PICAYUNE —
Crosby Arboretum director Pat Drackett knows how to attract a crowd at the Arboretum: hold a seminar on either hummingbirds or mushrooms.
Last month a hummingbird seminar attracted more than 50 paying attendees, and on Saturday another seminar — this one on mushrooms, presided over by an authority on mushrooms, Dr. Juan Luis Mata, assistant professor, Dept. of Biological Sciences, University of South Alabama — also attracted more than 50 patrons.
Dr. Mata told participants that if you are not sure what type of mushroom you have picked, don’t eat it because if you pick, prepare and eat the poisonous one, you can be a dead duck.
And if not dead, seriously debilitated. The chemicals from some mushrooms can destroy body tissue, can cause hallucinations, and can be deadly in some cases.
“So don’t eat it if you have any doubt about its classification,” said Mata.
The best advice is to buy your mushrooms at the supermarket or health food specialty shop and let the experts harvest the safe ones for you.
What can make the mushroom, which is really a fungi, so dangerous is that the good ones also have a bad one that looks like the safe one. So you might have two mushrooms that look similar, but one can kill you, while the other one would be perfectly safe to eat.
Sometimes only an expert can tell the subtle differences between the safe and deadly ones.
Some people, who are experts at it, collect and harvest mushrooms from the wild and sell them to gourmet food markets.
Some mushrooms will go for $200 a bagful. But you have to know what you are doing to be a professional harvester. One mistake and you could kill or injure a customer.
The crowd broke up into small groups and walked along the Arboretum’s trails and then came back and Mata identified what type of mushroom they had picked.
There are more than 800 different varieties in Pearl River County, said Mata.
Worldwide, there are probably more than 30,000 varieties.
Mata is considered a national authority on mushrooms. He teaches at South Alabama near Mobile.
The fleshy plant you see above ground is actually the fruit of the fungi which is below ground, said Mata. The fruit above ground is the spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, most of which exist in a symbiotic relationship with plants by converting leaves and other material into food the plants can use.
The standard mushroom is the “white button mushroom”, which is cultivated. But they come in all types of varieties and colors, from brilliant oranges to reds.
Mushrooms have a stem, a cap and some have slits underneath called gills.
The mushroom goes way back into ancient lore, and the proverbial “toadstool,” where a frog is sitting atop the cap catching flies goes back into the Middle Ages.
In England, the lore associates mushrooms with gnomes. The “Amanita muscaria,” is the most easily recognized “toadstool,” frequently depicted in fairy stories and on greeting cards.
Mata said there are a number of characteristics allowing one to identify a certain species, but he says identification procedures have now even acquired ways to identify some by their molecular structure, requiring a scientific knowledge.
Mata said mushrooms’ variety and the lore surrounding them, are, he believes, why so many people are interested in knowing more about mushrooms.
The act of hunting and collecting mushrooms has become known as “mushrooming,’ or mushroom hunting.
Known as the meat of the vegetable world, the mushroom is used extensively in European, Chinese and Japanese cuisines. They are of nutritional value, too.
Some mushrooms have hallucinogenic properties, though, and are used in religious rituals in some parts of the world.
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Related Photos
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Dr. Mata, above holds a mushroom as he addresses a crowd of more than 50 mushroom enthusiasts on Saturday at Crosby Arboretum. At far left is a “chicken” mushroom found growing alongside a walking trail in the Mason Neck State Park near Lorton, Va. A closeup of the colorful mushroom is shown directly at left. David A. Farrell and Will Sullivan
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