I’m actually surprised Jezebel didn’t put some sort of loony tunes 4th wave feminism spin on this
A Climate Change Threat You Wouldn’t Expect: Death by Mushroom Poisoning
First things first: You could not pay me, at this point, to eat some foraged mushrooms. I don’t care if you’ve foraged every weekend for the last decade. I don’t care if you’re a grizzled survivalist living off the providence of nature. I don’t care if you’ve observed deer nibbling on them. The fact of the matter is, the ones that add a nice earthiness to a pasta cream sauce look entirely too similar to the ones that leave you curled up and dying in agony for me to trust any forager’s eye test, a point driven home by California’s ongoing epidemic/outbreak of mushroom poisoning cases, which in less than two months has left three dozen people sickened and resulted in multiple fatalities. Of course, there’s another culprit involved here as well, and I think you know its name: Climate change.
The mushrooms in question are of the toxic death cap (Amanita phalloides) variety, which the true crime junkies in the house will no doubt immediately perk up and recognize as the same family of mushrooms infamously used in a triple murder by a woman in Victoria, Australia in 2023. In that case, the now-convicted woman had put a truly theatrical level of art into her murder method, serving her guests homemade beef wellingtons containing the mushrooms. In California, meanwhile, the poisonings all appear to be accidental to date, the result of foragers mistaking the generally benign-looking death cap or western destroying angel mushrooms for more common and palatable species before cooking with them … which does nothing to destroy the poison, by the way. Now can you see why declining foraged mushrooms from a friend might be a good idea?
If you’re trying to forage your own mushrooms, or buy them from someone who did, you’re a complete fucking dipshit for not know what the types look like.
Which begs the question, why has the number of poisonings shot up so precipitously? Well, here’s the thing: Mushroom poisonings tend to occur when toxic mushrooms suddenly appear in places where they don’t typically exist, or in numbers that are not usually seen, and overconfident foragers can’t tell the difference. And what is different about the California climate this year? That would be record levels of precipitation and drenching storms linked to climate change; the same storms that caused historic flooding in Washington and Oregon this fall. As these “atmospheric rivers” have dragged huge amounts of water into the state, they’ve created some odd results, even pulling California out of the “abnormally dry” category of the U.S. Drought Monitor for the first time in a quarter century. That’s a boon for reservoirs, but as with any climate change topic, the full array of results is unpredictable. Did anyone think to attempt to warn residents of the state about a surge in toxic mushrooms, back in November? No, and that really shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Did anyone foraging consider they should be able to identify wild mushrooms? Dipshits.
