Friday Fungus: A sad tale - and probably a wise warning

Dogs have a terrible habit of eating almost everything:

Devastated Fred Marchment and his wife were walking with their three dogs at Danebury Hill Fort, a beauty spot near their home in the village of Upper Clatford, near Andover, Hants. Their springer spaniel-collie cross dog Jake, who was just under two years old, scampered excitedly into the woods and ate some poisonous fungi.

"We shouted at him to stop but it was too late - within three hours he died. It was horrible. We are really upset" said Fred. "There's fungi and toadstools everywhere. It's been so damp and warm, they are all over the place even though it's nearly Christmas."

The distraught family are warning other dog owners to take care and make sure their pets don't eat deadly fungi growing wild in the woods and meadows. 

The best advice is not to let your dogs eat mushrooms - the story doesn't make clear what mushroom this poor dog ate. Judging by the speed of reaction it sounds like a death cap - but dogs could react badly to fungi that wouldn't make humans ill.

A sad tale  - as the story relates there are a lot of mushrooms around at the moment including many of the edible species like oysters and assorted field mushrooms but we are as ever advised to be careful and to make absolutely sure we know what we're eating.

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Friday Fungus: The stuff we didn't eat!

No don't ask me - like a fool I didn't make any notes about the dozens of species that were either inedible, unpleasant, rock hard or outright poisonous! Some of them are in this basket - identify away!

We did learn that you can use Birch Polypores to light fires or make a plaster (I reckon they'd make a passing fair wall myself) and that, as ever, it's not as simple as it sounds when you ask: "is that mushrooms poisonous."

Also encountered were the remnants of mushrooms - oysters and chicken-of-the-woods that we might have been able to eat earlier in the season but now were old and rather chewed about by passing beasts and nibbled by maggots.

And we found some Amanita muscaria (you know the red and white magic mushrooms) - which pleased me most really and gave our guide the chance to tell the tale about the Sami. Mind you I like my version better!

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Friday Fungus: Report on a mushroom hunt

Last Sunday saw me - and about 20 others - tramping through the woods around Ogden Water, a great little country park in the South Pennines. This was Slow Food West Yorkshire's Annual Mushroom Forage and a splendid (if ever so slightly damp) occasion it was too culminating with an outdoor feast on the foraged goodies pictured above. All this was made possible by the expert input of wild food expert and herbalist, Jesper Launder.

For those interested in the details of the feast:

Included there is the grisette (with the delightful latin name, Amanita vaginata). This is the tall, white-stemmed one with the steel grey cap. Quite why the mushroom acquired the same name as a female french peasant of loose morals is something of a mystery to me. But the latin name is simply descriptive since vaginata means sheath and describes the sac from which the mushroom springs.

There are two deceivers in the pile - plain ones (Laccaria laccata) and amythyst ( Laccaria amethystea) ones. The little chaps were pretty abundant but there's no jolly stories about them - they're just good to eat!

Finally there are honey mushrooms (Armillaria mellea) and conifer stump mushrooms - both of which I'd come across but didn't know we could eat.

We also identified a load of other mushrooms edible, inedible and poisonous - some of which will feature in future episodes of the Friday Fungus!

All in all a fine afternoon's effort, a real education and a great feast!

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A Monday Mushroom: They're trying to stop us picking mushrooms.

There has been an almighty outcry at the prospect of the Government "selling off all the forests". Some of this has been knee jerk left-wing, 'we hate privatisation' response but others have been rightly concerned about access - especially for leisure. As the Forestry Commission trade union bloke told us:

Once we've sold it, it never comes back. Once it is sold, restrictions are placed on the land which means the public don't get the same access to the land and facilities that are provided by the public forest estate

So there you go - save the forests! The People's Forests! Unless of those people are mushroom pickers in which case, oh no, you can't get your pleasure in the forest. You are bad people. You are "destroying ecosystems". You must desist!

this new generation of foodies and foragers are beginning to trample the forests and fields that feed them – as well as many animals and insects, warn those who look after the UK's woodlands and nature reserves

Like cyclists, walkers, runners and wildlife photographers don't?

What really annoys the "conservation" groups of course is that some people are making money from mushroom picking. There are teams of commercial pickers who gather wild mushrooms for sale to posh restaurants and fancy delis. So why not do what Antonio Carluccio says then?

The chef, who does not use wild mushrooms in his cafes and delis, believes there should be licences for commercial collectors to ensure they behave responsibly, as there are in many other European countries. "There should be more discipline in collecting: not trampling everything, not destroying everything and to be limited to what you can consume. But don't deprive people of the wonders of going to the woods for the mushrooms,"

Now that's a great idea - just selling a limited number of 'rights' to collect mushrooms! Get some income (like you do from fishing rights, from pannage or from grazing) and ensure that the mushroom stock is sustained. And for hobby pickers - have a licensing system (back to fishing again) or a membership system.

