Subject: a morel lesson

From: [email-masked] (LauraL6000)
Date: 23 May 1996 02:16:42 -0400

I had an interesting morel experience this past week which I thought I
oughta pass along......the GOOD news is, I found LOTS of morels last week
here in the Catskills. Some trees (dead elms) with as many as 50 under
them......etc. Then I found a good 50-60 by a railroad track, and was all
ready to eat them when I was told by a mushroom expert, "DON'T!"

It turns out that they put all sorts of toxic substances (herbicides etc)
by the tracks, and one should never eat mushrooms picked near these types
of sites (dumps, highways etc).

It was with great sorrow that I had to dump them ALL out (because of
course I had mixed them all together by then), and I haven't found any
since, but such is life..........better to go morel-less than die of some
dreadful disease in 20 years, I suppose....

Anyway, for those of you like me who hadn't really taken note of WHERE you
found those morels -- learn from my lesson!

---

From: [email-masked] (Peter Herman)
Date: 30 May 1996 08:18:29 GMT

Xerula ([email-masked]) wrote:
: Such nonsense!  People know what foods are safe via hundreds of years of
: experience, and true morels (genus Morchella) are no exception.  Consult a
: true expert---someone like Dick Korf at Cornell, or Don Pfister at
: Harvard---before making such absurd statements.

I don't think that the original post questioned the safety of eating 
morels, otherwise why go and pick them!  The concern was in where they 
came from and and what non-natural products might have been on them as a 
fresuly of human activity.

This only serves to reinforce one of the rules I always tell mycology
classes about collecting mushrooms for eating

"Keep all collections separated in bags by the type of mushroom and place
of collection" This makes it easy to go back and recheck ID before they go
into the pot and allows the tossing of any collections that you are not
sure of without tossing everything (this also would have allowed the
original poster to use the uncontaminated morels) 

Peter

--
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R. Peter Herman				email	[email-masked]
Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet		Phone:	+46 18 67 12 20
Inst. f. Markvetenskap			Fax:	+46 18 67 27 95
S750 07 Uppsala, Sweden		
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