Mushrooming?

Well, then, you might need a permit. And some savvy.

(Nov. 26, 2009) A few days before a voracious mob jostled into the Humboldt Bay Mycological Society’s 30th Annual Mushroom Fair at Redwood Acres in Eureka, Ann Marie Tedeschi was prowling around Big Lagoon with a friend, hunting for mushrooms. They found some king boletes. They also found a big, fluttery branch-like mushroom resembling a pale yellow sea coral.

Tedeschi brought the mushrooms home and sauteed them in olive oil with garlic. Yum.

Purty mushrooms. Photo by Heidi Walters

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But on Sunday afternoon at the mushroom fair, Tedeschi, her long, ropy dreds swept neatly back under a scarf, stood in front of a wood bin loaded with samples of edible coral mushrooms side-by-side with samples of similar looking, but toxic, corals. To her left, at another bin, an intense volunteer, looking like a stern trumpet master, clutched a huge, funnel-shaped Gomphus floccosus in his left hand and a spore print of it in his right hand and leaned forward to stare into the faces of several mushroom novices as he went over the basics. “I try to educate people,” he was saying, “and tell them to organize their mushrooms into four groups: gills, ridges, pores and teeth.”

Ignore that advice, his piercing gaze seemed to indicate, and you risk a bellyache from this old Gomphus, a chanterelle of the less edible sort.

But Tedeschi’s eyes were fixed on the graceful corals. How, she asked the volunteer behind the corals bin, can you be sure you’ve picked Ramaria rubiginosa (an edible coral) and not Ramaria formosa (a toxic coral)? And if you’ve already eaten one that you thought was edible, but now you think it maybe was poisonous, what symptoms might you expect to be feeling, and when?

“My stomach feels funny,” Tedeschi said. “And I feel a little hot.”

The volunteer said she wasn’t absolutely sure what the symptoms might be; but, she said, Tedeschi’s current symptoms might just be anxiety induced.

Moments later another volunteer, Don Bryant, reassured her. “Nothing in the coral family is too toxic,” he said.

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