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Mushroom foraging was common in my family and the ruleset was quite simple – we learnt this as children: - you have to know a mushroom, that you want to eat, b

Mushroom foraging was common in my family and the ruleset was quite simple – we learnt this as children: - you have to know a mushroom, that you want to eat, by 100%. You not only have to know the appearance in all possible states (young/old, colour variations, environmental context) but also you have to know the lookalikes and how to differentiate. The point here is: NEVER follow any generic rules (like avoid mushrooms with this or that feature), but reliably identify the type you want to eat! - to learn to absolutely positively identify a mushroom therefore takes a lot of time. In my childhood I learnt about a dozen edible types, that I would dare to eat. And this knowledge only applies to the geographic region I lived. The same mushroom might have other lookalikes in other regions. - if there is the slightest doubt, do not eat it. - when picking, make plausibility checks. For example: does the sample fit to the environment? - if you have trouble to differentiate a potentially edible mushroom from its lookalike, avoid both. - if there is the slightest doubt, do not eat it. - as long as you are learning a new type, do not eat it. If you pick one to examine at home, keep it separated from the others. Buy samples from the market for comparison. - when you are sure that you have learnt a new edible type and that you can absolutely identify it, pick one. Double check with the books, when at home. Ask someone else for reassurance, if possible. - When still sure: prepare one very small sample together with the other mushrooms and only for one member of the family (in my case, that would usually be my father). Observe for reactions for at least 24 hours. If everything is fine, repeat with a somewhat larger ratio the next time. Do so one more time and if everything is still fine, that type would be approved for family use. As a child, it was always a little exciting, not to say creepy, when father tried a new type. But never anything happened of course. - Some mushrooms only become edible with certain preparation. Make sure to know them. My family would usually avoid those. - if there is the slightest doubt, do not eat it.

saiya-jin 7y ago
Yeah something along those lines, apart from testing new stuff (god knows how long some toxins take to manifest or how strong they are, why risk life/health for few bites). We knew around 10+ of types that grow around us and all their variations, didn't touch anything else. It is a wonderful activity, hike in dense forests for hours, coupled with treasure hunt that you can eat afterwards (or dry for later). Great for kids too. The thing is, when I moved to Switzerland, the amount and types of mushrooms changed dramatically, for the worse in this case. Alps around here seem to be pretty desolate place, and of those mushrooms I can find most are not known to me, so big no-no. Funny how things can change dramatically when you move only 1500km. The worst people are those that collect all mushrooms they see and then they study them at home. We used to make fun of big city dwellers for this. But this approach is dangerous - not only is there unnecessary destruction to beautiful fungus that will be just thrown away, but also eating something that was touching / has bits of death cap on it cap ain't the brightest idea. Plus without expertise, many edible mushroom might look very similar to dangerous ones. One of the reasons I never dared to pick up magic mushrooms in the wilderness - they are too similar to some poisonous ones back home. Not worth the risk, not unless I would know all variations of them by heart.
- AlphaGeekZulu 7y ago
  "[...]apart from testing new stuff (god knows how long some toxins take to manifest or how strong they are, why risk life/health for few bites).[...]" In our case, the procedure - of course - was not to approve the edibility of an unknown type of mushroom, but to approve the reliability of our identification of a well known and documented type. Somewhat over-cautious maybe, but better so. "[...]It is a wonderful activity, hike in dense forests for hours, coupled with treasure hunt that you can eat afterwards (or dry for later). Great for kids too.[...]" Yes! I miss it a lot. Mushroom foraging came to a complete halt after the Chernobyl desaster. "[...]The worst people are those that collect all mushrooms they see and then they study them at home.[...]" Or that would rip the mushrooms from the ground instead of cutting them properly...
jogundas 7y ago
Looks like a perfect task for a set of Deep Learning CNN models :)
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> The point here is: NEVER follow any generic rules (like avoid mushrooms with this or that feature), but reliably identify the type you want to eat! There's a famous machine learning dataset (cited by at least 50 papers) where the task is to identify mushrooms as "definitely poisonous", "edible" or "not recommended (for eating)": https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/mushroom https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/mushroom The following passage I quote from the UCI repository's mirror of the data agrees with your rule: This data set includes descriptions of hypothetical samples corresponding to 23 species of gilled mushrooms in the Agaricus and Lepiota Family (pp. 500-525). Each species is identified as definitely edible, definitely poisonous, or of unknown edibility and not recommended. This latter class was combined with the poisonous one. The [Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms] clearly states that there is no simple rule for determining the edibility of a mushroom; no rule like ``leaflets three, let it be'' for Poisonous Oak and Ivy. So that's just the mushrooms in two families, and there's no definite rule to identify them as poisonous or not. To be honest, I think I'll make up a rule on the spot: "if it's growing wild, I won't eat it" :0

