To prepare for the collapse of Western civilisation, which seems to be more imminent with every news bulletin, I’m learning about wild food. Two months ago I learnt how to identify, prepare, cook and eat several different types of seaweed. Last week, I went on a ‘fungus foray and feast’.
The foray attracted a dozen punters. We met in a National Trust car park in a wood next to a beach. Christian, our guide and instructor, arrived comfortably dressed in a brown trilby hat, tweed jacket with a tear under the arm, and a worn-out old pair of steel toe-capped boots. We were going to walk to a farmhouse four miles away, he said, gathering fungi as we went. At the farmhouse we would identify, cook and eat what we’d found and hopefully, he said, most of us would live to tell the tale.
I was hoping that there would be a handy rule of thumb I could learn for differentiating between edible mushrooms and poisonous ones.
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