Environmental News

Mushrooms are very tasty and healthful, but with some important exceptions:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/wild-mushrooms-poisoning-people-california-county-21220866.php

Excerpt: "In January, three people arrived at the Salinas Valley Health Emergency Department with acute liver toxicity after eating death cap mushrooms they purchased from an unlicensed vendor in a grocery store parking lot." Well, dang.

Your humble reporter is in Yunnan Province, China. Here we dine at mushroom restaurants cooking mushroom species in a hot pot on table. Pay more, and get more species. Interesting thing is restaurants put a countdown timer on your table and after 20 to 25 minutes (depending on hot pot size), diners are allowed to begin. Motivation is that some 'edible' species need time to detoxify. Here's the fun part: restaurants take a (broth) sample when the timer dings and write customer cell phone # on that sample. So, there is a 'chain of responsibility'. There is no certainty that restaurant will pay to analyze our table's sample for mycotoxins. It is instead theater that diners are in good hands.

Several edible delicious mushroom species become safe only after boiling time. Less frisky than fugu fish, but still frisky.

--
I advise readers to not eat mushrooms they might obtain wherever. I may have said here before that all mushroom species are edible.

Once.

 

Acute liver toxicity is wrong with that. Joking about it seems crude, but senses of humor differ.

The whole topic hits close to home because my stepson ate mushrooms that, for being undercooked, sent him to hospital. He remembers very little of his stay there but made full recovery. As far as we can tell.