Toxic Food 2 Mushroom Trial | How To Cook That Ann Reardon

Hi I am Ann Reardon, Thsi week we are looking at dangerous foods like the death cap mushrooms and rat lung worm from salads. While rare the consequences of eating these is devastating.

Feel like binge watching? Here's some more of my videos:

You can send letters & stuff to:
PO Box 202
Chirnside Park 3116
Australia

[skillstacker]

There are old mushroom pickers. There are bold mushroom pickers. There are no old, bold mushroom pickers!

[arandomfrog]

I'm just imagining humans first discovering mushrooms like:
"This one tastes good"
"Kyle ate that one and it didn't end well"
"This one makes you see god"
"They all look the same"

[STEMghost]

One of my neighbors here in Japan is an avid mushroom hunter. He doesn't eat them, he collects, identifies and dries them like one would flowers and then displays them on his walls. His home is filled with these displays. One of the things he's told me that has always stuck with me is that the "prettier" the mushroom, the more deadly it is.

[Bossarama]

New Fear Unlocked: Baby slugs in my salad

[bartoszk]

Mushroom foraging is very popular here in Poland. 20-30 years ago pretty much all the kids around age of 10 could tell apart at least 5 types of edible mushroom and 10+ non-edible or poisonous. I started around age of 6, with strict supervision ofc. But we are taught this kind of stuff not only by our parents but even in school. And there is one golden rule: if you're not 100% certain of what musroom it is, don't pick it up. I never heard any story of poisoning from my relatives nor my friends.

[FATxAZZxGONExCRAZZZY]

I remember as a young boy in school our class went foraging with a veteran mushroom picker.
None was to be eaten and we had gloves on and picked everything in sight.
At the end the picker went over our haul and this one example stuck with me.. she held up two mushrooms that looked identical, "This one is tasty and normally expensive to buy" and "This one will give you an excruciatingly painful and slow death".
Dont F around and find out with fungi.

[pemanilnoob]

Well now I’m 10 times more terrified than I was 11 minutes ago

[Miss_Cryspe]

Probably not the smartest idea to eat a full English while watching this. Highlight was definitely either the story about killer mushrooms while chewing a forkful of fried mushrooms, or taking a sip of smoothie while learning some people get Lung Worm from them. On the plus side I found a great new diet hack to get rid of your appetite if anyone is interested.

[beatriceerikson]

The thing with foraging is really that you don't go looking for mushrooms, find one, and try to decide if it's edible - you go looking for specific kinds of mushrooms that you are sure you can differentiate from any other mushrooms (that don't have poisonous lookalikes which grow where you live) and you don't eat anything unless you're totally sure. Morels around here, for example, very distinctive (and very easy to tell apart from gyromitra if you're not in a situation where you stumbled on a gyromitra and are trying to determine if it looks like that morel mushroom you heard about)

[Leena]

I live in Finland, so probably many of the mushrooms here are different than in Australia, but I think the universal rule, which applies everywhere is, never pick something you don't recognize.

[kylehanley]

Here in Canberra, death cap mushrooms are prevalent in some suburbs to the point where we've got permanent street signs up warning of the dangers.

[lyn]

I had a mushroom poisoning as a teenager. It wasn't from death cap mushroom specifically, it was a different mushroom, Cortinarius, but it was an incredibly unpleasant and painful month in hospital on fluids, I seriously thought I was dying.

[WannabeMarysue]

Death caps are also a danger for pets, so don't let your pets eat unknown mushrooms they might find on walks either.

[thesupergreenjudy]

In Germany many people grow up learning how to forage mushrooms. But I have to admit I never had the courage to do it without my dad.

[luminoustarisma]

Coming from a foraging culture, where people often go out to forage for mushrooms and berries, rule no one is:

Never pick anything you don't know what it is, and if it can be mistaken for something and you are new to the trade, just don't eat it.

If you, like most who grew up with this tradition, know some edible mushrooms, you stick to those.

And then you do not dump those straight into a pan, you sort them, clean them and gt rid of the moss, the sticks, the bugs, oh, and sometimes the mushrooms you don't want.

[galacticmechanic]

The reason they can't grow deathcaps in a fungi farm is the same reason they can't grow truffles. Both need particular trees to grow.

[sparrowwilson]

That rat lung worm story gives me nightmares.

[zuzpager]

Mushroom foraging is very popular where I'm from and those of us who live in villages or close to forests are taught from a young age about how great but also how extremely dangerous it is. We will never pick a mushroom we aren't 100% sure about. My family specifically taught me never to buy mushrooms from anyone but the grocery store, because there are lot of little pop up mushroom seller stalls here. Nope. Even though I might recognize their mushroom, you never know where they came from. My family for example never picks mushrooms with gills (my grandpa did but he knew much more about mushrooms than any of us), because they all look very similar and a lot of them are poisonous.
What I wanna say is, you can pick wild mushrooms, but it's not a fun one weekend kind of activity. It's years of learning and doing it with supervision, following strict rules and being extremely careful, while also learning to be gentle to the forest and making sure you don't bleed it dry.

[dawidtomczak]

Hi Ann, Polish fan here. Here in Poland mushroom picking is a very old and cultivated hobby. Even if I have a good knowledge in gathering shrooms I usually leave those which are questionable. We have lots of lots of varieties and species in here that share so many similarities, thankfuly We don't have many cases of shroom poisoning in here.

[sllizarrd]

I've found slugs on the parsley I've bought from the grocery store the last two times I've bought it. One was maybe a half inch long, and I found it in the bottom of my salad spinner after rinsing off the parsley. The second one was extremely tiny, and it made it through the rinse and the salad spinner, and I only noticed it on a leaf as I was chopping up the parsley for my tabbouleh (and only because I was on the lookout for slugs that time!). Even a very thorough rinse and going through the salad spinner didnt get that little guy off the parsley... I'll definitely be on high alert next time I make tabbouleh!