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Comment by kornhole | Hacker News Reader

It is fall and mushroom picking time! Here is my simple advice: The first mushrooms you should get to know in your area are the deadly ones. When you find a mushroom that looks like an edible one, temper your enthusiasm and be realistic. Mistakes are made when people really want to find an edible one. If it definitely doesn't look like a deadly one and might be the edible you identify, first try a small amount and see how it sits with you. Most are just indigestible and give stomach aches. If it looks anything like the deadly ones, when it doubt, toss it out.

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The best advice I ever heard about mushroom foraging was to find someone who's been doing it a long time, possibly from your local community college, who will take you on walks and teach what to look for and where to look. Repeat any time you move or want to forage in a new place.

That's the general advice for eating random plants, but not mushroom advice.

That's really good advice. Even perfectly edible mushrooms can give you adverse effects. Eating just a piece and wait for 24 hours is how I usually go.

I read advice once that if you were lost in the woods and didn’t know what might be poisonous, rub it on your arm and wait. If no reaction after 15 minutes, rub it on the inside of your lips lightly. If no reaction after 15 minutes, eat a very small amount, and if no reaction within a number of hours, you’re good to go.

No idea if this is accurate but it seems reasonable.

“No idea if this is accurate but it seems reasonable” has probably been the last words of a non-zero number of people.

No it isn't, at least not for mushrooms. To be safe, you need to use a reliable mushroom guide and identify anything you pick down to the species. It's best to learn how to identify a few species that you like and to stick to them.

That advice wouldn't seem to have helped for the mushroom described in the article, whose symptoms only surface 8 to 12 hours after eating it.

If you're lost in the woods, it's a bad idea to eat wild mushrooms. They're mostly water, and the small amount of calories they might provide are unlikely to be worth the risk, no matter how confident you are in identification. I'd go as far as to say that any foraging of wild food is a dangerous distraction from your more important task of escape.

Bad idea for mushrooms. Some of them are insidious - you could feel fine for several hours while your liver is destroyed, and by the time you feel sick it's too late to do anything.

How long would you need to be lost before you'd try this advice, personally?

A few hours? A few days? A few weeks?

Like others mentioned, I wouldn’t try it with mushrooms as they aren’t that nutritionally dense relative to the risks. But for plants, I’d do it as soon as I felt the need to eat something. See Into the Wild for an example of a guy whose life it could’ve saved.

I honestly can’t tell if spoof or serious.

For reference, he likely died to bio-accumulation of toxins from seeds he was eating which led to paralysis and starvation [https://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(14)00277-4/ful...]

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