Deadly rise from foraging: the foodie trend responsible for thousands of poisonings each year as three Australians die after eating wild mushrooms

It’s a custom as old as humanity, but in an age of factory farming and ultra-processed foods, foraging has become the foodie trend gracing high-end restaurants and home kitchens alike.

But it’s not without danger, as a family in Australia tragically discovered when they ate skull mushrooms for lunch – three of them dead and a fourth fighting for life.

The stark reality is that foraging is responsible for thousands of poisonings and dozens of deaths each year in affluent western countries where food is plentiful — largely due to hapless amateurs eating what they shouldn’t.

In the US alone, there are about 7,500 cases of mushroom poisoning each year, of which about 700 result in ‘serious injury’ and three of which are fatal. Hundreds occur each year in France and dozens in both the UK and Australia.

Geoff Dann, who has been foraging in the UK for four decades and literally wrote the book on the subject, says a mix of arrogance, overconfidence and wishful thinking is usually to blame.

“People just don’t realize how many fungi there are,” he says. “They buy a little book with a few dozen in it, go out, find something a bit like what they have in the book, and they want to believe they’ve found what they’re looking for. .’

That could easily be deadly, as many edible mushrooms look almost identical to deadly poisonous species, at least to the untrained eye. And that is especially true for deathcaps.

“Almost all fatal poisonings since the invention of modern medicine involve[death hoods],” says Geoff.

“They look like things you’d want to eat, they’re pretty common, and even a small amount will kill you.”

That seems to be the case for Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister Heather Wilkinson who died last week after eating a beef and mushroom pie thought to contain the fungus.

Heather’s husband Ian is now in hospital awaiting a liver transplant, leaving Erin Patterson – who used to cook but apparently didn’t eat the cake – to face some tough questions.

Foraging was once how humans obtained most of their food, living as hunter-gatherers on a diet believed to be much more varied than the diet we eat today.

But since the development of industrial agriculture in the 20th century, people – especially in the West – have become almost entirely dependent on what they can buy for their livelihood rather than what they can grow or find themselves.

In recent decades, however, that has spawned a counter-cultural movement that aims to return to the wild for food – seen as healthier than what’s available in supermarkets.

What started with hippies in the 1960s and 1970s – Geoff admits his foraging began as a failed attempt to collect magic mushrooms – quickly grew into a foodie trend in the 1980s and 1990s.

The iconic Danish restaurant Noma, which opened in Copenhagen in 2003, showed that foraging can be done commercially – and these days it’s hard to find a fine dining restaurant where at least some of the ingredients aren’t sourced locally.

Planet-conscious chefs have also started foraging their home kitchens, with Geoff saying pandemic lockdowns have been a particular boon to the hobby.

“People couldn’t socialize and had to find something to do outside,” Geoff explains. “So a lot of them started foraging.”

But when a plethora of newcomers first turned their hand to the hobby, poisoning cases skyrocketed.

In France, 330 people got sick in 2021 and three died within two months of eating picked mushrooms.

In Australia, nearly 150 people fell ill during mushroom season in 2022, including three dozen in just a few weeks in May.

Two of them were Alice Both, from South Australia, and her 12-year-old daughter who had to be rushed to hospital after eating mushrooms found in their vegetable garden.

Alice used a smartphone app to identify the fungus and was told it was safe, but it turned out that the software had misidentified a deadly dead cap.

She ended up in intensive care, but luckily her daughter only ate a few bites of the dish and she was discharged after a few days.

Mrs. Both described her symptoms and said, “I was dizzy, I felt like I was fading.”

And Geoff recalls a 2017 case in the UK where two Thai women who had never grazed before picked enough skull mushrooms in Dartmoor National Park to kill their entire family.

But luckily they were stopped on their way home by some experienced collectors who quickly identified the deadly batch and persuaded them to throw it away.

Despite this, Geoff encourages people to take up the hobby – provided it is done in a safe and sustainable way.

He says, “(foraging) gives you a reason to go out into nature. Not just to wander in it, but to pay attention to it.

“(It means) interacting with the natural world in a way that is lacking in our lives.

“That’s what evolution has taught our brains to do, it’s what we should be doing, and it’s so good for mental health.”

But he also warns, “Don’t eat anything you’re not 100% sure about.

‘Don’t use an app, because there is a margin of error, and don’t trust internet identifications either.

“There are a lot of people online trying to prove they know a lot about mushrooms when they don’t, and I see confident misidentifications all the time.

“Learn how to do these things yourself.”

For starters, he generously recommends buying his books — which he says are “reasonably priced and available online.”