Leafy greens also have very low calories per pound. We eat them for the nutrients not for the calories. Because of mushrooms and wild greens, I buy very little vegetables, all I need is relatively cheap (per calorie) foods to go with the wild stuff.
There is also risk of food poisoning with food from restaurants or the store.. not to mention the chronic poisoning of eating food grown with excessive pesticides etc.
For the most part the abundant edible mushrooms look very different from the dangerous ones. But yes you do need to know ID thoroughly if you go for certain species.
That said not everyone lives where edible mushrooms are abundant, I'm not trying to suggest everyone should do it.
All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in.
I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor!
That's not the appeal of spices. People don't stop using the spices they like in quest of newer, worse-tasting ones. By far the most common case when a person is eating spices is that there's nothing new about the flavor.
And this often fueled increased trade and increased cultivation volumes and increased prices and tariffs and wars and cruel laws. In antiquity.
And often, the actual medicinal benefits became overhyped, and crept from their scope, and each nation's crown jewel of a spice became a miracle cure-all, and cue the trade wars and sword-wielding knights defending their spice.
Basically the "Snake Oil Salesmen" of the Wild West were white hucksters who diluted the actual snake oil down so much, or didn't bother adding any in the first place, then sold the elixirs on Main Street between the saloon and the whorehouse. So the Native Americans were nonplussed that their shamanistic remedies had been subverted as a trope of quacks and hoaxers.
Most of all, these spices and mushrooms have been gradually enshittified, perhaps literally, and many of them are a shadow of their former selves, bred for mass-production. And Americans sit there and dust our burger and fries with gray sand that doesn't even taste like black pepper anymore. Not to mention the salt that's been refined until there's nothing but sodium in it.
Perhaps mushrooms are the least likely food to be enshittified or deliberately commercialized, except for about 4 types in the grocery stores. From what I've learned about mushroom foraging, it's never worth it; just go buy mushrooms in the store, I mean for crying out loud. The risk is too great, and aficionados can claim "easy identification" all they want, but "easy" is relative and not for you to judge, because there's a fine line between tasty and fatal.
You wouldn't choose to do manual typesetting (or copying books by hand!!!) today either versus alternatives.
If you're _just_ looking to add umami flavor to a dish today, you'd be crazy to pick foraging for wild mushrooms over Aji no Moto.
That looks like... an intensely conservative estimate. Deer use salt.
The calorific value of a meal is one of the least important aspects - you might as well complain that the mushrooms don’t come in sufficiently varied colours to make it worthwhile.
It’s not about the calories. It’s about the experience - the taste, the texture, the satisfaction of knowing you did it yourself.
Also, for many mushrooms, the risk of consuming a toxic variety is extremely low if you know what you're doing. People love to bring up examples of "But the head of the Mycological Society of XYZ died of misidentified mushrooms!!", but a while back I dug into those examples and found 0 evidence for any of them - they're just popular Internet old wives' tales that people love to regurgitate.
Calls to poisen control concerning mushrooms: 8,294 Of those calls, 4862 were of unknown origin, only like 3-400 are confirmed dangerous wild grown mushrooms, 2k+ are psylocibin. 3-400 is probably <1% of the amount of people who forage, so its a lot safer than driving a car I'm guessing.
(This was a quick scan)
https://piper.filecamp.com/uniq/dPhtQdu6eCQnIQ5R.pdf [page 174-175]
I've eaten many hundreds of pounds of wild mushrooms in the last eight years and have not had any food poisoning at all.
I'm not sure that's true, I know that we had Cantharellus cibarius ("golden chanterelle") growing up everywhere in the woods, but I don't think the Douglas fir even exists there, never heard that name before. The forest was mostly oak I think.
The number of hospitalizations is somewhere around 10k a year. For ~1500 of those it's at least life threatening. ~100ish end up with organ failure or permanent neurological problems. ~10 of them die. That's every year.
That might be mildly dangerous compared to other hobbies, but if you isolate for actual practitioners of the hobby, suddenly those numbers look extremely dangerous.
Foraging for mushrooms is not dangerous if you know what you're doing and stick to easily identified mushrooms that aren't easily confused with poisonous varieties.
Also I said plants and mushrooms. Not specifically mushrooms. AAPCC doesn't track mushrooms separately and I would consider the CDC to not be the authority on poisoning -- their specialty is diseases.
https://i.imgur.com/vIXenG8.png
8294 case mentions, 3039 hospitalizations.
for outcomes check the table.
Looks like that includes the hallucinogenic mushrooms, which leads to 2139 case mentions and 1146 hospitalizations a year.
Essentially nobody is starving in the US for lack of calories (unless it's a case of mental illness or something similar). In fact, in the US, usually the opposite is true. From the Wikipedia page on food insecurity in the US:
> Reliance on food banks has led to a rise in obesity and diabetes within the food insecure community. Many foods in food banks are highly processed and low in nutritional value leading to further health effects. One study showed 33% of American households visiting food pantries had diabetes.
When your boss starts pushing Return To Office, ask if the company has a worthwhile kitchen in the office; at least a burner and plenty of room in the refrigerator for ingredients; it should be feasible to cook breakfast and lunch, but also dinner, in case you need to work late.