19 months! Who feeds foraged mushrooms to an infant?!
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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Ate it off the ground most likely.
There was a big kerfuffle in my community because a bunch of these popped up in the children’s playground at the park so it’s entirely possible
I live in the PNW, where there are several varieties of poisonous mushrooms, including death caps. Apparently people can safely forage for mushrooms - but it scares the crap out of me because of the exact scenario in this article.
Foraging for mushrooms is one of those activities where the risks far outweigh the rewards, at least to me.
Especially when you can cultivate most of the good ones yourself
You can’t cultivate morels or chanterelles. I don’t think you can cultivate porcini? I don’t think there are deadly look alikes for those varieties but folks really need to consult experts if they’re gonna dabble in mushroom hunting.
I think people get into trouble hunting for psychedelics since 1) many of the experts (like at mushroom hunting clubs) won’t help with anything illegal and 2) many of the fun mushrooms are little brown mushrooms which are pretty difficult to identify correctly.
TLDR: If you’re looking to make risotto, you can probably learn enough to do it safely. If you’re looking to expand your mind, just buy spores from a reputable source and grow.
I think morels can be cultivated by now to some extent, but seemingly not yet in any significant quantities. Porcinis cannot not be cultivated and are one of the easiest mushrooms to learn to safely forage. Hunting for psychadelics is risky and in some regions very disappointing. In europe for example there arent many true psychadelic mushrooms that grow in the wild (psilocybe). I have only seen two kinds here but i dont pay to much attention to them either. Problematic when foraging them wild, if one wants to consume them, is also that the content of the psychadelic substance may vary quite significantly making it hard to judge the dosage. And yes they are not as easy to safely identifiy as many common 'choice edible' mushrooms. But these are not the main source of poison cases. The main souce are still the destroying angel and such that are mistaken for some agaricus like the ones one can buy in every supermarket. Of course if one approaches this seriously learning the basics for 'choice edibles' isn't to hard, the problem is that some do forage without learning the basics.
Damn. People are getting killed over what they thought was a $2/lb button mushroom? I can see making the effort to hunt and properly identify for a $34/lb gourmet. But a bog standard cremini? Madness.
The are morel lookalikes that are toxic. I think they are easy to distinguish if you know what you are doing, but I don't know what I'm doing so I don't forage mushrooms at all
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Yeah the reward is you get some mushrooms. It's not like they're expensive to buy
LOL! Fancy mushrooms are ridiculously expensive, you can even sell them directly to restaurants if you find a good batch and just call them up and offer them.
I got two free meals at a Michelin star restaurant for a few quarts of Chanterelles. No way I could eat them all.
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I went to culinary school and they made it absolutely clear that you should never forage without an experienced mycologist with you. Or at least, never eat them before checking with one.
For what it’s worth, the poisonings are almost always children or people who are familiar with safe mushrooms in their home country that look just like the death cap, not local knowledgeable foragers.
That said I don’t eat foraged mushrooms either, even though it’s probably safe, because you only get one liver.
That’s loser talk, get more livers. You can do it, all you need is a scalpel, a ladder, and a cooler!
Don't forget the lidocaine. Boy, you only ever make that mistake once.
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I forage mushrooms. I think there is both a healthy fear and an overreaction to how dangerous it really is. A novice can forage for something like chicken of the woods because it is an obvious species that has no deadly lookalikes. However there are mushrooms even I still avoid despite knowing exactly what they are because they have poisonous lookalikes.
What's really surprising is people seem to think foraging plants to be safer despite there being plants with edible lookalikes like poison hemlock that can kill in minutes.
In the end, a little bit of practice, focus, and understanding safety, mushroom foraging, and plant foraging, is actually much less dangerous than one would imagine. Still, if you don't know what you are doing you should never eat a mushroom or plant that you aren't 100% certain is what it is. Never munch on a hunch.
