I attended a meeting of The Long Island Horticultural Society where a lecture was presented with mushrooms as one of the lecture topics. It was one sobering experience indeed. Among the slides was the following quite attractive picture of one particular variety.
This particular mushroom can be handled safetly BUT if it is eaten, it is poisonous. The toxicity was said to lead to renal failure over a span of three days and death.
I once knew a man who had immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1975. One day, we happened to be talking about mushrooms. He voiced puzzlement over American reticence over identifying edible mushrooms and cooking with them. As he asserted, one need only look carefully and choose only the good ones.
Having offered that thought, he later told a story of having taken a forest hike with friends when he was still in Russia. At some juncture, the group came to a clearing in which there were mushrooms growing in great profusion. Having next identified them as safe, the group cooked up a whole batch and had them for lunch before moving on.
A little later on their hike, they discovered that even after having eaten large portions, everyone was still hungry. It turned out that although those mushrooms were safe to eat, the variety itself offered no food value, no nutrition whatsoever.
It was my view that there was overconfidence in mushroom identification and that I myself would NEVER trust my own powers of observation and judgment in that regard.
Getting back to the lecture, in spite of all of the above, some identification tips were offered which included the use of “dichotomous keys” which from a Google search comes up as: “A dichotomous key is a scientific tool that helps identify organisms or objects by asking a series of questions with two possible answers at each step.”
In other words, the tool is a series of if-then-else steps which was cited in the lecture as useful for making mushroom species identifications. My thought though is that you had darn well better make each decision correctly or else!!!
Way back in Junior High School science class, my teacher said that he would pick mushrooms for dinner with absolute confidence, but ONLY in a grocery store.
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