A fungi warning!

Never eat a poisonous Panther Cap!

It is worth mentioning, and it will be a recurring theme in this blog – that you should never eat a wild mushroom without being 100 percent sure that it is exactly what you think it is!

If not, you might be in for an uncomfortable night, staring sickly down the toilet bowl, or worse – a night in A&E. 

Horror stories have been going around about the author Nicholas Evans (who is now more famous for seriously poisoning himself and two others by wrongly identifying and eating a mushroom on a foraging trip a couple of years ago, than for any of his novels...)

These kind of stories terrify my mother and she never refrains from warning me about the dangers of wild mushrooms and all the horrible things they could do to me...

But while they may be enough to scare you into never exploring the world of edible fungi, which would be a shame (as there are lots of mushrooms out there which are very easy to identify and taste delicious), at the same time, it's good that people are terribly aware of the dangers of eating something that could do them damage.  

I've thrown away baskets full of lovely mushroom specimens just because I wasn't entirely certain they were what I thought they were, after hours of identification and spore prints.  

The only wild mushrooms I have eaten are Chicken of the Woods, which you cannot easily confuse with any other species of mushroom (but does have to be cooked before being eaten) and some wild mushrooms that we collected in the Forrest of Dean with an expert forager.

Recently-published statistics say that the number of hospital admissions for people with suspected mushroom poisoning has doubled in the past year – mainly due to this year's bumper crop and the new-found popularity of foraging. 

"They received 209 calls this year from NHS staff attempting to treat suspected mushroom poisoning — a steep rise on last year's 123 enquiries and the 147 in 2008" 

 So don't let yourself be one of them (please)!