‘Some nations would not eat a forest mushroom even if they were starving,’ says a Czech expert studying cultures of mushroom-picking.

> **In some countries, the gifts of the forest are regarded as dangerous and inedible. This is also reflected in fairy tales and is linked to changes in forest ownership. Attitudes differ to such an extent that one nation cannot understand the other.**

> There are nations that love mushroom picking. And there are cultures in which people would not pick a boletus even if they were starving. “Mushroom-picking know-how is something that even social media has failed to significantly alter. It is still very much the case that knowledge of which mushrooms are edible and how to recognise them is passed down within families and on trips to the forest as a kind of family heirloom,” explains historian and anthropologist Karel Šima from the Faculty of Arts at Charles University.

> **How is it that there are countries where people go mushrooming and others where mushrooms do grow, but people do not pick them?**

> The distinction between so-called mycophobic and mycophilic peoples was conceived by the married couple Robert Gordon Wasson and Valentina Pavlovna as early as the 1920s. He was an American banker; she was a Russian émigré from high society. They got married and went on their honeymoon to the Catskill Mountains in the US. During the day, Valentina Pavlovna would run about the woods gathering mushrooms; in the evening, she would cook them for her new husband, who refused to eat them and was thoroughly frightened.

> **Why?**

> Because whilst Russian – and, by extension, Slavic – culture regards mushrooms as a gift from the forest and is, so to speak, mycophilic, Anglo-Saxon culture is mycophobic. This means that it generally regards the gifts of the forest as dangerous, sinister and inedible. It sounds like an amusing anecdote, but this couple’s experience did not lead to marital discord; on the contrary, it marked the beginning of a new line of research. As the founders of ethnomycology, the Wassons perceived the difference between mycophobic and mycophilic peoples as ancient, even mythical.

> **In what way?**

> They drew on folklore and fairy tales. Among Slavic and Baltic peoples, there are fairy-tale characters associated with mushrooms that are considered good and beneficial. For example, gnomes or forest spirits, such as the lešij, enabled people to find the best edible mushrooms. In the case of Germanic or Anglo-Saxon cultures, they noted, for instance, the connection with fairy rings. Some mushrooms do indeed grow in circles, and these cultures understood such spaces as places where fairies could bewitch you, causing you to lose track of time and find it difficult to escape their clutches. The Wassons hit the nail on the head. Other researchers followed in their footsteps.

> **What did they find out?**

> That it’s more complicated than that. For example, in southern Germany, Italy and France, one might expect people to be rather wary of mushrooms, but this isn’t the case in their mountainous regions. Put simply: the more mountains there are, the more people like mushrooms. In the south of France, there are a great many folk names for mushrooms, and from this we can deduce that people there knew about and collected them, whereas in the north they did not; there, they are familiar with far fewer species.

> High French cuisine, for example, recognises only button mushrooms that have been cultivated artificially; it does not use wild mushrooms. There are nations that viewed mushrooms as ‘the poor man’s meat’, particularly in rural areas. But places such as Scandinavia or England are so ‘mycophobic’ that, whilst their inhabitants did eat mushrooms during wartime, historical sources refer to this as something truly exceptional and a sign of crisis. The reason must lie elsewhere. It remains partly a mystery, but we do have some hypotheses.

> **What is it?**

> One theory suggests that where the forest was the property of the nobility and commoners were forbidden entry, they could not, logically, acquire the know-how or pass on knowledge about which mushrooms were edible. In England, the monarch restricted people’s access to the royal forests; he needed access to big game in particular and did not want his subjects to hunt it. This was in contrast to the Slavic countries.

> The oldest source relating to forest law in which I have managed to find a reference to mushrooms is a 16th-century Lithuanian code of laws, which also mentions that women and children were permitted to go into the forest to gather brushwood, forest fruits and mushrooms. It was, therefore, common practice – and women were thus able to pass on their knowledge of mushrooms to future generations.

> And then there is another hypothesis: England underwent massive deforestation as early as the Middle Ages, and people lost contact with the forests. In Eastern Europe, primeval forests and vast, extensively used woodlands were preserved for much longer – in some places right up to modern times – so forays into the forest were part of the way people found sustenance or raw materials. There are a number of regions that lie somewhere in between, where we find both mycophilic and mycophobic cultures. This is another reason why we speak of hypotheses – we will probably never know for certain why some peoples love mushrooms whilst others fear them.

