Mind the Death Caps

I used to eat mushrooms from the paddock, until I was chopping them up once and found… ugh… worms in them. Never again.

I went to this totally hilarious talk once by an older German academic (chemistry). Wild mushroom gathering was apparently a major activity in the area where he lived in Germany. He had some theories about some of the chemicals found in mushrooms, and how the mushrooms made them. So to test it, he produced radiolabelled (ie slightly radioactive) compounds and injected them into mushrooms to see if the mushrooms then converted the chemicals into something else. The hilarity came in when he revealed that the mushrooms he was injecting were just out in the forest – he just wandered out, injected and came back the next day to get the mushrooms…. woe betide anyone in the meantime who went into the area looking for a mushroom dinner

Chemistry was a lot more fun before OH&S. But I suspect more people may have died.

Mushrooming is quite a hobby among some people, who do know their stuff. A friend’s Finnish mother used to make teh most glorious pancakes, stuffed with those orange fungi that grow in pine forests. I can still taste that (drooling now).

I remember reading that deathcaps can look like proper mushrooms. I have some toadstool things on my lawn right now, actually, with white gills, and wondered if they were evil or not. No oaks for several hundred metres either.

Anyone stupid enough to go pick a mushroom growing under a tree deserves what they get IMO.

mmmm Psilocybin

Emlyn Ward said :

How about these ones:
These ones won’t kill you, but you really shouldn’t eat them more than once or twice per year, as the strychnine they contain will build up in your body and takes a while to be eliminated.

The above information is incorrect. There is no strychnine in mushrooms (or lsd for that matter).

Original article stated:

the immature button can be difficult to distinguish from an edible mushroom

Emlyn Ward wrote:

Emlyn Ward said :

You’d really have to be a moron to mistake a Deathcap for an edible mushroom.

NCA is making an announcement for all Canberra morons, except you of course, who might mistake the immature buttons for an edible one.

How about these ones:
http://www.erowid.org/plants/show_image.php?i=mushrooms/images/archive/panaeolus_cyanescens2.jpg

These ones won’t kill you, but you really shouldn’t eat them more than once or twice per year, as the strychnine they contain will build up in your body and takes a while to be eliminated.

Well, the other types that can easily be found in Canberra look much different…

Maybe you should post a picture for comparison purposes, to avoid any mistakes? 🙂

“The only people I can think of who would consume any mushroom from the wild are those that are eager for a trip… to the hospital.”
– Indeed – if it’s not got oodles of plastic packaging wrapped around it, it’s not real food, is it?

When I was a kid, after rainy days we used to pick bags of mushrooms in the vacant land between Red Hill and Hindmarsh Drive.

You’d really have to be a moron to mistake a Deathcap for an edible mushroom.