this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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IIRC, the only definitive way to ID mushrooms is by making a spore print - and even then you need to know what you're doing.
Just doesn't seem worth the risk to me.
nah it's generally fairly easy to ID mushrooms, the problem is just that if you miss a feature and mistake it for another, you'll fucking liquidize from the inside out.
This is the same reason that you never touch something that looks like a carrot plant in the wild, because it could be that one plant that kills you 3 times over.
I agree that it's generally not worth the risk though, hence why those who pick mushrooms (which is pretty standard to do here in the nordics) stick to like 5 species who have no dangerous lookalikes and actually taste good and are easy to find.
Here in sweden 90% of what people pick is chanterelles or boletes, whose entire families look effectively the same and at worst simply don't taste good. Boletes have ONE slightly toxic species in sweden, and it's bright red and only grows on one island in the baltic sea.
That's funny. I was just thinking to myself "Fuck all this mushroom noise. I'll just stick to eating carrots, no way to mistake those for something else." I guess I'll die quickly in the coming apocalypse.
This is why we befriend the people who can reliably ID plants and know what is safe to eat, you wouldn't survive an apocalypse alone regardless.
Mhm, society persists even through collapse scenarios mostly for exactly this reason. John the Butcher in 13th century Scotland might have lost his entire village to The Plague, but those guys in the village 3 miles down the road still have people who know how to forage, or hunt, or grow food, etc etc etc.
yeah do watch out for hemlock plants, they look very similar to wild carrots
Spotted water hemlock
"The confusion with parsnips can be fatal as C. maculata is extremely poisonous. It is considered to be North America's most toxic native plant."
"The chief poison is cicutoxin, an unsaturated aliphatic alcohol that is most concentrated in the roots. Upon human consumption, nausea, vomiting, and tremors occur within 30–60 minutes, followed by severe cramps, projectile vomiting, and convulsions."
It supposedly tastes good though.
If anyone is curious about the carrot mention, Google where the phrase "Sardonic Grin" came from.
Huh. I was thinking Aconitum species when they mentioned carrots.
Sardonic grin just mentions strychnine poisoning, which comes from a tree.
No, no. It's hemlock.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oenanthe_crocata
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/plant-that-produced-ritual-death-smiles-mayve-given-homer-a-neat-phrase
Ah, yes. My mistake, did not read the entire wikipedia article there for sardonic grin.
It's all good. :) I try to hold back links sometimes to encourage people to go look up stuff, both because the curious will and they come back and contribute some new things. It's good for conversation. Mistakes are the best way to learn. People are neat.
Oh my, the mechanism of action on that is essentially the opposite of alchohol/benzos and would feel like going through the DTs. That's a very unfun way to go. Interestingly, a suggestive treatment would be benzos/getting blind drunk.
Okay so when you said "Never touch" I was thinking casually "Oh, don't go messing with it or munching on it or whatever. Sound advice."
Looking it up, oh...poison hemlock...you were being dead-exact.
Source
Oh holy crap. ~~Kill it with fire~~!
Not even fire can sate its lust for indiscriminate killing?!
Apparently it's a "recent problem" that this stuff is spreading all over the place.
It was as I suspected. Going outside is overrated. 😬
This is untrue. Spore print can be useful for some very similar species or when you are first learning but I’ve been picking and eating wild mushrooms for about 15 years now and I basically never do a spore print anymore. Once you learn it’s pretty unnecessary. The ones I pick are easy to ID anyway. Most people can learn to identify them fairly quickly with some instruction though I have noticed that some people lack the attention to detail to be good at it.
Yah -- and to add certain edible mushrooms or families of mushrooms are very distinctive (e.g. hedgehog fungi in the UK), and I would recommend novices start out with. Others I wouldn't touch with a barge pole even if I was relatively confident with an id, purely because it isn't worth the risk (e.g. miller Vs fools funnel).
Perhaps I should have said 'categorically' instead of 'definitively', but they are synonyms so...
I’m not sure I understand the distinction you are making here but I wouldn’t say it’s the only way to categorically identify mushrooms either. It is one tool among many, and one that is typically used with unfamiliar mushrooms, not those that a person is already familiar with.
Basically if you are not sure what you have it can help narrow down the possibilities. But typically if you are picking mushrooms to eat you are (or should be) already certain of what you have. I can’t think of a single scenario where spore prints would be the easiest way to distinguish similar edible and poisonous mushrooms. There are many other features that are more readily examined and spore prints are mainly for separating more distinct types of mushrooms from one another anyway.
I'm UK based so not hugely familiar with US mushrooms, but I seem to recall a spore print being useful for checking for false parasol? Though it's not the most obvious (e.g. snakeskin markings for distinguishing from parasol).
Btw I totally agree with your general point (I never use them, except to produce pretty spore prints for friends).