Day 355: Is there a person alive who doesn't associate this mushroom with faeries, children's stories, video games? How did that get started, anyway? Well, it all began in Europe...
Although the North American version of Amanita muscaria goes by the same scientific nomenclature as the European species, there is something in its makeup which qualifies it poisonous on this continent but edible in Europe. The fools among American mushroom collectors will tell you that it is a hallucinogen and will give you a high but neglect to mention that the long-term effects of the amanitoxins contained in it include liver and kidney damage which may not show up for years and may lead to an untimely demise. The European muscaria contains fewer of those alkaloids, although they are not entirely absent. The amount is sufficiently lower to place muscaria among the edible species in Europe, and its recognizability led it to become the poster child for "mushroom." Many European children's books contained illustrations of muscaria, and when European settlers came to North America, their use of it as the stereotypical mushroom of faerie tale continued.
This can all be very confusing to a child or even to an adult. The bottom line is that you should leave this one where it sits. I won't go into another rant about being "105% sure" of any mushroom species you pick for your table. You already know that mushrooms can be quite difficult to tell apart, and if you're the kind of person who thinks a 20-minute trip among bright colours and weird shapes is worth paring five or ten years off your life or suffering through dialysis or hepatic collapse, my lecture would be wasted on you.
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