Notably Death Cap mushrooms aren't present worldwide. A number of the poisonings are from people who learned about mushroom foraging in one area, then moved to California and didn't learn that the safe mushrooms from their home have deadly lookalikes in California.
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It's a yummy death mushroom!
In this post: some very confident sounding people with very, very bad ideas about how toxic mushrooms work.
Please don't pick and eat mushrooms in the wild unless you've had actual experienced people teach and train you.
Here are some facts you need to know:
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You cannot cook fungus toxins out. They are not potatoes.
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Every "obviously" safe mushroom has at least one species of look-alike that can be dangerous. You need more knowledge than a single picture in a field guide.
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You cannot taste mushroom toxins, they taste just like any other mushroom.
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A poisonous mushroom doesn't kill you fast, it takes days or weeks for the toxins to work on your organs. These toxins can exist in a spectrum from "mild stomach ache" to "you're doomed without several new organs very soon." depending on what you ate and how much.
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Knowing how to identify safe mushrooms is not an identity, don't act like people are stupid if they can't tell as easily. There are a lot of people who don't know how much they don't know.
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Who the fuck is giving a one year old child some mushroom they found in the woods?
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, probably.
Accurate
In my country we even avoid giving mushrooms we know are safe, nearly impossible to harvest incorrectly, to children under 4 because they may be hard on the digestive system.
Probably no one. Kid probably found it and parents didn't know or couldn't stop some of it from getting into the kid. Children at that age are on a mission to speed run life.
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So unsettling that some mushrooms are delicious in a risotto or omelette and others will fucking murder you.
here's the thing: the poison mushrooms are also delicious
Once.
And some transport you to parallel dimensions to meet magical imps. Fungi are extremely cool organisms.
I prefer the ones that show me god.
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All of those involved in this were people who used to forage in their respective home countries. They knew regional edible species before moving to California, as a result they identified what they thought was edible, but as it happens was deadly poisonous.
Please don't come away with the opinion that you cannot identify mushrooms or that the process is somehow mysterious, that's not the case. If you are considering getting into mushroom identification, please get in touch with your local mycological society: https://namyco.org/ as they are an excellent resource and it's a whole lot of fun. Don't rely on anyting a "AI" will provide you, either forward or backward. Don't ever just guess or YOLO it. When in doubt, throw it out.
Articles like this come out every time these unfortunate events occur, and since mushrooms are culturally stigmatized, the facts of the events are brushed over and uneducated attitudes and stigmas are spread and continue fester--which is a shame as it provoakes a very fearful attitude towards mushrooms in general.
They're about a billion different forms of mushroom and they all look mostly the same why would anyone risk it?
Real talk! I studied mycology, and the only culinary mushroom I feel comfortable identifying is morels.
If you can't tell a death cap from Chicken of the Woods or Chanterelle or Oyster, you need to take more courses.
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Are these linked to "AI identification"?
Not likely, all the victims were migrants who had a practice of forraging where they grew up natively. I've read about cases like this across the country on either coast of the US.
However, there seems to be a spike, either due to the rains in California or perhaps another reason--not going to go as far as plaming 'AI' identification. I certainly wouldn't trust "AI" to do that job.
The California health department is providing video and documentation in order to help people identify the "Death Cap" mushroom in multiple languages:
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/EHIB/Pages/EIS/Poisonous-Mushrooms.aspx
Please educate yourself extremely well if you plan on eating wild mushrooms
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Goddamn wtf mushroom people is it really worth the risk?
It’s not a risk if you know what you are doing. Then again I don’t forage for mushrooms that look like phalloides, besporigeras or marginatas. I stick with ones that are easily identifiable like Lions Mane, Oyster, Lobster, chanterelles, morels, porcinis, matsutakes and the like.
It gets you outdoors and learning your land, even if you are just observing/documenting and not collecting for food. That said, I don’t get the people that roll the dice with iffy picks or trusting roadside vendors without experience. They are crazy. Amatoxin death sounds gnarly.
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