I've eaten at Dave's and also gather and eat morel's regularly in Montana.
Dave's is a popular joint but didn't strike me as particularly good even by Sushi restaurants in Montana standards. They had some creative rolls but seemed to fail to get the basic fish cuts and rice seasoning right.
What they were doing marinating the morel's and eating them basically raw is ridiculous. No one who is experienced with morel's does it that way and most mushroom guides contain info on hydrazine contents/risk and suggested cooking methods.
March and April is too early for Montana (or most US) Morel's which are commercially picked in forest fires from the previous year once the soil temperature reaches 54 degrees. I heard at one point these were grown in China and wouldn't be shocked if they are a different [sub]species that might contain more hyrazine. There are also some "false morels" that fruit earlier (one species is known as the snow morel as it comes up right after snow melt) but these are easy to identify contain even more hydrazine.
The article also claims they were imported from China. They also said samples were sent for genetic testing and confirmed they were of the species Morchella sextelata. Not sure if that is what you're referring to as a species with a higher hydrazine content but I agree with you that you should be cooking them regardless and it's strange to me that they were serving them raw.
> On April 8, the morels were served partially cooked, with a hot, boiled sauce poured over the raw mushrooms and left to marinate for 75 minutes; and on April 17, they were served uncooked and cold-marinated.
All morels are poisonous when eaten raw. There is zero gap in knowledge here.
Yeah this article is kind of annoying. I've started foraging for mushrooms in the past few months and I've never found a morel but I know they're poisonous when raw. It even says so on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morchella#Toxicity
There are plenty of gaps in knowledge about mushrooms, and there's a lot of unknowns about the ecology of morels but plenty of people eat these all the time.
it’s written to an academic standard by the looks of it. they can’t claim things without proven research on it. the article says that the research into the toxin is not well characterized which is academic speak for that.
that said it’s common knowledge to anyone who knows anything about mushrooms that you need to cook morels.
My mom said the same thing to me a minute ago when I mentioned this headline. My parents are avid mushroom gatherers. Not every type of mushroom affects everyone the same way, a friend of theirs apparently ended up in hospital after eating the same kind of edible mushrooms my family ate for years, and it was thermally processed (cooked & pickled).
Chicken of the woods is where people get sick most often. They're super easy to identify and don't really have any dangerous look alikes, so people tend to start with them when they start gathering mushrooms.
They're delicious and the grow in huge quantities. So most people will eat a lot of them.
And most people are okay, but several have either allergies or a sensitivity to them. And they get violently sick.
Rule number one of wild gathered foods, regardless of what it is: eat just a little of it until you know it won't make you sick, even if it's 100% safe.
> Rule number one of wild gathered foods, regardless of what it is: eat just a little of it until you know it won't make you sick, even if it's 100% safe.
I don’t have the source at hand but I recall reading a few years ago that you should start by rubbing it on your skin, and if no reaction run it inside your lips, and if no reaction, chew it a bit and spit it out, and if no reaction then eat a very small amount, and only eat more after a significant period of time has passed, and then in small doses.
It seemed reasonable to me. Slowly increase the risk level.
I'm grateful that I learned this lesson pretty early and pretty quickly. My first time I stumbled upon morels I ate them raw, not knowing any better. Then chased it with some whiskey, thinking the alcohol would kill whatever it needed to. That combo can sometimes be deadly. I have never been so violently sick. I now heed with extreme caution when eating any mushrooms for the first time. I also tend to overcook them out of extreme caution.
Not directly related to this but I once was forced to deal with risks of trichynosis from undercooked bacon (long story) by drinking copious amounts of whiskey, after finding some old research which suggested the method. Bit of a hangover the next day but fine other than that.
Not drinking anything might work even better. Killing bacteria and parasites is what your stomach acid is there for. Doesn’t work that well if it’s diluted.
For foraged mushrooms. Alcohol can exacerbate reactions to mushroom toxins. There are particular wild mushrooms like ink caps that experts recommend you should not eat if you have had a drink within 48 hours, and you should not have a drink for 48 hours afterward.
The oversimplified answer is that there are potential toxins in foraged mushrooms that your liver needs to sort out, which is going to be even more problematic if it is busy dealing with acetaldehyde from the ethanol breakdown.
