In the face of fatal temptation, how to become a "mushroom warrior"
Written by: Our reporter Zhao Hanbin Planning: Zhao Yingshu, Teng Jipu, Lin Lijun
【Produced by Shentong Studio】
Wild mushrooms are very delicious, but there are those who have collected toadstools by mistake, and those who have been poisoned by improper processing.
According to the statistics of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2010 to 2020, there were 10,036 mushroom poisoning incidents in my country, more than 38,000 people were poisoned, and 788 people died of ineffective treatment.
When the rainy season comes, fungus lovers are active again in the north and south, deep in the mountains, on the gentle slopes, and on the grasslands.
They were searching for the same kind of creatures, which are called "mushrooms", "mushrooms" and "wild mushrooms" in the southwest, and mushrooms in most other places.
I bumped into the "lucky guy" who was overgrown with mushrooms, happily took a bag and went back to eat, but a huge crisis may be coming, quickly and silently.
Wild mushrooms are very delicious, but there are those who have collected toadstools by mistake, and those who have been poisoned by improper processing.
According to statistics from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2010 to 2020, there were 10,036 mushroom poisoning incidents in my country, more than 38,000 people were poisoned, and 788 people died due to ineffective treatment.
The 2021 "China Center for Disease Control and Prevention Weekly Report" pointed out that mushroom poisoning is one of the most serious food safety problems in my country. There were 327 mushroom poisoning incidents throughout the year, involving 923 patients, of which 20 died. A total of 74 poisonous mushrooms were identified in the incident. kind.
The top five provinces with mushroom poisoning incidents are Hunan, Yunnan, Sichuan, Fujian and Guizhou.
Why Wild Mushrooms Are Respected
Li Yan, a fungus lover, was originally from Dali, Yunnan, grew up in Kaiyuan City, Honghe Prefecture, and now lives and works in Kunming.
Li Yan said that among the common wild mushrooms, she likes cockroaches, boletus, dry mushrooms, and blue-headed mushrooms the most. The most fragrant ones are dry mushrooms, and the "green in your hands" in boletus.
"The fire needs to be bigger, the oil needs to be more, and when I stir-fry it with cured meat, green peppers, and sliced garlic, half of the people in the community are drooling!"
Since ancient times, wild edible mushrooms have been regarded as "mountain treasures".
In Japan, it was revered as "the pinnacle of food" on land, and in ancient Rome it was regarded as "food of the gods".
Among about 210 countries and regions in the world, 47 countries have the tradition of collecting wild edible mushrooms for sale.
What makes food lovers coveted is not only the crunchy taste of wild edible mushrooms, but also the umami substances in the pot gas that are irresistible.
Almost all edible mushrooms contain 8 essential amino acids that the human body cannot manufacture on its own.
Yang Xukun, Institute of Quality Standards and Testing Technology, Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences, etc., after studying the amino acid composition of morel, bolete, chicken fir, black chicken fir, pine mushroom, dry mushroom and truffle in the Kunming market, found that in addition to the morel In addition to the bacteria, the umami amino acid content of 6 kinds of wild bacteria is more than 20%, of which the truffle has the highest umami amino acid content, reaching 28.65%, indicating that the delicious taste of these wild bacteria is far from common vegetables and fruits. .
Glutamic acid and aspartic acid are characteristic amino acids in umami amino acids, and glutamic acid has the strongest umami taste.
The sodium salt of glutamic acid is the protagonist of monosodium glutamate and chicken essence.
"Edible mushrooms also have a particularly high vitamin content, far better than ordinary fruits and vegetables. In addition, they are rich in minerals and some special biologically active substances, which can enhance the immune function of the human body, which is also their charm." All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives According to Hua Rong, deputy director of the Kunming Edible Fungi Research Institute, from a nutritional point of view, most edible fungi have nutritional components between meat and fruits and vegetables, which can be called health food with high nutritional value.
Among them, the leader is Matsutake, a mycorrhizal fungus that is symbiotic with the roots of Pinus and Quercus plants. It has very strict requirements on the growth environment. It mainly grows in Yunnan, Sichuan, Tibet, Heilongjiang, Jilin and other places between 2,000 meters and 4,000 meters above sea level. On the high mountains of China, the taste is delicious and the price is high, so far it has not been able to achieve artificial cultivation.
Matsutake fruiting bodies are highly regarded for their precious bioactive components such as matsutake double-chain polysaccharides, matsutake alcohols and matsutake polypeptides. They are popular in Japan and Korea and are the "king of mushrooms" among wild edible mushrooms.
my country is the world's largest producer and exporter of matsutake mushrooms, accounting for more than 90% of the world's output, while Yunnan's matsutake production area accounts for more than 70% of the domestic market.
See what a ruthless character Shouqing is
Recalling what happened two years ago, Mrs. Pu, a citizen of Kunming, is still terrified.
