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.
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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:
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:
Is broadly wrong, there is nothing specific to mushrooms here, and this is entirely incoherent.
Also incoherent and wrong.
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 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.
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.