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WBraun
climber
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Oh I have to say .........so sorry all mushrooms no good. They grow in dark dank places, bad karma. Big ugly mold.
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'Pass the Pitons' Pete
Big Wall climber
like Oakville, Ontario, Canada, eh?
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I remember reading in 2003 or so about this wild mushroom expert from Michigan who ate a new delicacy, and ended up dead. He thought he was sure....
Perhaps you should feed one to your climbing partner first. [Oh right, you're a soloist] Sorry.
Why not soak it in Olde E.? That might kill anything nasty.....
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addiroid
Big Wall climber
Long Beach, CA
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Funny a drug post would appear on a climbing forum...
So I was playing Scattegories with some friends of mine. You have to name 10 things under the category listed. So she goes, "Paul, you're a climber, you should get this!!" The category was "Illegal Drugs" GO!! Ok, so I got all 10 and even got all of the ones in parentheses that are alternate names for the ones listed (about 14 total). This was about all in 15 seconds without really even pausing to think about it.
And to think that I have never done ANY drugs and still got this right!!
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Shack
Trad climber
So. Cal.
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I like the ruler in the photo.
Makes em more like crime scene photos.
They don't look like any "good" ones I've ever had.
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Melissa
Gym climber
berkeley, ca
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I remember when I first moved here my thesis advisor's wife was doing a rotation in the UCSF organ transplant ward during her internship. FWIW, she was really busy during that rotation b/c it was poison mushroom season in Marin. Eat them, and your only hope is a liver transpant asap. They tended to do a few emergency liver transplant for this reason each year. I guess you have dibs on Tuolumne*rainbow's, so you should time your mushroom feast to coincide with her ascent of the Punch Bowl.
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TradIsGood
Trad climber
Gunks end of country
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Seek out a mycological organization near you. They can teach you enough to be safe. There are also some standard books available on amazon (example Mushrooms Demystified, ... by David Arora), but it would still be advisable to find an organization to help you get started. Reading this will probably get you to seek out some live experts.
Avoid advice like some of what you see above. For example, boletes do not have gills, they have pores. I have not seen or heard advice about maggots or worms before. Certainly there are edible species that "worms", insects, or slugs will be eating.
Laetiporus sulfureus (chicken mushroom) seems almost always to have other critters dining before you do. But I would be very wary of the converse of that statement. Omphalotus illudens (Jack O'Lantern mushroom) might look similar to the Laetiporus to an untrained eye and is deadly poisonous. The two are very easy to distinguish.
Most mushrooms should not be eaten uncooked. I have heard an expert say that none should be eaten raw. Some do not mix with alcohol.
The best rule is "Do not eat a mushroom unless you can identify it." You might miss a few edible ones, or ones in which edibility is unknown. But you really do not want to roll the dice (probability mentioned in earlier post) on edibility. There are some which will only cause mild to severe gastric distress. Others for which that may appear to be a temporary symptom, prior to liver failure.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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best rule is "Do not eat a mushroom unless you can identify it."
it sounds like a special case rule that I had when eating in diners around Brookhaven National Laboratory taking shifts on experiments: don't eat anything you cann't positively identify... generally sound advice.
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Jonny D
Social climber
Lost Angelez, Kalifornia
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Hey Zardoz,
Those photos are making me drool... nice specimens of Boletus (aka Porcinis, aka Ceps). On a good year I use to pick'em up by the bucket loads in Santa Fe when I use to live there. Coming from a country of shroom pickers, I get the jones when the late summer rains hits in the mountains.
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dirtbag
climber
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There are old mushroom pickers, and there are careless mushroom pickers, but there is no such thing as an old careless mushroom picker.
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dmitry
Trad climber
Chita, Russia
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hey, klaus
I ate a lot of wild mushrooms growing up in Siberia.
None of the mushrooms that you found look edible.
