In article ,
echinosum wrote:

He thought he was picking chanterelles, not boletes. Chanterelles do
have gill-like wrinkles on them. But although it isn't quite as big a
mistake as mistaking gill fungi for a bolete, it was still a pretty
implausible mistake to make for anyone who had any basic knowledge at
all: like mistaking a lychee for a strawberry, or a nectarine for an
apple - some very superficial visual similarity, but anyone with any
sense of the look and feel of the thing would never make such a mistake.
As Nick said so well, they were so ignorant they didn't realise how
ignorant they were. We are very ignorant of fungi in this country; in
other countries there is much more general knowledge about them.

I once found an albino death cap, which is a rare thing. My first
instinct on seeing it was "mushroom". From above, it does have a
mushroom-looking cap. On picking it, I looked at it and then very
quickly went "not mushroom". It has several features which are
inconsistent with mushroom on closer examination. So I did not eat it.

Well, you're still posting :-) It was definitely A. phalloides not
A. verna or A. virosa? I have seen at least one of those, but not
an albino A. phalloides. Not that it makes much difference if you
eat any of them!

Perhaps the worst bit of UK ignorance is the belief that you should
select only fungi that look like the ones you get in shops, because
the closest similarities between edible and lethal species are among
those. The oddball ones are much easier to distinguish reliably.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.