> **Czechs are keen mushroom pickers. Do we know how many mushrooms we pick?**

> We even have statistics on this; it’s been tracked for over thirty years. Roughly three-quarters of Czech households go mushroom picking every year. That’s a very high figure.

> **Does anyone else measure this?**

> Although similar surveys are carried out in some countries, we do not have comparable, continuously collected data from other countries, which may indicate that mushroom picking in the Czech Republic is extremely popular – more popular than elsewhere.

In france you can go to the local pharmacy with your basket of muchrooms to have them checked.

Mushrooms are delicious and fun to cook with! But there are super lethal varieties that look like the edible varieties. I can’t find the light switching the forest for some reason

It can be difficult to tell a straw mushroom from a caesar’s mushroom from a death cap, and a single mistake has disastrous consequences. The risk isn’t worth the reward for most people.

Everyone I know loves mushrooms but I hate them for their texture/consistency.

in norway we generally do pick some mushrooms, particularly cantarelles, but it’s always been hammered into us as kids to not eat just any mushrooms, because two of our most common native species are deathly poisonous. i think it’s because of this strong caution that people generally don’t go out picking. because, for your own safety, the barrier to entry is high. you have to read up on what you should eat and what you should leave alone. most people would rather just be safe and not pick anything that have to read up

Need to be teaching safe mushroom picking habits in school then. If I’m not sure I’m not eating it and *neither should anyone*.

I don’t know enough about mushrooms to pick them in the wild and expect to live to eat them a second time.

Understandably. There’s a pretty high risk to reward ratio when it comes to eating wild mushrooms. You need a decent amount of knowledge and expertise to precisely identify and pick the ones that are safe to eat.

In northern Italy, in the Alps and the Apennines, we’re good mushrooms pickers.

So every year in the beginning of autumn a family of 4 dies because they were wrong.

Finns are pretty uniformly mushroom mad these days but earlier there used to be a geographical divide between the eastern and western parts of the country with the latter being more suspicious of eating mushrooms. So I guess Russian influence originally.

Picking mushrooms is my favorite pastime in autumn. You can combine taking a walk with being in the forest and and kinda playing Pokemon Go in reality.

My parents taught me which ones are edible and I expanded on that, it’s really not hard.

I live in Ireland. I’ve found some decent spots for delicacy mushrooms: Boletus edulis, Calvaria gigantea, Craterellus tubaeformis.

However, searching for them takes most of a day, and about half the time I’ll find nothing or they’ll not be in an edible state (worms etc). I have young kids, so my time’s too precious to waste on those kind of odds.

German here. When I grew up my family used to go and pick forest mushrooms pretty frequently. We were no real experts, so we used only the ones easily recognizable (like the boletus in the photo), but within an hour or so we always found enough of them to feed a family of four.

The fallout from the Chernobyl accident however put an end to that as radiation levels in forest mushrooms were quite high.

considering i barely can keep most mushrooms apart, thats the better choice.
additionaly, echinococcus multilocularis and other problems make me shy away from wild mushrooms either way.

Social media has not significantly altered this culture due to natural selection: the people who are prepared to find and eat wild mushrooms based on direction from social media are all definitely dead.

Look at those beautiful porcini in the photo.
Would 100% pick those! 
In Italy its not uncommon for people to pick mus perhrooms

In my village (dominantly Turkish speaking village) in Bulgaria more than 30 years ago when I was a child we were picking mashrooms with my father or other people. One day a child died because of a poisenouse mashroom and suddenly everybody stopped picking mashrooms. Since then no one picks any mashroom. I moved to a city and the only mashroom I buy to eat are the ones who are sold in big markets like Billa or Kaufland. All that knowledge about mashrooms in my village is lost. Lst year I asked to some people in my villge if they pick up any mashrooms and they told me that they are sill strongly against picking mushrooms.

A mushroom expert being a non-expert in human behaviour? Hmmm, wild huh? 🤣🤣🤣

I don’t want to pick everywhere.. Chernobyl nuclear disaster…