In the US, I've found only a couple of varieties identical to the ones I'm accustomed to. I'm still alive.
dmitry
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TradIsGood
Trad climber
Gunks end of country
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Picking is perfectly safe. But you probably know that. You can smell and probably even taste (spit afterward) (Not recommending tasting here. And not mycologist myself). Ingesting is what can be dangerous.
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dmitry
Trad climber
Chita, Russia
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that's cool; i just know that i am alive for the lack of experimenting: i only eat those mushrooms i know from my childhood days (based indeed on the smell, the way the skin peels off from the top, the underside appearance etc.)
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Melissa
Gym climber
berkeley, ca
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LOL...I'm pretty handy in the lab, and I know that I screw up a fair number of my experiments and don't always realize it until later. I always wondered why more people didn't drop dead from botched homemade drugs.
The same boss that had the wife working in liver transplant had a classmate get booted from his grad program for making acid. This guy would only sell to other chemists and he would provide his raw QC data with his product.
T*R...not wishing you any bad luck. Sorry for the gallows humor regarding klaus having two reasons to need a new liver in the same day.
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TradIsGood
Trad climber
Gunks end of country
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"I always wondered why more people didn't drop dead from botched homemade drugs. ..."
Maybe they do. But the manufacturers probably do not see the need to report this to the FDA. They might make them take their products off the market. That kills income, ask Merck. :-)
I guess if there were any "magic berries", we might have a parallel thread on eating wild berries. Oops, is that another liver opening?
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Melissa
Gym climber
berkeley, ca
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"I always wondered why more people didn't drop dead from botched homemade drugs. ..."
Maybe they do. But the manufacturers probably do not see the need to report this to the FDA. They might make them take their products off the market. That kills income, ask Merck. :-)
Let me rephrase then..."I wonder why I've never known anyone who dropped dead from botched homemade drugs."
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TradIsGood
Trad climber
Gunks end of country
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Melissa, now I am wondering if you think the sample of people you know is a population particularly likely to have had that problem. Nice on the QC data though. Maybe that is the factor. Population with tendency but knowledgable.
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dmitry
Trad climber
Chita, Russia
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Well, in my innocence, i considered this thread to be non drug related.
My comments thus related only to eating wild mushrooms for the sake of nutritional enjoyment.
They are very good; far better than any store variety.
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David Nelson
climber
San Francisco
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I collected some Amanitas this year, several specimens were destroyed prior to full drying by what appeared to be fly larvae (maggots). They may not have been poisonous Amanitas, but they definitely had the veil and volva characteristic of the genus. I would not recommend relying on the fact that they don't kill larvae.
As for collecting mushrooms that are similar to ones that you have eaten in other localities, the most common reason for an Amanita death is that the collector knew from experience what was safe in another country (often from Asia) and thought that the knowledge could be applied here. The mushroom books are very clear on this: poisonous US mushrooms look very much like edible ones from other countries.
Give the cost of mushrooms at the store, and given the cost of eating the wrong one from the field, I do not eat what I collect, I only admire. If you are not an expert, eating anything is essentially being "off belay", and even "experts" are "off belay" fatally at times. We had a local expert (professor of mycology) here in Marin, California, get very sick (luckily did not die). Caution, caution, caution.
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Melissa
Gym climber
berkeley, ca
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Dmitry: My comments didn't concern why one was eating the mushroom...just what often happens when the picker's mushroom identifying skills aren't honed.
TradlsGood: I don't think I know any more party people who have enjoyed a wide variety of synthetic fun than any other person who went to school in SF whilst raves were all the rage. Sure, lots of them were chemists and whatnot, but the stuff that the were taking came from who-knows-where. The QC data was a friend-of-a-friend story. That guy was probably out of business before I finished junior high. Never been my cuppa tea for the very reason that I said above.
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dmitry
Trad climber
Chita, Russia
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Thanks for the warning, David.
I am sure that it's warranted and well meant.
D
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