Please Do Not Eat Random Backyard Rain Mushrooms
With heavy rainfall in NSW and Queensland, wild mushrooms are once again cropping up in council strips, parks, and lawns.
But while it’s tempting to forage nature’s little gifts, it’s time to remind you all about how dangerous and potentially life-threatening these mushies can be.
This year alone, the NSW Poisons Information Centre have received 73 calls about mushroom exposures, with 16 being adults who ate wild mushrooms as food, and 10 about them being ingested for “recreational purposes”, according to Channel 7.
Last week, Sydney man Jonathan Herrman shared on Facebook how he learnt the hard way how poisonous random mushrooms can be. He was hospitalised for two days after trying a nibble of the bountiful normal-looking mushrooms that popped up in his garden, before falling violently ill.
The Poisons Centre told him that shrooms near oak trees are particularly “feral” and said he was lucky to still have a functioning liver and kidney.
Now recovering back at home, he told Junkee that the mushroom undeniably did the damage because he ate nothing else questionable at the time, and the culprit was identified by mycologists later as Chlorophyllum Molybdites.
He said the angry reacts and comments calling him a “fucking idiot” online is a small price to pay when it could have been his life instead, and is using his experience to warn others who might also be curious to simply… not be. “Don’t. Just don’t. It’s not worth the risk,” he said. “I’m too old to be embarrassed, it’s just a warning. If I saved one liver transplant or one life then I would be happy,” he said.
Please, Do Not Eat The Forbidden Mushrooms
The Food Safety Information Council warned Australians last month to not pick unidentified mushrooms because of the risk of poisoning — particularly the ‘deathcap’, which is indistinguishable to the layman. They said the wet summer will see them spring up across the country and pose a particular health risk to children.
Microbiology Professor at the University of Sydney Dee Carter told Junkee that these cases can happen because of the visual similarity to mushrooms from the supermarket, but an easy giveaway is the colour of the gills under the cap.
While she also recommends just steering clear from touching wild mushrooms, it’s important general knowledge to know that white gills instead of the brown ones we’re all used to seeing are a good indicator that the mushroom is harmful. “If you don’t know that and you think, ‘Oh it’s just an immature form, or just another variant’, you could be fooled into eating it,” she said.
“The ones that cause poisoning are usually not native, they’re usually ones that have been introduced, along with introduced tree species,” she explained. “Poisonous can range from, yeah that’ll give you an upset stomach for a while, to it will kill you even if you do get to hospital — there’s a really big spectrum in there.”
She said Canberra tends to get more cases than Sydney because they have a lot of exotic trees, while a lot of incidents are also from European and Asian travellers who are used to foraging at home, and misidentify the species for ones they’re familiar with.
Professor Carter is also the webmaster of the Australasian Mycological Society, where they help people ID pictures of fungi sent to them and have had to put up a special poisoning page after seeing the number of questions coming in asking if wild mushrooms were edible or not.
“If you don’t know what you’re doing, make sure you have an expert with you, or just don’t do it. It’s just not worth it,” she said.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Herrman/Facebook