Are You Brave?

I was looking at the new Encyclopedia Of Life website that is just getting started with some "representative" pages and admiring the material on the "Death Cap Mushroom" when I read the following...

The ability to identify, collect, and prepare edible mushrooms is usually passed down through generations. Methods can be different from those used elsewhere: the Slavic way does not require identification to species, but relies more on experience and familiarity with varieties that have been collected before. Many people would not consider eating a species that they cannot positively identify using a field guide, but most Slavic collectors would view this attitude as overly paranoid. Some mushroom species listed as poisonous in Western literature are even listed as edible in Slavic literature; this may be because the majority of people do not have any adverse reaction, or because the reaction, when it occurs, is generally mild. (It must be noted that ALL mushroom species cause adverse reaction in a few individuals, even the common champignon.) The relative leniency toward potential health risks can be justified by the fact that only a handful of poisonous mushrooms lead to fatal poisonings and are reasonably easy to avoid, and that children usually learn to identify edible mushrooms quite reliably through live examples, rather than textual descriptions. Also, some species have been shown to contain different amounts of toxins when growing in the New World and the Old World. Additionally, the toxins of numerous mildly poisonous mushrooms can be broken down or eliminated with specific cooking or drying methods, and these are handed down together with collecting skills as part of the mushroom-consuming tradition.

This reminds me of what I just read in Nicholas Wade's "Before the Dawn" book. That we are losing the genes to detoxify poisons in our diet as part of our on-going evolution. This causes different reactions to medicine. And, it causes different reactions to foods as the above snippet indicates.