ago
      A high percentage of fatal poisonings in the US have been Southeast Asian immigrants because, in the button stage, the North American death cap looks nearly identical to the paddy straw mushroom they know from home.
- twdfhgy4556452 1y ago
  Meh, there are a couple of mushrooms that are super easy to identify with no risk of confusing them with anaything dangerous (at least where I live). Stick to those and you're fine. Also, they are super tasty ;)
- reverendsteveii 1y ago
  do you only eat the food with the highest calories:risk ratio?
  - busterarm 1y ago
    Risk of death is a huge cost/downside. I've known several people poor enough to optimize all of their eating around cost per calorie. 30-50 calories is basically only worth your consideration if it's free at that point. If that came with a high risk of illness/death it's not even worth considering.
    - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
      Ironically, optimizing around cost per calorie is, at least in most places in the US, a great way to have horrible health and die an early death.
      - fragmede 1y ago
        What food and $/calorie do you get to determine that?
      - SoftTalker 1y ago
        Starve now or die later is not a difficult choice for most people.
        hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
        "Starve now"? If you're talking about the US, get real. Essentially nobody is starving in the US for lack of calories (unless it's a case of mental illness or something similar). In fact, in the US, usually the opposite is true. From the Wikipedia page on food insecurity in the US: > Reliance on food banks has led to a rise in obesity and diabetes within the food insecure community. Many foods in food banks are highly processed and low in nutritional value leading to further health effects. One study showed 33% of American households visiting food pantries had diabetes.
      - 1y ago
- hoseja 1y ago
  Sorry but skill issue.
- soperj 1y ago
  Honestly it's not hours of study. You identify the one mushroom that you're going foraging for, and then you need to know the ones that look like it so that you don't get those by mistake. It's pretty simple if you know what you're doing. Ie: Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs I'm not sure that's true, I know that we had Cantharellus cibarius ("golden chanterelle") growing up everywhere in the woods, but I don't think the Douglas fir even exists there, never heard that name before. The forest was mostly oak I think.
- lithocarpus 1y ago
  Where I live mushrooms are by far the most abundant wild food. It's good exercise, very enjoyable "work", and they taste really really good with a huge variety of flavors. Leafy greens also have very low calories per pound. We eat them for the nutrients not for the calories. Because of mushrooms and wild greens, I buy very little vegetables, all I need is relatively cheap (per calorie) foods to go with the wild stuff. There is also risk of food poisoning with food from restaurants or the store.. not to mention the chronic poisoning of eating food grown with excessive pesticides etc. For the most part the abundant edible mushrooms look very different from the dangerous ones. But yes you do need to know ID thoroughly if you go for certain species. That said not everyone lives where edible mushrooms are abundant, I'm not trying to suggest everyone should do it.
  - istjohn 1y ago
    Where is this, if you don't mind my asking?
- imp0cat 1y ago
  Well then, what do you think about eating fugu?
  - fireflash38 1y ago
    fugutaboutit?
  - rzzzt 1y ago
    With foraged mushrooms and bear that you have fought as a side dish.
- TechDebtDevin 1y ago
  Acccording to America's poisen center these are the numbers: Calls to poisen control concerning mushrooms: 8,294 Of those calls, 4862 were of unknown origin, only like 3-400 are confirmed dangerous wild grown mushrooms, 2k+ are psylocibin. 3-400 is probably <1% of the amount of people who forage, so its a lot safer than driving a car I'm guessing. (This was a quick scan) https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/dPhtQdu6eCQnIQ5R.pdf https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/dPhtQdu6eCQnIQ5R.pdf [page 174-175]
  - lithocarpus 1y ago
    Meanwhile 48 million Americans get some kind of food poisoning each year. Eating food is dangerous! I've eaten many hundreds of pounds of wild mushrooms in the last eight years and have not had any food poisoning at all.
    - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
      To be honest, I will probably still pass. Mushrooms kinda freak me out on a biological level anyways. What is crazy to me is how people find certain things scary or risky but they'll literally strap themselves inside a metal box on wheels that has uses a controlled explosion produced with highly carcinogenic toxic chemicals, that has hundreds of parts that can fail, it can slam into the other contraption next you tear you in half, all so they don't have to ride a bike or walk for an extra twenty minutes..
      - HeWhoLurksLate 1y ago
        I can't remember who said it originally, but it amuses me to no end that the only reason our society works as well as it does is a mutual agreement to follow some lines and not play bumper cars
- tshaddox 1y ago
  They’re also an acquired taste, which makes it even more absurd.
jaggederest 1y ago
I'm honestly amazed I didn't get tetrodotoxin poisoning when I was a kid. We used to play with these rough skinned newts all the time, they were everywhere, and nobody was especially diligent about washing their hands.
- eszed 1y ago
  Same! I even kept a couple of them in a terrarium. And, my dad was a PhD in zoology, so it wasn't like I lacked access to expert advice. It was a "they have toxins on their skin, so... Eh, maybe wash your hands a bit", not "wash your hands or the whole family dies" level of concern. Makes me wonder if a) these toxicity stories are exaggerated, b) it's really regionally specific, c) toxicity has radically increased in the past ~40 years since I was playing with newts, or d) we got dumb lucky. I loved this article. I didn't know anything about the newt / snake interaction; I wonder if my dad did.
  - Benanov 1y ago
    I think B is the case - it seems to be very regionally specific.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

sbierwagen 1y ago

Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.