Don't just stop us.

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Scrumping, foraging and mushrooming - they'd rather you didn't you know!

The Food Standards Agency is a QUANGO that should have gone in the great cull – and their wild food advice tells us why:

…the traditional harvest-time pursuit of hedgerow-picking has been targeted by a government quango that says children should not gather wild food unsupervised. The Food Standards Agency (FSA), which escaped last week's money-saving cull of public bodies, has also warned against eating anything that hasn't been washed or fruit that is "unhealthy looking" or "bruised".

It isn’t that children shouldn’t have what is and isn’t edible pointed out to them – that’s a good idea (that sadly the FSA’s advice fails to provide at all) – but that scrumping is bad for those children. What kind of message does it send out if everything has to be sanitized and decontaminated before little Jenny or Miles can eat it? What ever happened to the old advice – “you’ve got to eat a peck* of dirt before you die”?

However, what I found most interesting was the little threat in the FSA’s advice on wild food foraging:

Under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act it is illegal to uproot any wild plant without the permission of the owner or occupier of the land. It is also illegal to pick, uproot, collect the seed from, or sell, any of particularly rare or vulnerable species.

Which I guess brings us to Epping Forest, where the City of London (who for odd historical reasons own said woods) has been gleefully prosecuting people for mushrooming:

Epping Forest keepers have warned that people will be prosecuted if they continue to pick mushrooms at one of London’s most historic open spaces. Illegal fungi picking has reached record highs this year at the Forest which has been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest partly because of the diversity of fungi found there.

Apparently all this is for our own good:

It is dangerous for the public to pick mushrooms from the wild as poisonous mushrooms can be commonly confused with edible ones.

Not really – there have been about 200 or so reported cases of possible mushroom poisoning but nearly all of these relate to precautionary actions by parents whose small children have eaten a mushroom. In truth most mushrooms aren’t poisonous – they just don’t taste very nice!

The City of London goes on to say that mushrooming affects the ecology of the forest. Now I’m not going to get all mycological here but, if mushrooms are gathered properly, the impact on the ecology is minimal. I agree that there’s a case for making sure mushroomers know what they’re doing and perhaps a case – as we do with fishing – for selling licenses to gather mushrooms. And lo, that was the case:

The Fungi Licensing Scheme - introduced in Epping Forest in 2004 - has been terminated to help protect the genetic stock of fungi in the Forest. Licenses are currently granted for fungi research or organised educational fungi courses only and will not be issued for personal or private consumption

I’m sure that the genetic stock isn’t remotely bothered – collection for ‘research’ isn’t objectively any different from collecting for dinner. It would be much more honest for the City of London to have issued a limited number of licenses auctioned off to the highest bidder. This would have had the added benefit of providing a degree of self-policing as those who have paid for the rights will act to protect those rights. Not to mention some income to support forest management!

But then that would be too obvious wouldn’t it?

With foraging increasing as a pastime – and that’s what it is – we have reached the stage where authorities have noticed and, as ever, the default position of government everywhere is to stop something uncontrolled happening. By a combination of idiotic, counter-productive and threatening regulation and passive-aggressive warnings, authorities like the Epping Forest Keepers and the Food Standards Agency hope to keep us all safely consuming vacuum-packed, processed, tasteless and soul-less food purchased from shining, sanitized shelves in supermarkets.

Ignore them folks – get out there, enjoy your countryside, scrump if you want to, forage for the good things and hunt, shoot or trap the game. If more do these things we’ll get away from the stifling, scrubbed, unhealthy, bunny-hugging urban world and back to understanding how we’re part and parcel of nature. Back to appreciating the magic of nature’s bounty, to protecting it for that bounty and to using it for our personal purposes where right to do so.

As Kipling put if in ‘The Land’:

_Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto_, I, who own the River-field,
Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,
Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs
All sorts of powers and profits which--are neither mine nor theirs.

I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.
I can fish--but Hobden tickles. I can shoot--but Hobden wires.
I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,
Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.

Shall I dog his morning progress o'er the track-betraying dew?
Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?
Confiscate his evening faggot into which the conies ran,
And summons him to judgment? I would sooner summons Pan.

His dead are in the churchyard--thirty generations laid.
Their names went down in Domesday Book when Domesday Book was made.
And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line
Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,
Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.
He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,
And if flagrantly a poacher--'tain't for me to interfere.

'Hob, what about that River-bit?' I turn to him again
With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.
'Hev it jest as you've a mind to, _but_'--and so he takes command.
For whoever pays the taxes old Mus' Hobden owns the land.

*For those not brought up on proper measures, a peck is two dry gallons or a quarter of a bushel