Deadly morel mushroom outbreak highlights big gaps in fungi knowledge
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Dave's is a popular joint but didn't strike me as particularly good even by Sushi restaurants in Montana standards. They had some creative rolls but seemed to fail to get the basic fish cuts and rice seasoning right.
What they were doing marinating the morel's and eating them basically raw is ridiculous. No one who is experienced with morel's does it that way and most mushroom guides contain info on hydrazine contents/risk and suggested cooking methods.
March and April is too early for Montana (or most US) Morel's which are commercially picked in forest fires from the previous year once the soil temperature reaches 54 degrees. I heard at one point these were grown in China and wouldn't be shocked if they are a different [sub]species that might contain more hyrazine. There are also some "false morels" that fruit earlier (one species is known as the snow morel as it comes up right after snow melt) but these are easy to identify contain even more hydrazine.
So we should be growing morels on Mars?
All morels are poisonous when eaten raw. There is zero gap in knowledge here.
There are plenty of gaps in knowledge about mushrooms, and there's a lot of unknowns about the ecology of morels but plenty of people eat these all the time.
that said it’s common knowledge to anyone who knows anything about mushrooms that you need to cook morels.
Is there some internet fight against Big Cap?
They're delicious and the grow in huge quantities. So most people will eat a lot of them.
And most people are okay, but several have either allergies or a sensitivity to them. And they get violently sick.
Rule number one of wild gathered foods, regardless of what it is: eat just a little of it until you know it won't make you sick, even if it's 100% safe.
I don’t have the source at hand but I recall reading a few years ago that you should start by rubbing it on your skin, and if no reaction run it inside your lips, and if no reaction, chew it a bit and spit it out, and if no reaction then eat a very small amount, and only eat more after a significant period of time has passed, and then in small doses.
It seemed reasonable to me. Slowly increase the risk level.
Pure lay speculation, but based on the fact that humans have been deliberately ingesting lots of alcohol for millennia (and mammals have been doing intermittently for untold millions of years), the liver may preferentially break down ethanol and then acetaldehyde even when substances that are problematic/deadly in lower concentrations are present. Alcohol metabolism has been optimized for.
Interesting anecdote, methanol causes intoxication similar to alcohol and is harmful but not deadly in and of itself. However, methanol ingestion can cause blindness and death specifically because the liver breaks it down quickly into formic acid, which then circulates throughout the bloodstream. In cases of methanol poisoning, the antidote is to drink alcohol (ethanol) in sufficient quantities, since the liver preferentially breaks down the alcohol, allowing the methanol to be broken down much slower to the point that it is no longer deadly (half-life goes from 2-3 hours to 90+ hours when ethanol is present).
The abandoned alien ships in Frederik Pohl's Gateway are specifically described as morel-shaped. It's where I learned a morel is a type of mushroom.
The only two mushrooms people generally recommend trying raw are the beefsteak polypore and the caesar's amanita. But this isn't because they are healthier when eaten raw, but rather because they have some unique culinary properties that are considered worth the risk when consumed in small quantities.
The more important consideration, from the limited reading I've done, is to limit consumption to cultivated mushrooms from reputable sources. Environmental toxins in raw mushrooms is a definite problem! But the white buttons you get at Safeway are no more likely to poison you than the potatoes or romaine you buy there.
(2) There's some question about whether cooking mushrooms even resolves the issue.
(3) The effect seems smaller than that of potatoes and other acrylamide carriers, which we know, end-to-end, to be causative of human cancer.
You do you, but mushroom carcinogenicity is not on my behavior-alteration list.
(I don't like raw mushrooms so it's easy for me to say this).
Acrylamide, like many things, is known to be causative of cancer at extremely high doses. There is no indication that the levels found in food are harmful; it would be very difficult for a human to eat the levels of acrylamide shown to be harmful.
The list of things carcinogenic at doses two orders of magnitude larger than those found in food is large.
