Human Condition

I stayed with some folks in France who served me a dish with wild mushrooms they'd picked in the woods near their home earlier that day. Mushrooms and eggplant are pretty much the only food that I really hate. I ate their tete de veau (head of calf) earlier in the night, but the mushrooms were too much. It was a bold human who first plucked a mushroom off the ground and ate it. Thousands of years of guess-and-checking on trying different possibly edible plants, leaves, fungi and roots in the forest. Some people died after eating certain mushrooms, so we knew to avoid those. Now we're arrived at a place where all of the information on what one can eat without dying is readily available online, in books and probably on an iPhone app. But do I have any of that information? Of course not. If I ever get lost in the woods by myself and have to find food on the forest floor, it's back to square one.