There's no "mushroom obsession", JC simply did all the usual stuff that a passionate mushroom hunter would do.
He wrote a book about mushrooms? Obsessed! He accidently poisoned himself? Unheard of for passionate mushroom hunters!
Poisoning yourself with false hellebore suggests he might have been a little unhinged. You’d have to be pretty impulsive to do that.
>On May 15th last year, we took an early trip to our family cabin in the central Adirondacks to see if we could catch the beginning of morel season there.
>We walked down a dirt road for a mile until we came to numerous splits in the road.
>While taking a closer look through a loupe, Riitta, who was a few steps ahead, squealed with delight. She had found something special! But it was not a Morchella americana. She knew it as the choice edible Korvasieni (Finnish for “ear mushroom”). We knew it as the deadly poisonous Gyromitra esculenta, the false morel.
>We knew that these were potentially deadly poisonous, but that some people do eat them when prepared properly.
>However, according to Wikipedia “although it is still commonly parboiled before preparation, evidence suggests that even this procedure may not make Gyromitra escu-lenta entirely safe for consumption, thus raising concerns of risk even when prepared properly. When consumed, the principal active agent, gyromitrin, is hydrolyzed into the toxic compound monomethylhydrazine (MMH - a com-ponent of rocket fuel). The toxin affects the liver, central nervous system, and sometimes the kidneys. Symptoms of poisoning involve vomiting and diarrhea several hours after consumption, followed by dizziness, lethargy and head-ache. Severe cases may lead to delirium, coma and death after 5-7 days.” Yikes!
>Rinse the mushrooms thoroughly in plenty of running cold water. Repeat once more the boiling and rinsing of the mushrooms. Drain the mushrooms and use for cooking like any edible mushroom.After doing this with all the windows open in our kitchen, trying our best to avoid inhaling the poisonous fumes, and cautiously boiling twice for 11 minutes, we cooked up the false morels in lots of butter and onions.
I've never eaten false morels, although if I were at Noma or something I'd probably try the soup. Eating them outside of a geographic region where there is a history of eating them is definitely especially questionable, although I don't know that I'd necessarily consider it unhinged. At least they knew exactly what they were eating and made an informed decision.
I would have thought his music alone was plenty of evidence that he was more than a little unhinged.