Not mush-room for error

With poisonous fungi hitting the headlines in recent weeks, John Wright introduces Britain's most deadly species and advises on how best to avoid eating them in the first place

- John Wright

LAST October, I toddled over to the local pub for my weekly pint with the other old boys from the village. Charlie had picked some 'field mushrooms' and duly shared out five small bags of his bounty among the assembled company. One glance told me that his knowledge of fungi was seriously wanting, as they were in fact yellow stainers (they turn chromium yellow when scratched), not field mushrooms (which don't). I had saved the day, although not Charlie's. He had eaten nine of them for tea and was to spend the entire night confined to the smallest of quarters. How we laughed!

Yellow stainers are not deadly, merely very nasty; I have met more than 100 people who have suffered thus. Being lookalikes of the related field and horse mushroom, two species with a British tradition of collection, they are by far the most common cause of mushroom poisoning in the UK. With the British having shown little interest in eating other 'excrements of the earth' (as physician James Hart put it in 1633's The Diet of the Diseased) for all of their history, we have been lucky that the only likely mistake has been that of Charlie's. There are far worse mushrooms than yellow stainers.