this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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If you want to get into foraging, find a local survival teacher. No matter how many pictures and books you look at, you’ll never learn what wild foods are safe just by reading about them. The only way to really learn is to have someone show you. You need to see it with your own eyes, learn what’s safe to touch and how the safe ones feel in your fingers, and learn the smell and taste of safe food.
Especially mushrooms. Mushrooms are some of the most dangerous foods around. There’s a reason there’s a new hybrid of fruit or vegetable every few years that gets popular, but we only ever eat the same 5 kinds of mushrooms from stores. Some random white mushroom might be perfectly safe, or it might shutdown your organs and kill you three days later.
That being said, for anyone in the UK who is interested in getting into foraging, the wild food UK YouTube channel is really good for showing what to look for in wild mushrooms, and there are certain mushrooms that are reasonable to go out and ID (for edible vs inedible, not necessarily down to species) from those videos. Hedgehog mushrooms, for instance, I'd consider incredibly safe for someone that's seen one of those videos to go out and look for.
No substitute for an in person teacher, but it can be really good to get up to speed before going on a course.
Honestly it kind of makes me wonder who I am trusting to serve me safe mushrooms.
I guess I always assume food I get from a store (or restaurant) is safe (unless it's expired or has other obvious issues). And like, most foods have brand recognition of some sort (which may or may not mean anything). But I couldn't tell you a single company that harvests and sells mushrooms. I mean the blue container makes me feel safe (???) but like...I don't even know if that's a marketing thing or just what every company does.
Anyway now I am going to look all of this up.
You’re really trusting your country’s food safety agency.
In most countries, some government entity is responsible for reviewing foods sold in stores for safety, and regulating what the packaging can say. So if a company wants to sell a new kind of mushroom in the stores, they have to get it analyzed for safety.
There’s many mushrooms that are perfectly safe to eat, but don’t taste particularly distinct, don’t store well, or just don’t respond well to farming. There’s also many more that are incredibly toxic, and look very similar to the safe ones.
I’ve done foraging as a hobby, and it’s fun to go out and find things in the woods. However, I pretty much only go for berries and leafy greens, as there’s very few truly dangerous flavors of those in my region. I also generally only take a handful at most, as I don’t want to damage the local ecosystem, or risk a mistake making me seriously ill.
For most people, it’s much safer to just go to the store and buy fresh looking produce. Most places of the world no longer have the habitat to support even a few people going out and regularly foraging for fresh produce. If you do find something you like, you can always take a sample of the fruit and plant it in your garden. This is also great for expanding native plants in your area, which provides food for local wildlife like birds.
This is great, thank you