Anyone know?
Is He Edible?
Ted Rall
http://rall.comTed Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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8 Comments.
Hard to ID a mushroom from a single photo but that could be a “destroying angel” (common name for a species group of lethal amanitas that cause many poisonings because they are large and attractive and taste fine.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destroying_angel
Mushroom ID usually starts with a spore print (place caps gills down on white and dark paper, wait several hours, and you should see colored lines of spores dropped from the gills.) Amanitas (as well as some other families) have a white spore print.
Sure it’s edible. Is it poisonous? Well, that’s a whole other issue. Funny. I was talking about poison mushrooms just a couple days ago. The two of us in the conversation were wondering how the people who grow mushrooms know they aren’t shipping carton after carton of savory death. (Anyone?)
Some people (hand raised here) read far too much. As in, ‘Anyone who’s studied mushrooms can easily tell which are edible and which are poisonous.’
So I checked a book out of my local library. It had pictures of edible mushrooms facing pictures of deadly mushrooms that were similar but anyone with eyes could easily tell them apart.
As best I could tell, both the delicious mushroom and the deadly toadstool were two prints from the exact same negative.
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I recommend making an omelet and feeding it to a Republican. If it doesn’t kill him, the mushroom is edible. If it does kill him, nothing lost.
I tried it on a Republican but them I realized that evil never dies.
@alex, the type you commonly see in the market with variants such as button mushrooms, portobellos, or criminis is started under sterile conditions and then spawned out onto sterile media where it grows and fruits too quickly for anything else to get a foothold. And any unlikely intruder, even if somewhat similar, would be different enough to stand out in appearance from the uniformity of the cultivated ones to anyone customarily working with them anyway. Shiitakes are grown on logs. They are first grown onto wooden pegs under sterile conditions but do not require sterile logs for fruiting. Oyster mushrooms can be grown either way.
@michaelwme, photos alone aren’t enough to go by in identifying mushrooms. Field guides note attributes such as spore color as well as features of cap and stem that mat not be readily apparent from a single picture. Mushroom hunters should check these before looking up the picture for a species.
Goddammit, now I want to grow mushrooms at home. Why should I let the NSA know I’m eating mushrooms?
If you have to ask, don’t eat it. Common sense. If you don’t hunt for mushrooms and don’t know the simplest rules about it, then don’t post a picture and ask a stupid question. Stupid is as stupid does, eh?
Doh. I died.