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Comment by chrisgd | Hacker News Reader

Why do people like eating mushrooms from the woods? How much of it is the potential risk? There are plenty of options at the grocery store.

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You look at the woods differently when you hunt for mushrooms. Your whole vision changes. You see the exact same things as, say, a hiker, but you process it entirely differently.

It's a gamified experience of the wilderness, too, in some ways.

It provides many people a connection to their culture and ancestry.

It's a literal connection to the earth. Besides the amazing health benefits of mushrooms, I'm sure your microbiome gets a boost.

Mushrooms and herbs both have plenty of potent phytochemicals that have impressive effects on the body, often for good, sometimes not. When I gather mushrooms or herbs for my own consumption, I have complete control over the supply chain and am confident that I'm consuming reasonable subclinical doses. I have a healthy distrust for supplements of mushrooms and herbs in the US; they're poorly regulated, the supply chain is totally opaque; rarely can you know anything about the age, quality, harvesting conditions, etc., or even if you really have the herb or dried mushroom claimed, much less the actual dose of any chemical in there. Sure, I don't know the actual chemical contents of my blue vervain or turkey tail or whatever either, but I also know I'm not grinding it up and chowing down on a concentrated dose.

Of course accurate identification of the plant or mushroom is important, as can be understanding of how growing conditions affect the plant and how preparation should be carried out (Kentucky coffee tree seeds are nice legumes if boiled a couple times, can kill cows if just left in the water trough in the sun; amanita muscaria can be boiled several times and eaten or pickled then eaten).

> It's a gamified experience of the wilderness, too, in some ways.

I sometimes collect trash from the woods near me and weirdly enough the feeling in the brain of finding a good mushroom is very similar to the feeling of finding a plastic bottle to collect.

Part of the reason I own woods in the first place is for the food it provides - berries, nuts, mushrooms, herbs, wild grapes, maple syrup, not to mention deer. We aren't even heavy collectors, but still when I priced it out last year we probably foraged about 3000 dollars worth of various foods. Once you add in some gardening, plant some fruit trees, raise a few chickens, do some bartering with and purchasing from other folks with farms in the area... you start to wonder if you even need a grocery store.

Based off the market rate for chanterelles my harvest this year would have cost several thousand dollars had I merely bought them from the grocer.

I have mild and pedestrian taste for mushrooms and I’m satisfied by grocery offerings, but no there aren’t plenty of options at the grocery store. Some different presentations of button mushrooms is common, and maybe shiitakes. More varieties are sometimes available at some farmers markets, generally cultivated, and even still they don’t offer many varieties found in the wild.

It’s not the potential risk. Mushroom hunters are usually both very careful and very knowledgeable, or at least very careful to defer to people who are very knowledgeable. And a lot of them are either chefs or supplying chefs. For everyone else I t’s mostly because the variety available is so much more limited than you portrayed, and because mushroom hunting is a hobby some people enjoy either for its own sake or for the context of being in the woods to forage for that’s own sake.

There are mushrooms you effectively can't get at the grocery store. Morels are probably the best example.

My area is probably exceptional, but you can get it from the people at the farmer's market that focus exclusively on mushroom foraging. Even when they're selling the same thing as even premium grocery stores, the gap in quality is very apparent.

You can buy them in a supermarket in Europe (where I live)

It's fun, it's an outdoors activity, and as far as I know you can't really get the mushrooms you find locally in the grocery store. Using an app to identify mushrooms, however, is a terrifying thought. Maybe it speaks more to people's conceptions of the capabilities of modern technology.

If you want to get into foraging, there are some really easy to identify safe ones without dangerous lookalikes. Get a good identification book on the topic. Don't listen to random strangers on the Internet, and don't trust apps.

"There are plenty of options at the grocery store."

Not really, as you can cultivate only a handful of mushrooms. The good ones have to come from the woods.

I know, right? What's the upside? Possibly interesting flavor. What's the downside. AGONY AND DEATH.

Why is this even a question?

Fugu would like a word.

There's no risk of agony and death from foraging many edible species. If I'm foraging big orange pored shelf mushrooms, for example, my risk of death is zero. This is like saying "what's the upside of drugs when some of them kill you?!"

Yes, there is no risk if you know what you're doing.

But above that, the risk is that you have misestimated your level of "knowing what you're doing".

So, the sensible thing to do is make the cutoff at the point where the risk of that error is lowest. And that point is "is it a wild mushroom?"

Or you can just assume your knowledge is good enough and risk becoming a Dunning-Kruger statistic.

There are countless places in life where people do elective activities that would be potentially deadly if they didn't have a base level of knowledge, and in none of those is the general expectation that people will make the cutoff "where the risk of that error is the lowest."

Why? Because it's not that hard to figure out whether you're misestimating your level of knowledge if you actually do things to attempt that verification.

If you're not going to attempt that, yes -- you should stay away from virtually all things that have ever killed anyone, ever.

You do a risk-benefit tradeoff. Here, the risk massively outweighs the benefit. So you have to be absolutely certain you're not mistaken. This is very different from activities with low probability risks and/or considerably larger benefits.

It takes an incredibly small amount of research and a miniscule amount of care to nullify all of the risk of death. If you've ever seen a picture of either you are simply not, under any circumstances, going to confuse Laetiporus cinncinatus or any of the handful of for any deadly species. If you're using an ID book, you've just made it basically impossible to confuse anything outside of a couple of genera with a deadly species, and the book will make sure you know what the lookalikes are, even if they aren't at all toxic.

I know people who self-admittedly overcorrect and refrain from picking even a few easily-distinguished mushrooms that happen to be vaguely similar colors and shapes to deadly mushrooms, but the idea that you need to not pick any mushrooms at all, ever, in order to eliminate the risk is silly.

Picking wild mushrooms is not done (except by those who haven't done the trivial amount of info-gathering that is actually necessary) by gathering lots of different mushrooms and then identifying them and eating the ones that appear to be edible species. It isn't done by taking a field guide out and IDing mushrooms from scratch and then eating the ones that look like the edible ones in the book. It is done by learning species one or two at a time, along with all of their potential lookalikes. People who do this and start with easy mushrooms will encounter far more risk both from getting to the foraging area and from walking around in it than they will from the mushrooms.

I know you are more exclaiming than asking, or it reads that way, but it is seriously a lifestyle. Many mushrooms are only foraged as there just aren't farmers, but past that, it is kind of a prestige culture. Pride, and generations of knowing "the spots"

I read it as curiously exclaiming, as in “I don’t understand and have preconceived contrarian views but I might be missing something”, which is a really good “change my mind” introduction.

because its fun

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