Don’t Rely on the App to Find Out If a Mushroom Is Edible

Mushrooms are like people: some of them are great to invite home for dinner, while others are poisonous and want to kill you. Don’t rely on an app, a downloadable newsletter, or someone who says, “Yes, that’s probably okay.”

There are many mushroom identification applications that are marketed with varying degrees of responsibility. The one above is in beta testing (although it currently costs $ 4.99) and its developer told the motherboard that it is for educational use. When I searched the iTunes store, the best mushroom identification app was the one that said you shouldn’t rely on it to tell you what is edible. But on the other end of the spectrum is an Android app called Edible Fungi, which says that all you need is “a good identification guide and a little common sense” to decide which is.

People die and get sick, constantly eating forest mushrooms. It is worth reading the report of the North American Mycological Association , which details the cases reported to them in 2014. These include mushroom poisonings that have passed through the hands of gatherers and chefs who should have known what they were doing but still misidentified their mushrooms. If you want to start researching mushrooms, it’s best to find a local expert club and find out all the clues you need to identify the mushroom (for example, the color of its spore) that the app cannot. it is possible to evaluate. Not a drop of common sense will solve this.

In short, if you want an edible mushroom app, you are not the type to try to identify edible mushrooms. Remove the death penalty and head to the grocery store instead.

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