Can someone give me a quick explainer on why it’s appealing to pick & eat ANY mushrooms in the wild at all? I’m probably just a dumb “city kid”, but I don’t see the appeal whatsoever.
I’d love to get some perspective on why folks enjoy this.
As a city kid who likes doing this, there are two aspects for me.
One is simply the game of going through the forest and carefully scanning the ground, looking at bunches of leaves - is that just leaves? Or a young mushroom just coming out? Then, when you do find a mushroom, checking if it's firm and good to eat, enjoying the alien aspect of the thing etc.
The other aspect is the wonderful taste of these. In my country we have porcini and chanterelle mushrooms in the wild, and finding some makes for an absolutely delicious breakfast the next day. You usually can't get fresh forest mushrooms any other way here, and in the rare occasions that you do find them, they are extremely expensive.
Morels are absolutely scrumptious. My partner and I buy them dried for $20 a meal in France, but it would be cool to be able to pick then in the woods :)
They're really tasty and good for you. There's also a deep primal satisfaction from eating something directly from the wild earth. It's also a long-standing tradition in many cultures.
If you know what you're doing and are very careful and cautious, it is a pretty low-risk activity.
The ratio of benefit to potential drawback seems unappealing though. There are plenty of other types of food that would fulfil that "deep primal satisfaction from eating something directly from the wild earth", and orders of magnitude more if you also include the sea.
The benefit / drawback ratio for mushrooms is close enough to plants that it should be a non-factor. The real issue is familiarity. When you’re out in the woods, you’re surrounded by plants that are mostly inedible and often toxic. But you already learned that “most plants are inedible,” and you are familiar enough with the plants/parts that are edible to make it seem much less risky, since you ignore 90% of what you see before asking “can I eat that?” You don’t eat random berries; you stick to easily-recognized ones like raspberries or strawberries. You’ve been warned about poison ivy since you were a kid. Very few people eat the common herbs that are around because they don’t recognize them as edible.
Mushrooms are harder to find and less familiar. If you take a few hours to study up on one or two edible mushroom species (and their lookalikes, if they have them) you’ll find that it’s just as easy to positively identify them as it is an edible plant—which is to say, it’s not trivial but not too hard either. The defining characteristics are just different from what you’re used to looking for.
Chanterelles for example have a couple of lookalikes, but the real ones have ridges that run down the stem and not gills. Morels have a few lookalikes, but the real ones are hollow inside.
The differences between edible cow parsley and deadly water hemlock are IMO harder to spot than either of the above.
As someone who rarely picks I would never pick a white mushroom for example because it is high risk even there are edible variants. However I'm sure when it comes to chanterelles and penny buns for example and those (+ one or two more) are plenty for me.
They are awfully tasty fried up with a little butter and it is fun to go for a hike and find perfectly edible, tasty food right there growing wild. As he mentions toward the end, practically no one gets sick from eating wild mushrooms. For instance in the SW United States there is really no way of mistaking anything poisonous for an edible puffball. Some people are more adventurous and will identify questionable mushrooms from a book, but then you’re really taking care not to eat something deadly and don’t proceed if you are not certain.
I only pick the "best" ones around here (Chanterelles, boletus), and those happen to be risk-free because of how they look. I don't pick mushrooms where I'd need to use my judgement to decide whether it is deadly or delicious. It's also very few that are this toxic, and I don't know of anything I'd like to pick that even resembles it (I'd never pick a white mushroom, for example - and that alone lets me dodge the deadly one).
Of course if one doesn't enjoy being in the forest, and don't enjoy eating the mushrooms - there is little point to it.
Luckily they are even harder to mix up in Europe where the jack-o is both rare and differently colored from the american one which is quite similar to chanterelle in color. Also since the jack-o has real gills (unlike a chanterelle) you’d need to be really sloppy to miss it. It’s not extremely toxic - you risk becoming sick, not dead.
You're more likely to get sick from restaurant food than forest mushrooms if you use common sense (eat only ones you are sure about, and learn from books/grandma how to be sure, try figure out / photograph the mystery ones before throwing away).
I’d love to get some perspective on why folks enjoy this.