Pure lay speculation, but based on the fact that humans have been deliberately ingesting lots of alcohol for millennia (and mammals have been doing intermittently for untold millions of years), the liver may preferentially break down ethanol and then acetaldehyde even when substances that are problematic/deadly in lower concentrations are present. Alcohol metabolism has been optimized for.
Interesting anecdote, methanol causes intoxication similar to alcohol and is harmful but not deadly in and of itself. However, methanol ingestion can cause blindness and death specifically because the liver breaks it down quickly into formic acid, which then circulates throughout the bloodstream. In cases of methanol poisoning, the antidote is to drink alcohol (ethanol) in sufficient quantities, since the liver preferentially breaks down the alcohol, allowing the methanol to be broken down much slower to the point that it is no longer deadly (half-life goes from 2-3 hours to 90+ hours when ethanol is present).
Depends on how much you're eating. They still contain chitin and human stomachs don't like chitin. You can end up with pretty severe stomach discomfort from eating a lot of them raw. Button and cremini mushrooms are actually the same species, and have pretty low chitin levels, but even someone with a pretty strong stomach can definitely overdo it with raw agaricus bisporus.
The commercial button mushrooms are still carcinogenic when eaten raw. The reason you see them at salad bars is because in practice there is no way to sue the salad bar if you get cancer 20 years later or whatever. But it's still not a good idea to eat them raw.
The only two mushrooms people generally recommend trying raw are the beefsteak polypore and the caesar's amanita. But this isn't because they are healthier when eaten raw, but rather because they have some unique culinary properties that are considered worth the risk when consumed in small quantities.
Do you have a source? If you mean formaldehyde then I don’t think that really matters. That’s everywhere from a decent chunk of glues to wood. Chances are you are exposed to small amounts of it every single day.
It's agaratine, but unlike acrylamide, which is most definitely a human carcinogen, the jury is still out on agaratine. You can give rats cancer with it, but only at huge doses.
The more important consideration, from the limited reading I've done, is to limit consumption to cultivated mushrooms from reputable sources. Environmental toxins in raw mushrooms is a definite problem! But the white buttons you get at Safeway are no more likely to poison you than the potatoes or romaine you buy there.
> (3) The effect seems smaller than that of potatoes and other acrylamide carriers, which we know, end-to-end, to be causative of human cancer.
Acrylamide, like many things, is known to be causative of cancer at extremely high doses. There is no indication that the levels found in food are harmful; it would be very difficult for a human to eat the levels of acrylamide shown to be harmful.
The list of things carcinogenic at doses two orders of magnitude larger than those found in food is large.
Meh. As far as I know, red meet is unambiguously carcinogenic, but that's not stopping many people from eating steak. I'll take my chances with mushrooms.
The effectiveness is hotly debated in literature [0], but I recommend everyone keep activated charcoal in their house. At the first sign of food poisoning take a couple tablets. It’s commonly used in Asia and has saved my life at least twice. For some reason it’s not as popular in the western world, but you can find it on the shelf in many pharmacies.
First incident. In late 2005, I'm in Bangkok for business. On the 3rd or 4th night I ventured to an outdoor restaurant, and ate their "specialty" which was raw shrimp, garlic, and crushed chili. Yes, I was an idiot. On the walk back to the hotel I started to feel it. Broke out into a cold sweat, doubled over, and realized my meal was bad news. I managed to get back to the hotel and asked for help. I thought they would call an ambulance but instead they gave me some charcoal, which I had never even heard of before - but they convinced me to take it. I started to feel some relief after 30 minutes or so. I still felt terrible for a day or two, but I could tell it would have been far worse had I not taken it.
Second incident. In 2012 I'm in Madrid on Business, and a colleague and I met up at a somewhat empty restaurant. We split a paella, because we were foreigners and forgot we weren't in Barcelona. We went back to our separate hotels in different parts of town. I had some charcoal with me, and realized I needed to take some. I got back home fine, my colleague went back home and ended up in the emergency room - took her about 10 days to recover.
It's not something I take often (maybe once every two or three years). But I swear by it and always travel with it just in case an adventurous culinary experience ends poorly.
I'm not a doctor or anything so I could be mistaken, but my understanding was that activated charcoal is helpful for treating poisons/toxins, not pathogens like you might find in bad seafood.
