Hey guys, just be really careful with picking and eating wild mushrooms. Many edible species look very very similar to very poisonous ones. You should really only eat wild harvested mushrooms after training with an experienced mushroom collector.
Mushroom poisoning is nasty. Mostly they affect the liver, through deadly metabolites that stop liver function, and often the onset is a few days after ingestion, and apparent only well after the damage is done. Sometimes they can affect the kidney resulting in kidney failure. Other poisons cause vomiting and gastric disturbance, but if that’s all you get you’re lucky.
psilocybin is really safe, OTOH. it was widely used in the 60s in psychology, and there was never a recorded case of anything more than short term anxiety from many years of clinical use of psilocybin or related molecules.
Agree with the above. and I’d love to go and collect some mushrooms with an experienced mycologist btw, but even if many look delicious I never take any of them from the wild (but is there any wild edible thing in Taiwan anyway?).
As for the psilocybin, supposedly it’s safe although I think I heard of people having flashbacks (this is something that definitively happens with LSD but… well I might be wrong). I wouldn’t say that its use in psychology/psychiatry was that extended, maybe Gestalt-like hippies and so used it, but I don’t think it was very mainstream or common at all.
Where though? in the past years I’ve seen many mushroom “farms”, but the wild mushrooms I spotted… they didn’t look like anything you can find in the supermarket.
So many factors involved, like temperature (time of year), precipitation, elevation, surrounding flora, knowledge and enthusiasm of the hunter, luck, etc. etc.
And some years the various elements don’t come together and they just don’t sprout.
I am fairly new to Taiwan and have zero experience foraging here.
I would love to see the glow in the dark ones though. Never seen that before.
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