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Friday, October 3, 2014

Mushroom Dangers For Walkers, Cooks, Magazine Editors and Artists

Walkers in Britain have been warned to beware of wild mushrooms. In France it is common to see French families walking with baskets for gathering mushrooms. I was told that you can go into any pharmacy in France and they will have either a book about mushrooms or a poster on the wall showing the safe or poisonous mushrooms (and toadstools).

I went to a botanical garden in the Loire valley of France. I asked if they had a poster about safe and dangerous mushrooms. They did not have a poster with coloured pictures but they had a book with small print and illustrations. I can't remember whether they were coloured or back and white. But the book would have been tiring, and possibly confusing, because it was all in French, and although I speak fluent French, a lot of the terms were technical and botanical names.

On a lighter note on this subject, I once met a woman who worked as a sub-editor on a cookery magazine. She said it was important to re-check quantities and correct names of ingredients and match pictures and captions to recipes. I asked her if they ever got the recipes wrong with disastrous consequences from disgruntled readers.

She said they once sent off their text about unusual mushrooms to the art department. The artist chose the popular red mushroom with white dots used to illustrate fairy stories. Apparently it's deadly poisonous.

I asked her what happened. She replied that the week afterwards the magazine's circulation went down.

"Your readers died!" I gasped.

"I don't think so," she reassured me. "The readers wrote in complaining they had wasted time and money, that they couldn't complete the recipe because none of their local supermarkets could offer the mushrooms our recipe specified."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2778804/Wild-mushroom-foraging-alert-Walkers-warned-dozens-cases-poisoning-far-year.html

I went looking online for books on mushrooms and found these links, although some of them might be country specific to mushrooms found in the USA, UK, France or Asia.

http://www.fieldforest.net/Books-and-DVDs/products/11/


Here's one I found on Amazon: The kindle edition would be really handy to carry around.

I'll still stick to supermarkets. But I have mushrooms growing in my garden (what the Americans call a yard, as it is so often a paved area without necessarily having a garden). I would like to identify them.

Rogersmushrooms.com has lots of pictures. Amazon has several books and you can read a couple of pages to see if you are getting the right sort of information for your needs.

Product Details

Our Edible Toadstools and Mushrooms and How to Distinguish Them by W. Hamilton Gibson (6 Aug 2014)

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