Autumn, so picking mushrooms. But watch out! When picking mushrooms, extra vigilance is required. There are municipalities where picking mushrooms on the basis of municipal regulations is not allowed. Picking is also at your own risk: especially for mushrooms it is not easy to distinguish non-toxic from poisonous species. The State Forestry Management therefore does not encourage the picking of mushrooms.

'A single mushroom can already be fatal'
Mushroom excursion In the autumn, people look for edible mushrooms. But sometimes they accidentally eat poisonous specimens.

The meadow mushroom and the meadow funnel fungus: both grow in the grass of Landgoed Elswout, just outside Haarlem. Both types of mushroom are in a coven, less than ten meters apart. But while the first species is well edible, the second species can be fatal to a young child when consumed.

In the Netherlands, people get sick every autumn by eating poisonous mushrooms. The numbers vary from year to year, depending on the weather conditions: in wet years more mushrooms are often found. At the end of July, the annual review of 2019 of the National Poisoning Information Centre (NVIC) showed that 249 people reported 'exposure to mushrooms'. More than half of all reports were made by worried parents whose child had eaten a mushroom bite — often without negative consequences. But 32 people ate mushrooms for meals and became so sick that they sought medical help.

“In these cases it involved game pickers, who considered a poisonous species to be edible,” says Henneke Mulder-Spijkerboer, toxicologist at the NVIC. “When eating a meal of the wrong mushrooms, the dose of toxins is often so high that the consequences can be very serious.” Depending on the type of mushroom, this may include liver failure, kidney failure, seizures and — in the absence of treatment — death.


Wildpicking: It's in our nature