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Ate it off the ground most likely.

It's a yummy death mushroom!

Foraging for mushrooms is one of those activities where the risks far outweigh the rewards, at least to me.

I forage mushrooms. I think there is both a healthy fear and an overreaction to how dangerous it really is. A novice can forage for something like chicken of the woods because it is an obvious species that has no deadly lookalikes. However there are mushrooms even I still avoid despite knowing exactly what they are because they have poisonous lookalikes.

What's really surprising is people seem to think foraging plants to be safer despite there being plants with edible lookalikes like poison hemlock that can kill in minutes.

In the end, a little bit of practice, focus, and understanding safety, mushroom foraging, and plant foraging, is actually much less dangerous than one would imagine. Still, if you don't know what you are doing you should never eat a mushroom or plant that you aren't 100% certain is what it is. Never munch on a hunch.

I went to culinary school and they made it absolutely clear that you should never forage without an experienced mycologist with you. Or at least, never eat them before checking with one.

For what it’s worth, the poisonings are almost always children or people who are familiar with safe mushrooms in their home country that look just like the death cap, not local knowledgeable foragers.

That said I don’t eat foraged mushrooms either, even though it’s probably safe, because you only get one liver.

here's the thing: the poison mushrooms are also delicious

And some transport you to parallel dimensions to meet magical imps. Fungi are extremely cool organisms.

I prefer the ones that show me god.

This is also kind of true of plants in the nightshade family like potatoes and tomatoes where they can be pretty poisonous if you eat the wrong parts, we just know which parts we can eat. We also don't have cultural stigma against eating potatoes so more people know about them. Knowledge is power!

Also, tobacco and chile peppers are in the nightshade family as well, but the "poisonous" chemical in those is slightly altered in each case to make nicotine and capsaisin respectfully. Neat!

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, probably.

In my country we even avoid giving mushrooms we know are safe, nearly impossible to harvest incorrectly, to children under 4 because they may be hard on the digestive system.

Probably no one. Kid probably found it and parents didn't know or couldn't stop some of it from getting into the kid. Children at that age are on a mission to speed run life.

Real talk! I studied mycology, and the only culinary mushroom I feel comfortable identifying is morels.

Not likely, all the victims were migrants who had a practice of forraging where they grew up natively. I've read about cases like this across the country on either coast of the US.

However, there seems to be a spike, either due to the rains in California or perhaps another reason--not going to go as far as plaming 'AI' identification. I certainly wouldn't trust "AI" to do that job.

The California health department is providing video and documentation in order to help people identify the "Death Cap" mushroom in multiple languages:

https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/EHIB/Pages/EIS/Poisonous-Mushrooms.aspx

They only eat McDonald's.