amanaplanacanal 1y ago
Eating plants at random must be more dangerous than eating mushrooms. I have heard that there are far more poisonous plants than fungi, and greens have almost no calories.
- lithocarpus 1y ago
  Hopefully nobody is eating plants or mushrooms at random!
crazygringo 1y ago
Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories. All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in. I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor!
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor! That's not the appeal of spices. People don't stop using the spices they like in quest of newer, worse-tasting ones. By far the most common case when a person is eating spices is that there's nothing new about the flavor.
  - MisterTea 1y ago
    Could also be used to mask stale or spoiled foods that if cooked enough, wont kil you and still contains nutrition. Nothing goes to waste. Another could be preservation as is the case for salt.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      Salt is much simpler than that. It's a vital nutrient and if you don't eat enough of it, you'll die. It's useful for preservation, sure, but you're not eating it because you couldn't find fresh food. You're eating it because it's salt.
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    Many spices, as well as actual oil extracted from actual snakes by actual healers, and mushrooms as well, gained reputations in antiquity as medicinal and/or beneficial to health in some way. And this often fueled increased trade and increased cultivation volumes and increased prices and tariffs and wars and cruel laws. In antiquity. And often, the actual medicinal benefits became overhyped, and crept from their scope, and each nation's crown jewel of a spice became a miracle cure-all, and cue the trade wars and sword-wielding knights defending their spice. Basically the "Snake Oil Salesmen" of the Wild West were white hucksters who diluted the actual snake oil down so much, or didn't bother adding any in the first place, then sold the elixirs on Main Street between the saloon and the whorehouse. So the Native Americans were nonplussed that their shamanistic remedies had been subverted as a trope of quacks and hoaxers. Most of all, these spices and mushrooms have been gradually enshittified, perhaps literally, and many of them are a shadow of their former selves, bred for mass-production. And Americans sit there and dust our burger and fries with gray sand that doesn't even taste like black pepper anymore. Not to mention the salt that's been refined until there's nothing but sodium in it. Perhaps mushrooms are the least likely food to be enshittified or deliberately commercialized, except for about 4 types in the grocery stores. From what I've learned about mushroom foraging, it's never worth it; just go buy mushrooms in the store, I mean for crying out loud. The risk is too great, and aficionados can claim "easy identification" all they want, but "easy" is relative and not for you to judge, because there's a fine line between tasty and fatal.
Vilian 1y ago
You can say that to any mildly dangerous hobby
- busterarm 1y ago
  How many people in the US do you think actually forage wild plants and fungi? The number of hospitalizations is somewhere around 10k a year. For ~1500 of those it's at least life threatening. ~100ish end up with organ failure or permanent neurological problems. ~10 of them die. That's every year. That might be mildly dangerous compared to other hobbies, but if you isolate for actual practitioners of the hobby, suddenly those numbers look extremely dangerous.
  - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
    Where are you getting your data? Is this a specific country/worldwide/what? If you're just talking about the US, a quick Google search shows your numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude. This article from the CDC estimated 100 hospitalizations for mushrooms in the US in 2016: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010a1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010a1.htm Foraging for mushrooms is not dangerous if you know what you're doing and stick to easily identified mushrooms that aren't easily confused with poisonous varieties.
    - busterarm 1y ago
      AAPCC annual reports, linked to from an actual mushroom foraging guide. Also I said plants and mushrooms. Not specifically mushrooms. AAPCC doesn't track mushrooms separately and I would consider the CDC to not be the authority on poisoning -- their specialty is diseases.
      - adamweld 1y ago
        Here's the relevant section from the 2023 National Poison Data System: https://i.imgur.com/vIXenG8.png https://i.imgur.com/vIXenG8.png 8294 case mentions, 3039 hospitalizations. for outcomes check the table.
mock-possum 1y ago
Oh come on - Making cost benefit analysis of foraging and eating wild mushrooms into a matter of calories is wild. The calorific value of a meal is one of the least important aspects - you might as well complain that the mushrooms don’t come in sufficiently varied colours to make it worthwhile. It’s not about the calories. It’s about the experience - the taste, the texture, the satisfaction of knowing you did it yourself.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  Yeah, when I read the comment about calories I thought "This is a prime example when engineers only think about numbers and completely miss the forest for the trees (err, mushrooms)" Also, for many mushrooms, the risk of consuming a toxic variety is extremely low if you know what you're doing. People love to bring up examples of "But the head of the Mycological Society of XYZ died of misidentified mushrooms!!", but a while back I dug into those examples and found 0 evidence for any of them - they're just popular Internet old wives' tales that people love to regurgitate.
  - a_shoeboy 1y ago
    A high percentage of fatal poisonings in the US have been Southeast Asian immigrants because, in the button stage, the North American death cap looks nearly identical to the paddy straw mushroom they know from home.
twdfhgy4556452 1y ago