One weekend in July that year, her son and daughter-in-law brought her grandson home for dinner. She picked the best porcini mushrooms on the market and fried them with green peppers and garlic. The whole family ate it that night.
"The fungus taste is fresh and crisp, and there is nothing."
At noon the next day, she heated the small half plate of mushrooms left in the refrigerator in the microwave and ate it with her husband.
"Who knows, after an hour, both of them felt paralyzed and weak, with gold stars in their eyes!" Sister Pu recalled, fortunately, taking advantage of her vague consciousness, she called the 120 emergency number. After 10 days of hospitalization, the two recovered, but they still felt energetic Seriously injured.
It is also known as "red onion" and "red sees hands" in the folks who let the elder sister and his wife "succeed". After mechanical damage, the cap and the fungus will slowly turn into light blue to light blue.
It is a new genus and species named by mycologists only in 2005.
This kind of bacteria is rich in Yunnan and Guizhou and other places. The protein content of every 100 grams of bacteria is as high as 56 grams, which is a high-quality protein source.
"Lanmao Boletus is rich in protein, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, polysaccharides and other functional ingredients, and has a unique taste. However, this bacteria is slightly poisonous and belongs to wild edible mushrooms that can be eaten. It must be heated and cooked before it can be eaten. If you just heat it in a microwave oven like Mrs. Pu, there will be a lot of hidden dangers," introduced researcher Sun Dafeng, director of the Kunming Edible Fungi Research Institute of the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives.
In the human brain, the occipital lobe is responsible for processing language, visual information, etc., and the hypothalamus is responsible for processing long-term memory.
Usually, these two areas are not related to each other, but the psilocybin contained in the hand green can allow the two to establish an abnormal connection.
As a result, the situation of "watching villains dancing" and "appreciating blockbusters" appeared on the Internet. The poisoned person will overlap what they see at the moment with the pictures in their memory, and experience hallucinations, including delusions, fears and other symptoms.
In 2006, a Johns Hopkins University study found that humans experience ecstatic hallucinations after ingesting psilocybin, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. Its hallucinogenic mechanism was discovered for the first time.
More than 200 years ago, the "originator" of fungal classification, Fleiss, said with emotion: "In my research, there is nothing more difficult than Boletus." The tricky part is that the boundaries of the genus and the relationship between the genera are not clear. , as well as the different standards for species classification and the difficulty in defining species within complex groups.
More than 10 years ago, Yunnan was still a hardest-hit area for mushroom poisoning represented by boletus, and the losses were very heavy.
"Boletus is too important for Yunnan people, accounting for almost half of the wild edible fungi." said Yang Zhuliang, director and researcher of the Key Laboratory of East Asian Plant Diversity and Biogeography, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, but there are too many species. , the relationship is too complex, lack of comprehensive research on it in the early years, can not clarify its nutritional composition or poisoning mechanism.
Bacteriologists today are able to study Boletus using modern molecular biology methods.
Yang Zhuliang's team published 138 new bolete species, accounting for one-third of the number of reported bolete species in my country.
At the same time, they found out the family background of Yunnan - there are more than 300 species of boletus in more than 40 genera, and more than 60 species are commonly eaten.
"Up to this point, we can clearly tell you which boletus mushrooms are edible, which ones can cause 'little people', and which ones are poisonous or even fatal." Yang Zhuliang said.
Why are toadstools so poisonous?
Southwest my country is a paradise for wild mushrooms.
More than 2,500 species of wild edible mushrooms are known in the world, about 1,000 species are known in my country, and nearly 900 species in Southwest China, accounting for 36% of the total number of edible mushroom species in the world and 90% in the country. Among them, there are about 100 species of valuable and important edible mushrooms.
However, there are about 400 species of poisonous bacteria in my country, half of which are in the southwest.
Inappropriate consumption of hand greens will make people dance wildly, cry and laugh, or make people laugh, but amanita, which kills 70% to 90% of people, can't make people laugh.
In April this year, a hospital in Shenzhen accepted six patients who were poisoned by mistakenly eating mushrooms.
Previously, they made an appointment to pick mushrooms in a park in Pingshan, and they had diarrhea and vomiting after eating them.
What they eat is the "poison king" of mushrooms - deadly amanita.
In Yunnan, there has been more than one incident of food poisoning caused by deadly amanita.
In recent years, a large number of single poisonings occurred in Luolang Village, Wangzishu Township, Longchuan County, Dehong Prefecture in June 2019. Seven migrant workers ate about 2 kg of deadly amanita ointment collected by themselves for lunch and dinner. poisoning.
The deadly amanita is named "white poisonous umbrella" because of its overall white color. The poisonous peptides in amanita can cause serious damage to human liver and kidney cells, resulting in the failure of various organs in the human body.
