STAYING SAFE AROUND MUSHROOMS
David Winnard is a foraging expert and founder of Discover the Wild, a Uk-based natural history company that offers foraging and species identification services. Winnard is a renowned naturalist in the UK and has worked with many conservation organisations and local councils through his career
How do you spot a poisonous mushroom? Are there distinguishing features people should look out for? There’s no clear way of saying if it has this, it’s edible; if it has that, it’s poisonous. It’s not as simple as that. What we have are families which are generally considered edible which have poisonous members. Similarly, you get very poisonous family groups that happen to have some edible ones. Learn edibles that have no poisonous lookalikes. In parts of Europe, this is what’s done. Learn different edible species, stick to those and don’t deviate. For example, porcini mushrooms don’t have anything that looks like them that is going to kill you. With foraging, identify the edible ones and ignore everything else to eliminate all the poisonous ones.
If you see a death cap under stress or in dry conditions it can look similar to blusher [Amanita rubescens], and they grow in the same habitat. If you’re going along with a basket and not really thinking about what you’re doing, a death cap can end up in your basket very easily. I tell people just don’t eat anything from the Amanita family, even if it’s edible. There’s no mushroom I’ve tried that is worth dying for.
Why is the death cap so dangerous?
Death cap is a particularly worrying one because it has no mechanism for people to stop eating it. With a lot of mushrooms, they’re bitter or foul-tasting or they smell bad. Whatever it is, your body reacts and says spit it out. Death cap doesn’t have that. It smells sickly sweet – like honey in some cases – you can almost smell them before you see them.
What advice do you have for anyone thinking of foraging wild mushrooms in the UK?
Understand your limits about what you do and don’t know. Be brave enough to say you don’t know. If you are 99.999 per cent sure, do not eat it. You need to be 100 per cent certain. You also need to have the discipline to take the whole specimen home and confirm what you think it is with good reputable field guides, not apps. I’ve field-tested quite a few [mushroom identification] apps, and I think this is where more recent poisonings are probably coming from because people are relying on pointing their phone at a mushroom and seeing what it is. These apps are so far away from being reliable for mushrooms. For indoor house plants they’re great, because plants are very formulaic [in their appearance] – mushrooms are not.