Environmental News

Mushrooms are very tasty and healthful, but with some important exceptions:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/wild-mushrooms-poisoning-people-california-county-21220866.php

Excerpt: "In January, three people arrived at the Salinas Valley Health Emergency Department with acute liver toxicity after eating death cap mushrooms they purchased from an unlicensed vendor in a grocery store parking lot." Well, dang.

Your humble reporter is in Yunnan Province, China. Here we dine at mushroom restaurants cooking mushroom species in a hot pot on table. Pay more, and get more species. Interesting thing is restaurants put a countdown timer on your table and after 20 to 25 minutes (depending on hot pot size), diners are allowed to begin. Motivation is that some 'edible' species need time to detoxify. Here's the fun part: restaurants take a (broth) sample when the timer dings and write customer cell phone # on that sample. So, there is a 'chain of responsibility'. There is no certainty that restaurant will pay to analyze our table's sample for mycotoxins. It is instead theater that diners are in good hands.

Several edible delicious mushroom species become safe only after boiling time. Less frisky than fugu fish, but still frisky.

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I advise readers to not eat mushrooms they might obtain wherever. I may have said here before that all mushroom species are edible.

Once.

 

Acute liver toxicity is wrong with that. Joking about it seems crude, but senses of humor differ.

The whole topic hits close to home because my stepson ate mushrooms that, for being undercooked, sent him to hospital. He remembers very little of his stay there but made full recovery. As far as we can tell.

 

A gloomy study forecasting a 19% drop in global income by 2050 has been retracted:
Authors retract Nature paper projecting high costs of climate change – Retraction Watch
Researchers lower estimate of drop in global income due to climate change as journal retracts study - CBS News

Generating a lot of buzz in all places that one might expect.

Authors have revised their analysis to 17% drop in global income by 2050, but that has not yet been reviewed and published. It is a preprint on Zenodo, but blocked for me so nothing more to say about it.

If the -17% does get published, it might generate less buzz.

 

There are about 8 mushroom species widely sold in US, mostly cultivated ones. Yunnan (province in China) has about 800 edible species, most species harvested seasonally from forests (and not yet cultivatable). I learned that after arriving, and have probably tried about 30. Edible for some species means particular cooking requirements. A few need to be fried before boiling meaning 100 degrees C won't make them safe.

Mushroom hotpot restaurants (with 20 minute boil timers etc.) are very nice but miss perfection for me. Boil 12 species together for 20 min. and they taste almost the same. Textural differences persist. Separate cooking would be better but I don't know that ultimate nerdiness is available in Kunming.

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Played-out coal mines in Pennsylvania produce a lot for the $1 billion US market for Agaricus bisporus. If agricultural manure is involved, I ain't sayin'.

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Other cultivated species do not obtain required nitrogen in that way. Grown on straw or similar, they kill and eat nematodes and other micro-crawlies.

Poop eaters or predators; take yer pick.