Meh, there are a couple of mushrooms that are super easy to identify with no risk of confusing them with anaything dangerous (at least where I live). Stick to those and you're fine. Also, they are super tasty ;)
reverendsteveii 1y ago
do you only eat the food with the highest calories:risk ratio?
- busterarm 1y ago
  Risk of death is a huge cost/downside. I've known several people poor enough to optimize all of their eating around cost per calorie. 30-50 calories is basically only worth your consideration if it's free at that point. If that came with a high risk of illness/death it's not even worth considering.
  - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
    Ironically, optimizing around cost per calorie is, at least in most places in the US, a great way to have horrible health and die an early death.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      What food and $/calorie do you get to determine that?
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      Starve now or die later is not a difficult choice for most people.
      - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
        "Starve now"? If you're talking about the US, get real. Essentially nobody is starving in the US for lack of calories (unless it's a case of mental illness or something similar). In fact, in the US, usually the opposite is true. From the Wikipedia page on food insecurity in the US: > Reliance on food banks has led to a rise in obesity and diabetes within the food insecure community. Many foods in food banks are highly processed and low in nutritional value leading to further health effects. One study showed 33% of American households visiting food pantries had diabetes.
    - 1y ago
hoseja 1y ago
Sorry but skill issue.
soperj 1y ago
Honestly it's not hours of study. You identify the one mushroom that you're going foraging for, and then you need to know the ones that look like it so that you don't get those by mistake. It's pretty simple if you know what you're doing. Ie: Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs.
- diggan 1y ago
  > Chantrelles have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas Fir trees, so you're only going to find them around Douglas firs I'm not sure that's true, I know that we had Cantharellus cibarius ("golden chanterelle") growing up everywhere in the woods, but I don't think the Douglas fir even exists there, never heard that name before. The forest was mostly oak I think.
lithocarpus 1y ago
Where I live mushrooms are by far the most abundant wild food. It's good exercise, very enjoyable "work", and they taste really really good with a huge variety of flavors. Leafy greens also have very low calories per pound. We eat them for the nutrients not for the calories. Because of mushrooms and wild greens, I buy very little vegetables, all I need is relatively cheap (per calorie) foods to go with the wild stuff. There is also risk of food poisoning with food from restaurants or the store.. not to mention the chronic poisoning of eating food grown with excessive pesticides etc. For the most part the abundant edible mushrooms look very different from the dangerous ones. But yes you do need to know ID thoroughly if you go for certain species. That said not everyone lives where edible mushrooms are abundant, I'm not trying to suggest everyone should do it.
- istjohn 1y ago
  Where is this, if you don't mind my asking?
imp0cat 1y ago
Well then, what do you think about eating fugu?
- fireflash38 1y ago
  fugutaboutit?
- rzzzt 1y ago
  With foraged mushrooms and bear that you have fought as a side dish.
TechDebtDevin 1y ago
Acccording to America's poisen center these are the numbers: Calls to poisen control concerning mushrooms: 8,294 Of those calls, 4862 were of unknown origin, only like 3-400 are confirmed dangerous wild grown mushrooms, 2k+ are psylocibin. 3-400 is probably <1% of the amount of people who forage, so its a lot safer than driving a car I'm guessing. (This was a quick scan) https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/dPhtQdu6eCQnIQ5R.pdf https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/dPhtQdu6eCQnIQ5R.pdf [page 174-175]
- lithocarpus 1y ago
  Meanwhile 48 million Americans get some kind of food poisoning each year. Eating food is dangerous! I've eaten many hundreds of pounds of wild mushrooms in the last eight years and have not had any food poisoning at all.
  - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
    To be honest, I will probably still pass. Mushrooms kinda freak me out on a biological level anyways. What is crazy to me is how people find certain things scary or risky but they'll literally strap themselves inside a metal box on wheels that has uses a controlled explosion produced with highly carcinogenic toxic chemicals, that has hundreds of parts that can fail, it can slam into the other contraption next you tear you in half, all so they don't have to ride a bike or walk for an extra twenty minutes..
    - HeWhoLurksLate 1y ago
      I can't remember who said it originally, but it amuses me to no end that the only reason our society works as well as it does is a mutual agreement to follow some lines and not play bumper cars
tshaddox 1y ago
They’re also an acquired taste, which makes it even more absurd.

jaggederest 1y ago

I'm honestly amazed I didn't get tetrodotoxin poisoning when I was a kid. We used to play with these rough skinned newts all the time, they were everywhere, and nobody was especially diligent about washing their hands.

eszed 1y ago
Same! I even kept a couple of them in a terrarium. And, my dad was a PhD in zoology, so it wasn't like I lacked access to expert advice. It was a "they have toxins on their skin, so... Eh, maybe wash your hands a bit", not "wash your hands or the whole family dies" level of concern. Makes me wonder if a) these toxicity stories are exaggerated, b) it's really regionally specific, c) toxicity has radically increased in the past ~40 years since I was playing with newts, or d) we got dumb lucky. I loved this article. I didn't know anything about the newt / snake interaction; I wonder if my dad did.
- Benanov 1y ago
  I think B is the case - it seems to be very regionally specific.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]