Unless there was a poisonous mushroom or something in your Thai food or your paella, would activated charcoal be expected to help?
Activated charcoal is just a high adsorption material with a lot more surface area (100-1000x or so) than stomach lining so anything floating around is more likely to be trapped by the charcoal than get absorbed by your digestive system.
It works with pretty much anything, good or bad, since it exploits a basic physical process of molecules sticking together.
@why_at your comment and @throwup238's (thread name checks out) are IIRC the source of the debate. There is a porous surface area and tests/arguments of the type/size of the particle that can attach - perhaps they are inconclusive because there are lots of other things at play in the stomach and gut like biomes and various substances and surfaces and reactions. In my experience it worked and, based on my recollection I'm pretty sure in both scenarios above I would have been f*cked if not for the treatment.
I'm definitely open to the possibility that it might work differently on different people - we're not all clones.
These days, in large non-coastal cities, I've heard that it is often other than you would expect. In cities where there are large international airports, fish is flown in daily, to the point where the fish served in nicer restaurants will not be much less fresh than on the coast. The Denver Post article linked below goes into how fish is flown to Denver within hours of being caught, every day.
Most seafood in the US is frozen at some point, regardless of if you are near the coast or not. And, yes, this includes most "fresh" fish, which generally just means recently thawed.
There may be exceptions if it is caught locally and in season, but the vast majority of seafood eaten in the US is not local, no matter how close you are to the coast.
Eastern Spain is on the Mediterranean sea and is home to Paella. Madrid is farther from the sea and not known for Paella. It's like ordering oysters in Iowa.
You say this, but it's perfectly normal in heavily populated parts of the world to do this. It's not like he found some street stand that popped up for one night only and no one else ever did it again.
I've had plenty of raw seafood from food stalls across the world and never had an issue.
I know that this is a low-effort observation but what stuck out to me in that story was "Dave's sushi in Bozeman". Like, there are some red flags just in that name.
That not a lot of people in Bozeman eat sushi, and not a lot of people named Dave run sushi restaurants. Bozeman is closer to the bluefin than Chicago is, and Chicago has excellent Japanese restaurants; it's not (directly) a geographical observation.
It calls to mind Show Biz Sushi from King of the Hill.
Dave's is about as non-sushi of a name as I can imagine for a sushi restaurant, I agree. Having eaten there many times (much to my chagrin), it's a pretty down-to-earth, not very fancy, not particularly high quality restaurant. But it has been the for 20+ years.
There are newer sushi places in town that are much fancier, and have fancy trendy names to match, such as "Seven".
As mentioned in other comments, all sushi fish in the US must be frozen for 7 days to kill parasites, so there's no such thing as "fresh" sushi here. That said, you can get day-of fresh fish in Bozeman - it's flown in a few times a week from Seattle, and is quite pricey. A friend of mine has built a business delivering it to restaurants in the morning.
That's all sushi. Even in Japan. Sushi Grade means it was frozen long enough and deeply enough to kill parasites, versus the standard grades which are kept cold, but aren't frozen at all.
Right, I assume whatever Chicago does to get good fish, Bozeman can do too. It's more a question of what the turnover is like in a Bozeman sushi restaurant. And to be clear: it's mostly just snark! I said it was a low-effort comment! :)
(It's very neat that you have an eyewitness report of actually being there.)
Your animus is showing. Bozeman is an affluent college town near a ski resort with real estate prices at California levels. Besides, it's 2024 and for about two decades now even dirtbags in the US have eaten sushi. You can buy sushi at Walmart and "gas station sushi" is not just a punch line.
I lived in the region for some years and never encountered any seafood that I thought was fit to eat. Eventually I stopped ordering it, and turning it down when it was offered to me.
I didn't go to the super-expensive places that have it flown in daily. Those might be okay, but the stuff in normal Chicagoland restaurants and grocery stores is just plain nasty.
The article goes through the rather in depth way that they narrowed down the list of potential causes to specifically the mushrooms.
If it was the way they handled their fish, it seems unlikely to me that their methodology would still have pointed to the morels. This is a sushi restaurant- pretty much everyone is eating some of their fish.
Right? Though my understanding is you want the fish frozen anyway to kill parasites and from there quality mostly comes down to reliability of frozen transport out of the port
Are restaurants in that state required to stop operating until they address problems like that, or is it one of the states that only lets inspectors make a restaurant stop serving if someone has actually been sickened by those problems?