saiya-jin 7y ago

Yeah something along those lines, apart from testing new stuff (god knows how long some toxins take to manifest or how strong they are, why risk life/health for few bites). We knew around 10+ of types that grow around us and all their variations, didn't touch anything else. It is a wonderful activity, hike in dense forests for hours, coupled with treasure hunt that you can eat afterwards (or dry for later). Great for kids too. The thing is, when I moved to Switzerland, the amount and types of mushrooms changed dramatically, for the worse in this case. Alps around here seem to be pretty desolate place, and of those mushrooms I can find most are not known to me, so big no-no. Funny how things can change dramatically when you move only 1500km. The worst people are those that collect all mushrooms they see and then they study them at home. We used to make fun of big city dwellers for this. But this approach is dangerous - not only is there unnecessary destruction to beautiful fungus that will be just thrown away, but also eating something that was touching / has bits of death cap on it cap ain't the brightest idea. Plus without expertise, many edible mushroom might look very similar to dangerous ones. One of the reasons I never dared to pick up magic mushrooms in the wilderness - they are too similar to some poisonous ones back home. Not worth the risk, not unless I would know all variations of them by heart.

AlphaGeekZulu 7y ago
"[...]apart from testing new stuff (god knows how long some toxins take to manifest or how strong they are, why risk life/health for few bites).[...]" In our case, the procedure - of course - was not to approve the edibility of an unknown type of mushroom, but to approve the reliability of our identification of a well known and documented type. Somewhat over-cautious maybe, but better so. "[...]It is a wonderful activity, hike in dense forests for hours, coupled with treasure hunt that you can eat afterwards (or dry for later). Great for kids too.[...]" Yes! I miss it a lot. Mushroom foraging came to a complete halt after the Chernobyl desaster. "[...]The worst people are those that collect all mushrooms they see and then they study them at home.[...]" Or that would rip the mushrooms from the ground instead of cutting them properly...

jogundas 7y ago

Looks like a perfect task for a set of Deep Learning CNN models :)

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> The point here is: NEVER follow any generic rules (like avoid mushrooms with this or that feature), but reliably identify the type you want to eat! There's a famous machine learning dataset (cited by at least 50 papers) where the task is to identify mushrooms as "definitely poisonous", "edible" or "not recommended (for eating)": https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/mushroom https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/mushroom The following passage I quote from the UCI repository's mirror of the data agrees with your rule: This data set includes descriptions of hypothetical samples corresponding to 23 species of gilled mushrooms in the Agaricus and Lepiota Family (pp. 500-525). Each species is identified as definitely edible, definitely poisonous, or of unknown edibility and not recommended. This latter class was combined with the poisonous one. The [Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms] clearly states that there is no simple rule for determining the edibility of a mushroom; no rule like ``leaflets three, let it be'' for Poisonous Oak and Ivy. So that's just the mushrooms in two families, and there's no definite rule to identify them as poisonous or not. To be honest, I think I'll make up a rule on the spot: "if it's growing wild, I won't eat it" :0