First incident. In late 2005, I'm in Bangkok for business. On the 3rd or 4th night I ventured to an outdoor restaurant, and ate their "specialty" which was raw shrimp, garlic, and crushed chili. Yes, I was an idiot. On the walk back to the hotel I started to feel it. Broke out into a cold sweat, doubled over, and realized my meal was bad news. I managed to get back to the hotel and asked for help. I thought they would call an ambulance but instead they gave me some charcoal, which I had never even heard of before - but they convinced me to take it. I started to feel some relief after 30 minutes or so. I still felt terrible for a day or two, but I could tell it would have been far worse had I not taken it.
Second incident. In 2012 I'm in Madrid on Business, and a colleague and I met up at a somewhat empty restaurant. We split a paella, because we were foreigners and forgot we weren't in Barcelona. We went back to our separate hotels in different parts of town. I had some charcoal with me, and realized I needed to take some. I got back home fine, my colleague went back home and ended up in the emergency room - took her about 10 days to recover.
It's not something I take often (maybe once every two or three years). But I swear by it and always travel with it just in case an adventurous culinary experience ends poorly.
Unless there was a poisonous mushroom or something in your Thai food or your paella, would activated charcoal be expected to help?
It works with pretty much anything, good or bad, since it exploits a basic physical process of molecules sticking together.
I'm definitely open to the possibility that it might work differently on different people - we're not all clones.
What does that mean? Is Barcelona a cleaner place than Madrid?
I avoid any/all fish dishes when not in a coastal region due to repeated bad experiences.
https://www.denverpost.com/2009/01/26/how-does-fish-get-from...
There may be exceptions if it is caught locally and in season, but the vast majority of seafood eaten in the US is not local, no matter how close you are to the coast.
I've had plenty of raw seafood from food stalls across the world and never had an issue.
The 2nd one, not that much improved.
I'm still unconvinced that it was the Morels
It calls to mind Show Biz Sushi from King of the Hill.
There are newer sushi places in town that are much fancier, and have fancy trendy names to match, such as "Seven".
As mentioned in other comments, all sushi fish in the US must be frozen for 7 days to kill parasites, so there's no such thing as "fresh" sushi here. That said, you can get day-of fresh fish in Bozeman - it's flown in a few times a week from Seattle, and is quite pricey. A friend of mine has built a business delivering it to restaurants in the morning.
(It's very neat that you have an eyewitness report of actually being there.)
I didn't go to the super-expensive places that have it flown in daily. Those might be okay, but the stuff in normal Chicagoland restaurants and grocery stores is just plain nasty.
It won't get rid of bacteria that colonize it after it's been thawed and improperly handled.
If it was the way they handled their fish, it seems unlikely to me that their methodology would still have pointed to the morels. This is a sushi restaurant- pretty much everyone is eating some of their fish.
On the poisonous front, my grandfather used to pick and eat Gyromitra Esculenta. His preparation method apparently rendered them safe, but he had no idea they were deadly when not properly prepared. (It's been a long time, but I recall that he'd soak his mushrooms in salted water to "get the bugs out" and would typically cook them in gravy.)
https://paulstamets.com/news/raw-edible-mushrooms
https://old.reddit.com/r/mycology/comments/qm3dag/can_anybod...
Surely intentional.
If i ever want to harvest my own mushrooms i'll buy the plug sdtarters from a reputable place, i think.
So the evidence seems to point to the morels, but we don’t have any idea how they could have caused the effect
"Even the cultivated A. bisporus contains small amounts of hydrazines, the most abundant of which is agaritine (a mycotoxin and carcinogen). However, the hydrazines are destroyed by moderate heat when cooking."
> Food specimens were tested for multiple substances, including volatile and nonvolatile organic compounds and enteric pathogens. Neither clinical testing nor food testing identified a causative agent.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7310a1.htm?s_cid=mm...
Deadly morel but nobody died. Sounds like 50 people got food poisoning. Sounds like non-news to me. First: morels can make you sick if not cooked properly, Second: lookup how many people get food poisoning each year.
And all this speculation about the mushrooms coming from China. Assume they came from China. So what?
It's well known that uncooked/undercooked morels can cause this. Food poisoning is not this rare thing that happened to hit this crummy place in Montana. It's non-news.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Hothouse
Incidentially, ... or probably not ..., I'm reading The Fungus at the moment.