I'm not worried a bit...I don't plan to hunt morels in China this year.

Dcarch thank you for the heads up- sounds like your warning applies to mushroom eaters as well as mushroom hunters, since it is difficult to know the provenance of the mushrooms served in restaurants. I buy mushrooms at the grocery store, that is as adventurous as I am prepared to get, and I think those are still safe?

I have no sense of adventure whatsoever when it comes to mushrooms 😊, not even at farmers markets. We've picked wild chanterelles which are easily identifiable and nothing else. Even though we've come across several really interesting species over the years, some quite beautiful, some rather odd.

DH did bring home an especially large or unusual tree conk once in a while for my sisters first husband but I can't remember now that he had done anything particularly remarkable with them. He was something of an artist and quite good - painting, sculpture. I have a couple of his paintings - no mushrooms 😊

All morels can cause issues for some people and it has always been advised to not eat too much and to always cook them.I recall reading about this poisoning. Scary.

I am not a fan of morels. I love wild chanterelles though. We get a few morels popping up on our property. DH eats them. I have tried and failed to get chanterelles to establish.

I hunt for mushrooms exclusively in stores that sell food.

When I was a child we had Morels grow on a cut-down tree stump. My Mom made a Creamed Sauce with them. When I discovered some at our counrty house in Fresno County, I also made them into a Cream Sauce dish, I checked out what I had found and found that they are hard to mix up with a poison variety.

I read the article given, and I found it interesting. Since, I really know quite little about gathering mushrooms, I also "hunt for mushrooms exclusively in stores that sell food."

How terrible! I think the lesson is to avoid morels.

I thought this paragraph was very interesting - I wasn't aware of that info about cooking mushrooms in general...

"It's also unclear if they sometimes contain toxins, like their look-alikes. But morels can readily absorb toxic minerals and compounds, such as heavy metals and pesticides, from the soil where they grow, the USDA notes. Whatever potentially poisonous component they contain, "Morels are more likely to cause intestinal distress if eaten raw, although even raw, they can be tolerated by some people," the agency wrote. Morels should be cooked before eating, as cooking can destroy bacterial contaminants. "For that matter, all mushrooms, wild or cultivated, should be cooked to release their full nutritional value because chitin in their cell walls otherwise inhibits digestion," the USDA writes."

Remember when spinach and raw mushroom salad was popular - 80s? We ate lots of raw mushrooms back in the day - not morels tho.

Hunting morels around here is about as common as hunting ramps. I've never heard of anyone ever getting sick from morels. I trust myself on morels and puffballs.

morels are so sought-after around here that it isn't unusual to see them advertised on local social media marketplaces for $60-80/lb.

i'll eat them if i'm somewhere where they're being served but every year, i decline offers to give me a bagful. they're messy to fry (at least for me) and not worth the time/effort to clean up after myself!

I had no idea this happened last year.

After reading the report, I wonder how much of it was the morels themselves vs poor handling. Six other places that got them reported back with no issues- they fully cooked their morels. The place with the outbreak was not really cooking them- they either partially cooked by pouring boiling marinade over raw and letting them sit for 75 minutes, or did a cold marinade on uncooked ones. They also got hit with some health code violations, including things like time/temp abuse and sanitation issues. The study found it unnecessary to track the morels past the import point. And while morels appeared to be the culprit, they couldn't positively identify why/how they caused the outbreak. There were five factors within consideration.

Also kind of interesting to me. This article is a cautionary about morels. It's not being used as a cautionary about sushi or the potential hazards for raw/undercooked foods with mishandling.

I had morels once in a fine dining situation. They were delicious. I don't think they grow here in swampy desert, though there are forests not so very far away by Western standards, where they might grow. I've never seen them fresh at a grocery store either, but I could have just missed them. So I'll stick to foraging them in fine, immaculate restaurants.

This thread is very interesting. Thank-you!

Beesneeds, I belireve the mushrooms contained some sort of toxin, though I'm not sure why it should be disabled when heated. It sounds like they were served in a nice sushi restaurant.

A guy I know who lives not too far away (in an older part of the neighborhood) is living in the house he grew up in. That's pretty rare in my region where people are known to move around a lot. The reason why- his parents, both physicians in fact, died when he was just finishing college and he got the house.

His parents were keen mycophiles. They were active in mushroom hunting groups. With this participation they could learn from experts about various mushroom types in our broader area. Which were edible and which not.

On their last mushroom jaunt, they misidentified a mushroom that they took home and consumed. It turned out to be a poisonous variety and that sadly ended their lives.

To me, it seems not that unlike those who enjoy the thrill of eating fugu in Japan. I don't get the desirability of eating something that could prove fatal, no matter how much skill or knowledge was involved in bringing it to a plate.

Heat breaks down some toxins, so cooking breaks those toxins. Mushrooms aren't the only ones- raw kidney beans can make you sick due to a protien, but soaking and cooking them makes them safe to eat. Mushrooms can have various toxins in them- some are more harmful than others. Some are broken down by the cooking, others are not. Some of the chemical components in mushrooms can also be freed and broken by the heat processing of chiton.

There were limitations in the study. It could have been toxins in the morels- but the study was not able to confirm a particular morel toxin. It does seem to lean a bit that way since the six businesses that cooked the morels had zero issues, but the raw/undercooked ones at the sushi place caused the entire outbreak. It could have been other handling issues at the sushi place, since they got hit with health code violations when they were inspected due to the outbreak.

" raw kidney beans can make you sick due to a protien, but soaking and cooking them makes them safe to eat. "

You may know that part of the process to prepare them safely is to raise the cooking water to boiling. For this reason, using previously uncooked kidney beans in a slow cooker can be a problem because they won't get hot enough to break down the illness causing protein.

Thanks for the article dcarch.

I’ve collected and eaten wild mushrooms — with great care. Once, while bicycling, I found a bunch of delectable morelles — Morchella esculenta.

I made a delicious cream of morels soup from them. But I was certain that they were that species. Unfortunately, they were mixed in with a lot of poison ivy, which I managed not to touch.

I have gone mushroom foraging with a husband and friends, both of whom were scientists. The woman of the couple seem to be collecting everything and putting it into a bag along with the soil attached to the base of these mushrooms many of which were coral mushrooms, which I would not eat just because they are blah.

But what I didn’t like and I refuse to do is to go mushroom hunting with some enthusiastic newcomer Who wants to dump all the mushrooms collected into one bag. No no I won’t do that.

We used to collect a huge number of wild mushrooms, and then take them back to our place and identify them carefully. We have tons of book and that’s great but there’s nothing like first-hand knowledge from somebody who is experienced. We also used to take spore prints, and things like that to help identify and many of them were not edible, but we were curious as to their identity. We came across a very interesting boletes which might have been edible, but I wasn’t going to eat anything that I wasn’t sure of.

I urge anybody interested in mushroom foraging to learn some of the very highly toxic mushrooms, such as the Amanita verosa (“destroying angel”) and Amanita phalloides (“death cap”). Resist the urge to gather those numerous LBMs —- little brown mushrooms.

Recently, there was this:

Top chef jailed for serving raw clams infected with norovirus

Marco Sacco, 59, served a borage risotto at a wedding banquet in 2021. More than 50 guests fell ill after eating the dish

Does anyone know why links won’t post?