An interesting aside - last year researchers discovered that indocyanide green (a medical dye) can be used as an antidote for alpha-amanitin poisoning! This is the bad stuff in death caps (amanita phalloides), funeral bells (galerina marginata) and a host of other deadly mushrooms. Potentially a game changer for future mushroom poisoning victims.
As do I, although I prefer them cooked. The article claims that even if they're not toxics, the chitin renders the nutrients unavailable to digestion. (Which is plausible, but I'd like to see actual citations for it.)
On the poisonous front, my grandfather used to pick and eat Gyromitra Esculenta. His preparation method apparently rendered them safe, but he had no idea they were deadly when not properly prepared. (It's been a long time, but I recall that he'd soak his mushrooms in salted water to "get the bugs out" and would typically cook them in gravy.)
It's common, but stupid. Button mushrooms contain a known carcinogen for rats, agaritine, which is easily broken down when they are cooked. Many other mycotoxins in other mushrooms are rendered inert by cooking as well.
A weird quirk: i know a few people who had iron deficiencies that would eat raw unwashed mushrooms as a side effect. Now, i was very young when i was told this, so i may be misinformed (about the reasoning. I assuredly saw them eat them straight from the flat without washing)
I've merrily eaten raw white mushrooms like everyone else but some people have sensitivities, and like any other raw vegetable they can be contaminated with bacteria or other pathogens.
this may be a shit take but i won't ever forage for mushrooms. Every other story seems to be "got sick" vs "i can eat for free from the local woodlands".
If i ever want to harvest my own mushrooms i'll buy the plug sdtarters from a reputable place, i think.
> But the FDA reported that "samples of morel mushrooms collected from the restaurant were screened for pesticides, heavy metals, toxins, and pathogens. No significant findings were identified." In addition, the state and local health officials noted that DNA sequencing identified the morels used by the restaurant as Morchella sextelata, a species of true morel. This rules out the possibility that the mushrooms were look-alike morels, called "false morels," which are known to contain a toxin called gyromitrin.
So the evidence seems to point to the morels, but we don’t have any idea how they could have caused the effect
The problem with harvesting mushrooms is that knowledge only applies regionally. Most of the time the people who get sick are travelers from mushroom-loving countries who forage while abroad.
That's true to an extent, but some families (agaricaceae and boletaceae come to mind) are found pretty much everywhere, and their edible members are easy to identify. Do you have a source for that? I would be surprised if the majority of poisonings (in the USAS, say) are travelers.
I can only see the table of contents, and not the whole article (it's from some magazine from the 60s), but supposedly it's toxic when combined with alcohol.
Is this specifically involving a hydrazine? I got downvoted for this yesterday.
"Even the cultivated A. bisporus contains small amounts of hydrazines, the most abundant of which is agaritine (a mycotoxin and carcinogen). However, the hydrazines are destroyed by moderate heat when cooking."
> Food specimens were tested for multiple substances, including volatile and nonvolatile organic compounds and enteric pathogens. Neither clinical testing nor food testing identified a causative agent.
Deadly morel but nobody died. Sounds like 50 people got food poisoning. Sounds like non-news to me. First: morels can make you sick if not cooked properly, Second: lookup how many people get food poisoning each year.
And all this speculation about the mushrooms coming from China. Assume they came from China. So what?
It's well known that uncooked/undercooked morels can cause this. Food poisoning is not this rare thing that happened to hit this crummy place in Montana. It's non-news.
Dave's is a popular joint but didn't strike me as particularly good even by Sushi restaurants in Montana standards. They had some creative rolls but seemed to fail to get the basic fish cuts and rice seasoning right.
What they were doing marinating the morel's and eating them basically raw is ridiculous. No one who is experienced with morel's does it that way and most mushroom guides contain info on hydrazine contents/risk and suggested cooking methods.
March and April is too early for Montana (or most US) Morel's which are commercially picked in forest fires from the previous year once the soil temperature reaches 54 degrees. I heard at one point these were grown in China and wouldn't be shocked if they are a different [sub]species that might contain more hyrazine. There are also some "false morels" that fruit earlier (one species is known as the snow morel as it comes up right after snow melt) but these are easy to identify contain even more hydrazine.