So is paying more for produce from the “organic” section worth it?
Amanita Muscaria is definitely exciting, but it never made me barf. I got some (apparently) Australian mushrooms from an Aussie crusty in a boilersuit and a policeman’s hat at a festival in the 90s. As I recall, they were mustard yellow with bluish-grey stalks. They were fucking mental.
(Derp. @teapot, this was meant to be a reply to you, but it works here. You can read it anyway if you like)
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As is an hallucinogenic mushroom if you pick it, according to UK drug laws. We need a test case to see if it’s technically legal to crawl around on all fours and eat them straight out of the ground.
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Aren’t you supposed to be crawling around on all fours after you eat them?
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Start as you mean to go on…
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I’d say not really. In a short and inaccurate way, you are choosing between fungicide residues and mycotoxins.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2004/June/organic.asp
http://www.eufic.org/article/en/expid/Organic_food_and_farming_scientific_facts_and_consumer_perceptions/
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The French Foreign Legion if you want to forget, Amanita Muscaria for everything else.
Peruvian Blue’s they were named to me but I think they’re a type of bruised cubensis. And the ones I had were bluer. One and done.
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That might be them, aye.
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And when I say done, couldn’t speak or really direct myself for about 16 hours, relied on friendlies to look after me and physically direct me to not just stand in one spot looking lost. Good times! 
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According to this article, from the Spartanburg SC Herald-Journal, Death Caps (Amanita Phalloides) tastes great, but is pretty smelly (likened to a pair of gym shoes).
Like it says elsewhere in this thread, the majority of mushroom poisonings in the US happen because common deadly or harmful mushrooms look a lot like known-safe mushrooms that are common in Asia, and so a lot of Asian immigrants end up poisoning themselves with something that looks very similar to if not almost exactly the same as something they ate all the time back in their old country.
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This, a thousand times this.
When I’d have clients refuse prescription diets (like the renal sparing diet that someone else here mentioned) that were pretty much necessary for their pet’s well being because the diets “weren’t all-natural”, I’d have a little discussion with them about how oleander is “all natural”, as is tetrodotoxin, rattlesnake venom, ciguatoxin, ricin, and a whole host of delightful “organic” compounds that can really ruin your day. (and how’s that for a glorious run-on sentence!)
Natural is not equivalent to healthy or harmless (though many marketing dollars are spent trying to convince people of this).
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An “organic” diet has been shown to have no significant health benefits: https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/no-health-benefits-from-organic-food/
As to whether organic farming practices are better or worse from an environmental point of view…the jury is still out on that one. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. Lower productivity means that more land is required to produce the same output; resistance to the use of effective herbicides makes beneficial no-till farming practices more difficult to implement.
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There’s also the whole deal with the less-effective “natural” pesticides which are molecules found in nature but synthesized in volume for use in organic farming. It turns out that stuff is also less selective in toxicity and requires a lot more of it to be useful in farming.
So most often you end up with more pesticide residue on your organic food, as well as more potentially harmful effluent collecting in rivers and streams from organic farms than you would with the conventional farming methods that use more selective and effective pesticides that are synthetic or semi-synthetic, instead of naturally occurring, but synthesized in volume.
Honestly, if the organic food people actually had principles and stood by them, they wouldn’t use synthetically produced pesticides at all, since “Natural good. Fire bad”.
If nature is so great, they should chuck their cell phones, sell their cars, and live in a tent out in the woods instead of trying to make all food more expensive while it hasn’t been shown there’s a benefit to organic farming, and simultaneously demonizing conventionally grown crops for hazards they have no evidence exist.
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Psilocybe Semilanceata (Liberty Caps) also grow in the British Isles and Northern Europe. I think there might also be another species or three.
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I think water only qualifies as food if you’re a plant. I’m also dubious about calling table salt, by itself, food.
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Well, there’s irritating, poisonous, and then deadly. Muscaria isn’t really deadly, because it makes you puke it back up before you can eat a particularly dangerous dose, for the most part at least.
Whereas Amanita Phalloides tastes great, and primary symptoms are delayed by hours, and by then, pretty much all you can do is supportive care and hope you won’t need a liver or kidney transplant after the poison gets cleaned out by the kidneys.
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No such thing. You mean amanita smithiana, Smith’s amanita.
It is far more toxic than muscaria.
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that’s exactly what I meant. I’ll go back and correct that mistaken wording.
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There have been no fatalities from eating amanita muscaria during the 20th century. Its toxins are highly water soluble, boiling leeches the toxins and psychotropics. It would require about ten raw caps, ten times the amount you would ingest to trip, to kill you. This do not try as a n00b without guidance. Results vary by season and location.
Amanita muscaria are a food. They are just a bad choice for a food label as they require preparation to be edible without you feeling sick. Many other foods do too though.
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