This toxin is resistant to high temperature, acid, alkali and salt, and conventional cooking methods cannot destroy its toxicity. If the treatment is not timely, eating 50 grams can cause death.
"There are 12 highly toxic amanita species in my country, which are distributed in the north and south, from temperate to tropical." Yang Zhuliang said that reducing such mushroom poisoning incidents can effectively control lethal mushroom poisoning.
In the southwest region, another toadstool poison, although not as "virulent" as amanita, has a very high killing rate and is extremely deceptive-it has neither frightening scales, nor does it wear a "skirt" ', a harmless appearance to humans and animals.
It is commonly known as "the charcoal fungus" sub-scarlet red mushroom.
In July 2019, the news that Jia Dao, a 2-year-old girl from Mandan Village, Mengla County, Xishuangbanna Prefecture, was sent to the provincial capital for rescue with her parents after being poisoned by charcoal bacteria, which once touched the hearts of people in Kunming and Jinghong.
The girl's parents died one after another.
Fortunately, after the hospital's full rescue, Xiao Jia Dao recovered.
The red mushroom, which is native to East Asia, has a fatality rate of 51% after accidental ingestion. It is the second largest "killer" of wild mushrooms in Southwest my country in recent years.
The researchers found that the toxin in Russula erythraea is Russin cycloprop-2-ene carboxylic acid, which can cause rhabdomyolysis with a lethal dose of 2.5 mg per kilogram of body weight in mice, and its effect is similar to muscarinic , which can depress the central respiratory system and lead to respiratory failure in patients.
In addition, the well-known chicken leg mushroom is a representative of the edible mushrooms of the mushroom type, and various types of chicken leg mushrooms have different contents of the mushroom.
The metabolized product of phalloidin after entering the human body can inhibit the decomposition of ethanol by the human body.
This means that if you want to enjoy delicious mountain delicacies and have two drinks with friends, you may experience nausea, nausea, rapid heartbeat and other symptoms. Although it will not be directly fatal, it will also lay thunder for your body.
How to tell if mushrooms are poisonous
The famous writer Wang Zengqi studied at Southwest Associated University and lived in Kunming for 7 years.
For many years after that, he never forgot the taste of Kunming.
In the essay "Rain in Kunming", he wrote: "The color of boletus is like beef liver, it is smooth, tender, fresh and fragrant. It is very delicious. When frying boletus, you need to add more garlic, otherwise it will cause people to faint."
In many places, you can often hear the so-called "experience" of "frying the mushrooms with garlic, if the garlic does not turn black, it means it is non-toxic" and "the bacteria that turn black when reacting with silverware and rice are poisonous".
In July 2019, Master Jiang from Chuxiong, Yunnan used garlic to "test for poison" and sent the whole family to the ICU.
Qiu Xi, who has been engaged in the dissemination of natural science and culture for many years, told the Science and Technology Daily reporter that these soil methods for identifying poisonous mushrooms have no scientific basis.
Some poisonous mushrooms have oxidative substances that can change the color of garlic, but some poisonous mushrooms do not have this characteristic, so the fact that garlic does not change color does not prove that the mushrooms must be non-toxic.
At present, there is no experiment to prove that garlic can remove the toxins in the toadstool.
Qiu Xi also made a video to explain why the whole family eats porcini mushrooms together, some people are poisoned and others have nothing to do, "This piece of bacteria behind the spatula is a 'fish that slipped through the net', it always sticks under the shovel handle, there is not enough When it's hot, whoever eats it in the family will be tricked."
In addition, many of the popular methods for identifying germs are not reliable.
Myth 1: "Mushrooms with bright colors and good-looking appearance are poisonous", "red umbrellas, white poles, lying on the board together at night".
In the southwest, the typical red mushrooms with red umbrellas and white handles are not only edible, but also nutritious and delicious; while the fleshy brown-scaled small umbrellas with unsightly colors and unsightly appearance, such as the red-headed mushrooms, are extremely poisonous; The scale of Amanita muscaria is very beautiful. It is indeed poisonous. The red and yellow amanita is also very beautiful, but it is a famous edible fungus at home and abroad.
So it can't be generalized.
Myth 2: "No maggots, no insects to eat, bitter taste, poisonous smell".
In fact, many poisonous fungi are harmless to insects, and the famous leopard-spotted umbrella is often eaten by slugs.
Myth 3: "It is poisonous for those who are injured to change color and shed juice."
In fact, it is not always the case. For example, the wounds and milk of the pine milk mushroom and the red milk milk mushroom all turn blue-green, but they are delicious edible mushrooms.
Hua Rong introduced other myths such as "the ones with warts on the caps, rings on the stalks, and vesicles are poisonous".
