The Crumby Ovate is a Fun Guy

Today, in the capacity of sort of working at my job I started thinking about mushrooms in general. Why? Last week, I collected a mushroom during or shortly after my official lunch hour when I am supposed to eat dinner during the official part. This particular dinner was a combined lunch and team meeting so after we finished with that, and I was disconsolately meandering in the general direction of my cubicle, I espied some mushrooms on a patch of lawn under a ? tree next to the parking lot located north of the Hancock Building. I collected one of these mushrooms because it was bright yellow, pretty much all over, and I thought that an all yellow mushroom would be easy to identify with the aid of "Texas Mushrooms: A Field Guide". I had bought this book about 18 months previously and had never used it, previously, but I truly wanted to know about this particular yellow mushroom. So I read about how to operate the book, "Texas Mushrooms: A Field Guide", and then employed the described identification strategy on my specimen. Of course, the particular almost entirely yellow mushroom I had collected was not in this book. And, of course, I then had a sense of deja vu from realizing this had happened several times before with different books and different mushrooms.

But today, I noticed that my yellow mushroom, now dehydrated, was right where I left it in front of the computer monitor last Friday, so I resolved to try again. I had, you see, attempted an informal spore print last Friday by placing the cap of the yellow mushroom, pores down on the cover page of a particularly irksome report I have been working on at a leisurely pace. Of course, this particular yellow mushroom had shed, no spores.

Aggravated, I resolved upon another strategy for dealing with this particular yellow mushroom. I decided then and there to go back to the very spot I had collected it, obtain additional specimens and make a plant list for the general vicinity to include the tree the yellow mushrooms were growing under. I think that tree is (Quercus muhlenbergia) which is sometimes used by the landscape crowd as an ornamental in these parts, but I'm not sure because at the time I collected the yellow mushroom I was partially in conversation with several pretty and smart young ladies and wasn't paying careful attention to the general floristic surroundings.

But then I pivoted and didn't do any of that. Instead, I did a Google search on "mushroom poisoning in the U.S." hoping my search would retrieve some interesting statistics on that particular subtopic. But I didn't get very far because 4:15 rolled around and that is the time when I start fixing to leave for the day, 4:30, being when I get to head out for the good old Cow Barn.

When I got here to the Cow Barn, there was no one here but pets and livestock. Sometimes they all go off somewhere and have meetings about me. So, I did some chores, played with Lulu and then continued my search for information on mushroom poisoning in the U.S. I was hoping to find a table something like this:

Year U.S. Mortality from Mushroom Gluttony
04 12,603
03 10,898
02 10,436

Instead, I found "An Overview of Mushroom Poisonings in North America", by Michael W. Beug at http://www.psh.umich.edu~kwee/mper/4mfl.htm. Briefly, Dr. Beug indicates that in 2001-2003 no humans died of mushroom poisoning conclusively in the U.S. and/or Canada, but that mushrooms had been eaten by two people shortly before they died of other causes in the U.S. and/or Canada, possibly due to panic attacks. During this same time frame, 2001-2003 eight dogs died from mushroom poisoning, conclusively. In addition, only 192 people, during this time frame, reported getting sick from eating mushrooms, and many of these poisonings resulted from the consumption of mushroom species widely acknowledged as being safe and delicious. Apparently, some humans may have the genes required for eating mushrooms and some may not, or some particular mushrooms within a species presumed edible and delicious may have higher than average levels of toxins.

All this is very interesting and has radically altered my perception of mushrooms in general. And now that I am pretty sure it won't kill me, I am going to eat that yellow one, regardless of what species it is.

Why the heck do the vulgar and ignorant call them mushrooms? The Online Etymology Dictionary provides these opinions:

1440 (attested as a surname, John Mussheron, from 1327), from Anglo-Fr. musherun, perhaps from L.L. mussirionem (nom. mussirio), though this may as well be borrowed from Fr. Barnhart says "of uncertain origin." Klein calls it "a word of pre-Latin origin, used in the North of France;" OED says it usually is held to be a derivative of Fr. mousse "moss," and Weekley agrees, saying it is properly "applied to variety which grows in moss." For the final -m he refers to grogram, vellum, venom. Used figuratively for "sudden appearance in full form" from 1590s. The verb meaning "expand or increase rapidly" is first recorded 1903. In ref. to the shape of clouds after explosions, etc., it is attested from 1916, though the actual phrase mushroom cloud does not appear until 1958.

I may have to share all this with the Druidry in these parts as a Potential Safety Topic - environmental hazard - Musherune.

Finally there are some amusing words related to mushroom, besides mushroom and toadstool. These are mycophagist n. - one that eats fungi; mycophagous adj. - feeding on fungi; and mycophile n. - a person whose hobby is hunting wild edible mushrooms

So........to use all three in one sentence:

The mycophile turned mycophagous mycophagist once he masticated the morels.