Location, location location: Why real estate's golden rule also applies to morel mushrooms
It turns out morel mush‐ rooms and real estate have something in common.
Location, location, loca‐ tion is the golden rule for buying or selling a home as much as it is for morels - the elusive and prized edible va‐ riety of mushroom that often grows in the same place every year and, according to a fungus expert, can be po‐ tentially dangerous depend‐ ing on where you pick them.
Morels are brown, black or yellow and have elongated caps with a ridged and pitted appearance that resembles a honeycomb. With a strong and distinct flavour, they're prized by chefs and amateur cooks alike for their ability to bring new life to dishes.
For those in the know, places where morels grow are closely guarded secrets. For the uninitiated, finding them while out on a walk in the woods is rare, according to Andrew Murray, an ama‐ teur naturalist who often spends his free time admir‐ ing the beauty of nature.
"I just take pictures and leave them be," he said, not‐ ing he's never eaten one. "They're quite rare in my ex‐ perience. I see maybe one every few years. The last one was in 2021."
False and true morels easy to discern
The mushroom's elusive nature and coveted status might be why people seem to be so keen to put pictures of them online every spring.
Over the past few weeks, morel hunters across Canada have been posting their hauls to social media groups - from a lonesome mushroom plucked from the lawn by a suburban dad, to morels gathered by the dozen, harvested from a topsecret hunting ground.
Murray doesn't eat them because there are false morels out there and, as he puts it, "I don't trust my fun‐ gal identification skills."
False morels can cause se‐ vere illness and, in rare cases, death if ingested, ac‐ cording to the UBC Beaty Bio‐ diversity Museum in Vancou‐ ver.
The good news is spotting the difference between a false morel and a real one is relatively easy, said Greg Thorn, a biology professor at Western University in Lon‐ don, Ont., who studies fun‐ gus.
"The false morel looks more like the brain on a stick than a honeycomb, so it has quite a different mor‐ phology," he said, noting, "'false morel' is just called that because they occur at the same season in the spring when there's not very many other mushrooms out there."
Morel lesson: Stick to conservation areas, parks
Thorn said the most im‐ portant consideration for morel hunters is where they harvest their mushrooms. Morels have a tendency to absorb and concentrate tox‐ ins found in their environ‐ ments, according to research.
"They're renowned for taking up toxins in the soil, including metals like lead, or cadmium or arsenic." He noted that while abandoned apple orchards are prime lo‐ cations for morel hunting, they should be avoided be‐ cause of the historical re‐ liance on arsenic-based pes‐ ticides on apple crops.
A 2010 study found con‐ centrations of lead and ar‐ senic in morel mushrooms harvested from a former ap‐ ple orchard in New Jersey; a 2018 study found concentra‐ tions of radionucleides from
wild mushrooms gathered in Chornobyl, the site of an acci‐ dent at its nuclear power plant in 1986.
Thorn said mushrooms are the fruiting body of a much larger organism that lives underground, a vast hid‐ den network of filaments and threads that take nutrients from soil or a rotten log.
"Fungi, for whatever rea‐ son, we don't know why they don't discriminate between compounds they do need and compounds they don't need, like a radioactive ce‐ sium," Thorn said. "They're very, very good at concen‐ trating these compounds.
"You really don't want to be eating a dinner of radioac‐ tive cesium or arsenic."
It's why Thorn recom‐ mends sticking to conserva‐ tion areas or parks to gather mushrooms and to avoid areas that are known to be polluted, such as abandoned apple orchards or brownfield sites.
Thorn said that given the early spring, it's likely this year's morel season will stretch well into May, mean‐ ing the mushrooms could continue to sprout until Mother's Day on May 12.