Achi news desk-
It turns out morel mushrooms and real estate have something in common.
Location, location, location is the golden rule for buying or selling a home as much as it is for morels – the elusive edible variety that often grows in the same place every year and, according to a fungus expert, can be potentially dangerous depending on where you choose them.
Morels are brown, black or yellow and have elongated caps with a ridged and perforated appearance that resembles honeycombs. With a strong and unique flavour, they are prized by chefs and amateur cooks alike for their ability to bring new life to meals.
For those in the know, places where morels grow are closely guarded secrets. For the uninitiated, finding them while out for a walk in the woods is a rare thing, according to Andrew Murray, an amateur naturalist who often spends his free time admiring the beauty of the natural world.
“I take pictures and leave them,” he says, noting that he has never eaten one. “They are quite rare in my experience. I see maybe one every few years. The last one was in 2021.”
False and true morels easy to spot
The mushroom’s shy nature and coveted status may be why people seem so eager to post photos of them online every spring.
Over the past few weeks, morel hunters across Canada have been posting their hauls to social media groups – from a lone mushroom plucked from a suburban dad’s lawn, to morels gathered by the dozen, harvested from secret hunting ground.
Murray doesn’t eat them because there are more fakes out there and, as he says, “I don’t trust my fungal identification skills.”
False morels can cause serious illness and, in rare cases, death if swallowed, according to UBC’s Beaty Biodiversity Museum in Vancouver.
The good news is that it’s relatively easy to tell the difference between a fake morel and a real one, says Greg Thorn, a biology professor at Western University in London, Ont., who studies fungi.
“The false morel looks more like a brain on a stick than a honeycomb, so it has quite a different morphology,” he said, noting, “‘false morel’ is called that because they occur at the same season in the spring when there aren’t many other mushrooms out there.”
Morel Lesson: Stick to conservation areas, parks
Thorn said the most important consideration for morel hunters is where they harvest their mushrooms. Morels have a tendency to absorb and concentrate toxins found in their environments, according to research.
“They are notorious for taking up toxins in the soil, including metals such as lead, or cadmium or arsenic.” He noted that although abandoned apple orchards are great locations for morel hunting, they should be avoided due to the historical reliance on arsenic-based pesticides on apple crops.
A 2010 study found concentrations of lead and arsenic in morel mushrooms harvested from an old apple orchard in New Jersey; a 2018 study found concentrations of radionuclides from wild mushrooms collected at Chornobyl, the site of a 1986 nuclear power plant accident.
Thorn said a mushroom is the seed body of a much larger organism that lives underground, a vast hidden network of filaments and threads that take nutrients from soil or a rotting log.
“Fungi, for whatever reason, we don’t know why they don’t distinguish between compounds they need and compounds they don’t, like radioactive cesium,” Thorn said. “They are very, very good at concentrating these compounds.
“You really don’t want to be eating a lunch of radioactive cesium or arsenic.”
That’s why Thorn recommends sticking to conservation areas or parks to pick mushrooms and to avoid areas known to be contaminated, such as abandoned apple orchards or brownfield sites.
Thorn said that given the early spring, it is likely that this year’s morel season will extend well into May, meaning the mushrooms could continue to sprout until Mother’s Day on May 12.
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