***** Note *****
I am not a medical doctor. I am not a lawyer. I am an experienced outdoorsman and investigator. Any information provided within this article is intended to “tickle your little grey cells” to make you think. The material is based upon legal, statistical, and empirical data provided to me and further verified via significant research of peer-reviewed, media, legal, and some (very little) normative anecdotal data. As you will see, I see foraging mushrooms for food is too high risk for me. Alternatively, I think that scientific research with fungi and HIV, viruses, bacteria, etc. is extremely promising. (see the video at that bottom of the article.)
There are many people, including an expert that I know, who sing the praises of mycological (mushroom) foraging. I had purchased one of his books on mushrooms and took several of his identification classes. I was very interested in medical research that was being performed with mushrooms “growing” human antibodies on the mushroom sweat. I was beginning to ramp up to foraging mushrooms.
As a survival/wilderness/preparedness instructor who forages for wild edibles, I believe that before you eat one single nibble of anything wild, you need to do your due diligence to verify what you are eating. Buy a professional level Plant ID field manual with color photos. In addition, download the PictureThis app. It requires an annual fee. So far, I have found it to be well worth the money. Loaded on a smartphone, you need only point and shoot a photo of the plant, and in seconds the app will identify the plant and provide warnings if toxic along with other useful data.
After talking with Tradd for the third time, I was very interested in foraging for mushrooms. Then in 2012, a man who I had met at a class, a master mycological foraging expert, had a disaster. He was supplying some of his mushrooms to a local nursing home for them to make the patients mushroom soup. I love good mushroom soup. The mushrooms turned out to be a poisonous “lookalike” mushroom. The colorless, odorless toxin amatoxin in the mushrooms causes liver toxicity. You get very little time to resolve the toxic liver. It requires a liver transplant. As a result, the mushrooms killed four people in the facility.
After seeing how a skilled 25-year veteran mushroom forager could accidentally kill four people, I decided that I would pass on the wild mushroom foraging.
See this article regarding mushroom poisoning in the USA 2019
According to FoodSafetyNews.com in France, there were more than 10,600 people who were made seriously ill and 22 liver toxicity deaths from mushroom foraging between 2010 and 2017.
If you are interested in cultivating mushrooms or foraging for them, I highly recommend Tradd Cotter. I know him personally. He lives, eats, and sleeps mushrooms. If you are going to learn, learn from someone who lives it.
Check out this YouTube video made of him.
Mushrooms for Backyard Medicine: Tradd Cotter from Mushroom Mountain
