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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

This is not remotely what the "common knowledge" about mushroom foraging is in Eastern Europe. There is a "funny" story in Bulgaria how the most famous mushroom foraging expert in Bulgaria a few decades ago died because he made a mistake when foraging.

Plenty of edible mushrooms are just "twins" of poisonous mushrooms, using animal's knowledge to not eat them, without expending the metabolic cost to actually produce poison.

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> There is a "funny" story in Bulgaria how the most famous mushroom foraging expert in Bulgaria a few decades ago died because he made a mistake when foraging.

Do you have a citation or evidence for this? I ask because a while ago another commenter on HN said that the president of a mushroom society in Boston died from the same thing, and when I looked and searched I could find no mentions of this.

Without additional evidence I'm putting all claims of "Mushroom expert does from mushroom misidentification!" into the "old wives tale/bullshit bucket". These types of stories just seem to be the ones that people love to talk about and share, even if they originate as a falsehood. Again, not saying it's not possible, but I am saying without a reasonable citation I'm discounting it as BS.

> Do you have a citation or evidence for this?

If I've understood the previous commenter correctly, he's talking about a виц (comes from German witz, cognate of wit in English) which is a funny story joke that spreads by word of mouth. Here is the one in question:

https://kvo.bg/vicove/vicOTJK1I/vapros-koi-sa-poslednite-dum...

Roughly:

> Q: What were the last words of the mushroom forager?

> A: I hadn't tried that kind until now!

Yeah, if I understand your point and link: this is not something that actually happened, it's just a joke, but after enough retellings for some reason people think that it is real.

> after enough retellings for some reason people think that it is real

I do not think anyone thinks it's real; you might be getting caught up by the word "story", just some dark Balkan humor.

I see the original commenter I replied to said it was just a "tale", but I don't think that's how most readers would interpret that comment. Saying something "happened a few decades ago" is oddly specific if it's just a joke/tale.

Also, the whole point of their comment was to emphasize how foraging for mushrooms is dangerous - using an old wives tale as "evidence" for your position would be a very odd choice indeed.

I expected it to be real.

It is very much an old wives tale. I was not trying to make it sound otherwise. It is just representative of the attitude locals have to foraging: it is popular, but it is understood to be dangerous and mishaps still happen.

To become an expert you have to be a little bit adventurous. Average forager knows and gathers maybe 10 species of mushrooms that are hardest to mistake for anything else and leaves alone anything that looks just a little bit different.

It is true that there are "twins" but they are not the commonly foraged ones. Common ones are quite easily distinguished from the poisonous ones, and those that have bad twins, the twins also taste pretty bad (extremely bitter, etc.) If you don't try to eat every possible edible mushroom as a sport but stick to the most easily recognized ones you'll be fine.

> Plenty of edible mushrooms are just "twins" of poisonous mushrooms

These are also living, evolving organisms. There will be mutants who knock back on a poisonous gene.

Your counter example is one guy dying from poisoning, in a country that does a lot of shroom foraging (берем гъби у гората).

The Russia rocket expert was likely killed.

You are reading too much in what I said. Of course weird things are happening in an unstable dictatorship like Russia and this guy might have been assassinated for one reason or another. That does not mean it is not nice to give people context about the culture in that end of the world though.

I think you make it sound more exotic than it is. People pick mushrooms around the world. Slightly more common in SE-Europe, a bit less so than a few decades ago. People tend to stick to the 1-2 species they know best, poisonings are extremely rare.

Fair point, but I am surprised to hear that. My US friends (New England) have been extremely surprised when they hear that foraging for mushrooms is common where I come from (on the rare occasions when this comes up).

It is also pretty common in parts of the US. They probably don't know about that either. I know people who go morel hunting every spring in the midwest (Iowa and Illinois, specifically).

https://www.thegreatmorel.com/regional-morels-midwest-region....

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