MUSHROOM DILEMMA !!

MUSHROOM  FOLLY

by  Michael  Pollan

......So my fungiphobia was another thing I'd have to overcome if I hoped to ever serve a personally hunted and gathered meal, because wild mushrooms had to be on the menu. Mushroom hunting seems to 1 me the very soul of foraging, throwing both the risks and rewards of eating from the wild into the sharpest possible relief. If I hoped to host representatives of all three kingdoms on my plate, learning to distinguish the delicious from the deadly among the fungi was a necessity. (Actually I hoped to wangle a fourth kingdom in there—a mineral—if I could manage to locate a salt flat within driving distance of my house.)

 I began consulting field guides to help me identify the many unfamiliar species I'd been content to treat as leafy, fungal, and feathery background noise......

 I scanned the leaf litter around a couple of oaks but saw nothing. Just when I'd given up and turned to head back, however, I noticed a bright, yolky glimmer of something pushing up the carpet of leaves not two feet from where I'd just stepped. I brushed away the leaves and there it was, this big, fleshy, vase-shaped mushroom that I was dead certain had to be a chanterelle.

Or was it?

How certain was that?

I took the mushroom home, brushed off the soil, and put it on a plate, then pulled out my field guides to see if I could confirm the identification. Everything matched up: the color, the faint apricot smell, the asymmetrical trumpet shape on top, the underside etched in a shallow pattern of "false" gills. I felt fairly confident. But confident enough to eat it? Not quite. The field guide mentioned something called a "false chanterelle" that had slighdy "thinner" gills. Uh oh. Thinner, thicker: These were relative terms; how could I tell if the gills I was looking at were thin or thick ones? Compared to what? My mother's mycophobic warnings rang in my ears. I couldn't trust my eyes. I couldn't quite trust the field guide. So whom could I trust? Angelo! But that meant driving my lone mushroom across the bridge to San Francisco, which seemed excessive. My desire to saute and eat my first-found chanterelle squabbled with my doubts about it, slender as they were. But by now I had passed the point of being able to enjoy this putative chanterelle without anxiety, so I threw it out.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I had impaled myself that afternoon on the horns of the omnivore's dilemma.

....................

YES  I  GUESS  HE  HAD  IMPALED  HIMSELF  ON  A  DILEMMA!!

YOU  HAVE  TO  BE  AN  EXPERT  ON  MUSHROOMS  TO  PICK  THE  RIGHT  ONES;  IF  NOT  YOU  CAN  KILL  YOURSELF!!

NOW  GOD  TOLD  THE  FIRST  HUMANS  THE  'rule"  FOR  PLANT  EATING....FRUIT  EATING.....MUST  BEAR  SEEDS.

SIMPLE  AS  THAT..... OF  ALL  FRUITS  AND  VEGETATION  TO  EAT  IT  MUST  REPRODUCE  BY  SEEDS.

MUSHROOMS,  FUNGI,  MOSS,  SEA-WEED,  AND  SUCH  DO  NOT  BEAR  SEEDS!!

THEY  SHOULD  NOT  BE  EATEN!!

WHY  WOULD  GOD  CREATE  SOME  MUSHROOMS  THAT  LITERALLY  CAN  KILL  YOU,  AND  HAVE  IT  AS  FOOD;  NEEDING  A  PhD  TO  KNOW  WHICH  ONES  WILL  NOT  KILL  YOU.  SIMPLE  ANSWER......MUSHROOMS  WERE  NEVER  CREATED  TO  BE  EATEN  BY  HUMANS.

NOW  IT  DOES  NOT  MATTER  WHAT  SOME  "DIET-NUTRITIONIST"  HAVE  TO  SAY,  ABOUT  MUSHROOMS  HAVE  THIS  VITAMIN  OR  THAT,  OR  THIS  MINERAL  OR  THAT,  AND  HOW  GOOD  THAT  IS.  I  HAVE  A  "HEALTH  BOOK"  THAT  TELLS  YOU  ALL  THE  GOOD  VITAMINS  ETC.  IN  "PORK"  -  MAKES  NO  DIFFERENCE  -  GOD'S  LAWS  SAY  PORK  IS  AN  UNCLEAN  SUBSTANCE [I  WILL  NOT  CALL  IT  "FOOD"]  AND  IS  NOT  TO  BE  EATEN  TO  BE  HEALTHY.

THERE  IS  NO  DILEMMA  -  MUSHROOMS  ARE  NOT  TO  BE  EATEN  -  THEY  ARE  PART  OF  THE  UNCLEAN  VEGETATION  LAW  OF  GOD.

NOW  ALL  THE  ARGUMENTS  [LIKE  THE  "YEAST"  ONE] GIVEN  AS  TO  WHY  YOU  CAN  EAT  MUSHROOMS  ARE  ANSWERED  ON  MY  WEBSITE  UNDER  "HEALTH  AND  DIET."

Keith Hunt