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The impossible predicament of the death newts

crookedtimber.org

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Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#41

Post by hoseja »

sbierwagen wrote: post #18
ryanblakeley wrote: post #9

I once took a group of young people foraging for mushrooms in the Willamette valley on a farm that had loads of these newts. I warned every body not to touch them. After preparing dinner, one girl got very ill, as did I, while other people who ate the dinner were fine. I was so worried I'd mis-identified some mushrooms. But turns out she had handled one of these newts and the bacteria had transferred to the mushrooms…

Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.

Sorry but skill issue.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#42

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

mock-possum wrote: post #25
sbierwagen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating wild mushrooms has got to have the worst cost/benefit ratio outside of wingsuiting or recreational bear wrestling. In exchange for hours of study and a significant risk of death you get fifty to a hundred calories of food. Probably made sense in the tenth century when the average person was one bad harvest away from starvation, but it seems harder to justify today.

Oh come on - Making cost benefit analysis of foraging and eating wild mushrooms into a matter of calories is wild. The calorific value of a meal is one of the least important aspects - you might as well complain that the mushrooms don’t come in sufficiently varied colours to make it worthwhile. It’s not about the calories. It’s about the experience - the taste, the texture, the satisfaction of knowing you did it your…

Yeah, when I read the comment about calories I thought "This is a prime example when engineers only think about numbers and completely miss the forest for the trees (err, mushrooms)"

Also, for many mushrooms, the risk of consuming a toxic variety is extremely low if you know what you're doing. People love to bring up examples of "But the head of the Mycological Society of XYZ died of misidentified mushrooms!!", but a while back I dug into those examples and found 0 evidence for any of them - they're just popular Internet old wives' tales that people love to regurgitate.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#43

Post by boogieknite »

dado3212 wrote: post #15
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #8

Christ, I handled these as a kid quite a bit. Add that to the list of reasons I will wonder how I survived past age 10. I used to keep native snakes and lizards (and inadvertently breed them!), and couldn’t keep newts because I wasn’t sophisticated enough to create the right environments for them. This is one species I kept (and killed, unfortunately). I’ve learned to do it far better since then, but haven’t tried ke…

I also handled these all the time as a kid in northern Oregon, literally hundreds in a day because they would hang out in a series of lakes nearby. Is there a non-poisonous rough-skinned newt variant? I find it impossible to believe that as a young kid I wouldn’t have licked my fingers after years of doing this.

few more generations of handling these lil friends and maybe we can get aposematic coloring in humans

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#44

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

busterarm wrote: post #35
reverendsteveii wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you only eat the food with the highest calories:risk ratio?

Risk of death is a huge cost/downside. I've known several people poor enough to optimize all of their eating around cost per calorie. 30-50 calories is basically only worth your consideration if it's free at that point. If that came with a high risk of illness/death it's not even worth considering.

Ironically, optimizing around cost per calorie is, at least in most places in the US, a great way to have horrible health and die an early death.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#45

Post by duped »

steezeburger wrote: post #38
busterarm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MSG is like $0.30/kg.

I don't think they had MSG before salt

There's a long history of glutamate containing food and food products being used in place of salt across the world, before it was first chemically isolated.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#47

Post by MisterTea »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #33
crazygringo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even that much. A couple of cups of mushrooms -- a generous helping as a side dish -- has around 30 calories. All the significant calories comes from the oil or butter they're cooked in. I'm not sure it was ever about avoiding starvation, but rather just a different flavor to eat sometimes. When you're always eating the same local ingredients, food can get boring pretty quick. It's the same appeal of spices -- yo…

> It's the same appeal of spices -- you got a new flavor! That's not the appeal of spices. People don't stop using the spices they like in quest of newer, worse-tasting ones. By far the most common case when a person is eating spices is that there's nothing new about the flavor.

Could also be used to mask stale or spoiled foods that if cooked enough, wont kil you and still contains nutrition. Nothing goes to waste. Another could be preservation as is the case for salt.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#48

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

busterarm wrote: post #39
Vilian wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say that to any mildly dangerous hobby

How many people in the US do you think actually forage wild plants and fungi? The number of hospitalizations is somewhere around 10k a year. For ~1500 of those it's at least life threatening. ~100ish end up with organ failure or permanent neurological problems. ~10 of them die. That's every year. That might be mildly dangerous compared to other hobbies, but if you isolate for actual practitioners of the hobby, sudden…

Where are you getting your data? Is this a specific country/worldwide/what? If you're just talking about the US, a quick Google search shows your numbers are off by a few orders of magnitude. This article from the CDC estimated 100 hospitalizations for mushrooms in the US in 2016: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010a1.htm

Foraging for mushrooms is not dangerous if you know what you're doing and stick to easily identified mushrooms that aren't easily confused with poisonous varieties.

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#49

Post by zonkerdonker »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #8

Christ, I handled these as a kid quite a bit. Add that to the list of reasons I will wonder how I survived past age 10. I used to keep native snakes and lizards (and inadvertently breed them!), and couldn’t keep newts because I wasn’t sophisticated enough to create the right environments for them. This is one species I kept (and killed, unfortunately). I’ve learned to do it far better since then, but haven’t tried ke…

Same here. I had no idea they were this toxic, I feel like someone should have told us this as children!

Re: The impossible predicament of the death newts

#50

Post by fragmede »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #44
busterarm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Risk of death is a huge cost/downside. I've known several people poor enough to optimize all of their eating around cost per calorie. 30-50 calories is basically only worth your consideration if it's free at that point. If that came with a high risk of illness/death it's not even worth considering.

Ironically, optimizing around cost per calorie is, at least in most places in the US, a great way to have horrible health and die an early death.

What food and $/calorie do you get to determine that?
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