This type of bacteria has a large proportion of poisonous species, but it is not necessarily poisonous for bacteria with this characteristic. Many toadstools do not have any special characteristics, such as the common-looking poison powder gills, which are very poisonous.
Therefore, using these rumors to identify poisonous mushrooms with various types, shapes and complex toxin components is not only unsafe, but even very dangerous.
Experts have repeatedly reminded that if you pick wild mushrooms yourself, you must first identify whether they are edible or not, otherwise only one of them may be poisonous and it may kill people.
Anyone who has dizziness, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, irritability or other discomfort within 10 minutes to 72 hours after eating wild mushrooms may really be "eating mushrooms" often heard in the southwest.
"From a clinical point of view, there is currently no specific drug to treat patients with amanita toxin poisoning, but comprehensive treatment can be used in the early stage, especially treatment within 48 hours, such as digestive tract cleaning, blood purification, drug liver protection treatment, etc. Let the patient have a certain possibility of survival." Zheng Fanshuang, director of the emergency medicine department of the Affiliated Hospital of Yunnan University, introduced, how can the patient relieve the symptoms of poisoning in the first time?
First, drink a lot of warm water and induce vomiting, then use spoons, chopsticks, etc. to stimulate the throat to induce vomiting to reduce the absorption of toxins; secondly, seek medical treatment as soon as possible, and family members should bring bacteria samples for identification, which can effectively help doctors determine treatment measures and judge prognosis.
At the same time, regardless of the severity of the symptoms, those who eat the same meal should immediately go to a nearby hospital for observation and treatment.
How do market management and popular science propaganda work?
Li Juanjuan, Wan Rong, etc., from the Nutrition and Food Hygiene Institute of the Yunnan Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, have done the analysis of wild fungus poisoning in Yunnan Province in 2015.
That year, Yunnan Province reported a total of 373 cases of wild fungus poisoning, 1,570 people were poisoned, and 33 people died through the National Foodborne Disease Outbreak Reporting System.
The report shows that the harmful level of wild fungus poisoning in rural areas is significantly higher than that in urban areas, and households are the places with high incidence of wild fungus poisoning. Effective measures should be taken to monitor and manage high-incidence seasons, high-incidence areas, and high-incidence places.
Yang Zhuliang is known as "Mr. Mushroom" due to the spread of scientific knowledge of edible wild mushrooms for many years.
In recent years, his two standards, "wear a hat on your head, wear a skirt around your waist, and wear shoes on your feet, must not eat mushrooms with the above characteristics; you must not eat mushrooms that you are not familiar with", which has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
In Zhuanxin Market, the largest vegetable market in Kunming, colorful wall charts of "common toadstools (poisonous mushrooms) in Yunnan" can be seen everywhere.
The bold font of "No picking, no purchasing, no processing, and no eating" is a wake-up call.
This propaganda poster, which must be seen in vegetable markets and villages and towns across Yunnan, is the popular science work of Yang Zhuliang's team, and has now been updated to the 2022 edition.
At the same time, high-definition pictures also frequently appear on the new media side of mobile phones.
In order to avoid "seeing little people" caused by improper processing, the 2022 version of the wall chart directly pulls "Lanmao Boletus", which is loved by Yunnan people, into the "blacklist".
For a long time, the disease control and market supervision departments in Yunnan have also attached great importance to the popularization of wild mushroom knowledge, strengthened market early warning and supervision, and emphasized that wild mushrooms and other high-risk foods are not allowed to enter public canteens, and do not go to weddings and funerals.
"Because wild fungus poisoning is relatively concentrated in certain areas and high in time, all localities should establish sound supporting policies to enhance the enthusiasm for supervision, and all grass-roots village groups and communities should go to each household to mobilize the masses to recognize blindly eating wild fungi to the greatest extent possible. At the same time, we will improve the places for medical treatment of wild fungus poisoning, and truly protect the life safety of the general public." Hua Rong believes.
Short video has become one of the most vivid means of communication nowadays.
With the addition of new media for publicity and promotion, the morbidity rate of wild fungus poisoning has a tendency to decline.
"Then please learn to distinguish the appearance of each type of mushroom. Who said that someone who is cautious is not a hero?" Major video platforms swipe the screen.
The concept of "be careful when eating fungi" is being implanted in the hearts of more people.
On June 27, at a press conference held by the National Health Commission, Li Ning, director of the National Food Safety Risk Assessment Center, said that local governments should strengthen the timely release of risk warnings in areas with high poisoning rates, and increase the number of consumers who do not eat wild mushrooms. Targeted popular science propaganda has significantly reduced the incidence and death toll of poisonous mushroom poisoning across the country.
The 2021 China Center for Disease Control and Prevention Weekly Report pointed out that over the past three years, Yunnan Province has ranked first in the country in the number of deaths due to eating poisonous wild fungi, but it has dropped significantly.