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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

Mushrooms are popular enough in western cuisine to be ingredients in canned soup (I don't just mean cream of mushroom soup). In the US fresh mushrooms are available in any medium sized grocery store and many people have the hobby of collecting wild mushrooms (notably morels). I'm pretty sure Europe is similar.

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Yes, mushrooms are sold in virtually every european supermarket and some, like chanterelles, are considered a delicacy. Collecting wild mushrooms is also quite popular in rural regions of Germany. However, please be sure to bring along a local when doing so. There are some poisonous look-alikes to edible mushrooms. Recently, a 16 year old refugee in Münster died because of this [1].

[1]: http://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/diagnose/muenster-16-jaehri...

However, please be sure to bring along a local when doing so

This is a pet peeve of a biologist I know: even though I know nobody who can determine species like he can, he's still very strongly against collecting mushrooms in the wild and does not do it himself. According to him there are just too many edible mushrooms with a poisonous look-alike which in some cases prefers the same surroundings as habitat and in for which the distinction can only be made by smell, or by squeezing it and see how the color changes, etc. Not sure he's exaggerating but it does illustrate why people die from eating mushrooms out of the wild, time and time again.

Not a biologist, but a fan of flora! He's correct. Maybe not the best comparison, but mushrooms are a lot like snakes. [0] Fact of the matter is, if I saw a snake with any variation of red, black, and yellow I'd be sure to keep my distance. To quote the article:

>Though there is no harm in assuming all colorful snakes are dangerous

I assume all wild mushrooms are dangerous. There is no harm in it. :)

[0] http://www.wildlife-removal.com/snakecolorrhyme.html

I think it is wise to set a very high bar, but having a moderate amount of experience picking morels, I can trivially tell when I have a real morel or a false one (there are several species of edible morels and several species of confounding mushrooms involved).

I'll have to take your word for trivially telling them apart. To my untrained eye, I wouldn't be able to tell the dangerous species of my region apart from the safe ones.

But looking at the math, the most fatal species belong to Amanita [0]. Amanita contains about 600 varieties (wiki lists 500ish). Of those 500, for my region only, I would need to learn how to identify about 30 varieties. A reasonably feasible amount! But wait... we can trim that number down some more. Ignoring the ones where edibility is unknown, that leaves only 10 or so to identify. Anyone who cared enough could likely easily learn to tell them apart. But with 5 being known as deadly and 1 of those being the angel of death [1], I won't be taking any chances. :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amanita_species

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_ocreata

So go hunt morels after a forest fire. You won't confuse them with the destroying angel. The advice to start with someone who knows the difference among the species that might be confused with morels would still be good to follow.

It's also totally fine to not do anything, I just wanted to point out that your position was extremely conservative on the matter.

Some of the edible species have poisonous lookalikes, while some don't.

Here, beginners are advised to only pick extremely easily recognizable mushrooms like various Boletus (Tatti).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boletaceae

The books have very thorough instructions on identification.

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