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Comment by tristramb | Hacker News Reader

Warning from an old Usenet fungus newsgroup: "If you collect fungi to eat you should always take three samples: one for the pot, one for the doctor and one for the coroner."

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'All Fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.' — Terry Pratchett

Or "There are bold mushroom foragers, and there are old mushroom foragers. But there are no bold, old mushroom foragers."

My partner has anxiety problems and did not entirely appreciate when I told her where a raw sample of the mushrooms I planted, harvested and positively IDed (stropharia) were in the fridge before I ate a small piece of them. And then the next day when I re-iterated it before eating a bowl of soup containing the mushrooms.

I think I need to sit her down and explain the Precautionary Principle again. I'm 99.999% sure but who knows what happens if I'm wrong so here's the sample for the toxicologist.

I understand now why mushroom hunters have their favorite spots. If you've seen chantrelles in the same spot for years and have never seen any doppelgangers in the area, you're a little more sure that what you have is actually chantrelles.

Chanterelles are not a great example as their look-alikes are easily distinguishable. Furthermore, they exist in symbiosis/parasitism with particular tree roots as a host. When you return to the same spot you’re harvesting new fruiting bodies of the same organism that you visited last time.

And yet most edible mushrooms do have these associations. Even saprophytic species will take a number of years to devour a nurse log, so that fallen oak or doug-fir will feed you many times.

And then there are truffles...

I don’t understand this comment for some reason… what am I not getting as the point? I don’t know my mushrooms.

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