Licence for use and carrying of mushrooms

        

        For carrying a weapon, we need a license; for medications, a prescription; for alcohol, an ID; but for mushrooms, nothing. The legislator and the criminal lawyers are not giving this issue any attention, although in some old lessons of criminal law, we were presented to the strange case of a woman who every day bought wild mushrooms at the supermarket, to cook them in a soup, firmly hoping to be able to kill her husband. One day, the poor husband finally fell to the ground, with the fatal taste of those mushrooms, and the poor students, like me, were faced with the subsequent legal quandary, of whether we could convict her. Well, “whether” is probably a wrong choice of words, for it never occurred to us anything other than convicting the woman for homicide. However, believe or not, we were prevented from establishing such much desired outcome. We were informed: offering mushrooms is not adequate to cause death, it is not foreseeable that mushrooms from the supermarket kill, and the woman, poor thing, cannot be blamed.

        I have never forgotten this great injustice, which has since consumed me and disturbed me every time I pass through the vegetable section and come across the mushrooms, as genuine weapons on sale, in broad daylight. Is it not enough to pronounce the words “fungus” and “wild” to understand that they cannot be any good? How can we cover the pizza with them, at the disposition of children? How do we really know if we're not going to die from the first spoonful of a Knorr mushroom soup? And then, my friends, we might still have to hear a voice from the very end of the tunnel, us almost on the other side: "I told you so!"

        And didn’t they told us so? Since that criminal law class, life has given me a few signs. At the end of the movie Phantom Thread, by Thomas Anderson, Alma's husband realizes, as he watches, defeated, his own death, that the cause of his previous indispositions was due to the continued ingestion of mushrooms offered by his wife. In Olga Tokarczuk’s Tales of the Bizarre, there is a story of a man who dies after eating a jar of "pickled mushrooms, 2005" which turned out to be "pickled mushdooms", but it was too late. My grandmother, who agrees with my concerns, tells that in Sernancelhe, a portuguese villa where she was placed as a notary, one could never be sure of the state of the mushrooms, picked in the garden, that were offered to her. To reassure my grandmother, they informed her of the two completely reliable tests that preceded their serving at the table. First, they would thread a gold ring onto a string and lower it into the cooking pot. If the ring came out oxidized, they were poisonous; if it kept the same color, they could be eaten. Finally, they would give the mushrooms to the dog, and if it also survived, after fifteen minutes, the mushrooms were served for dinner.

       Even at the end of last year, the BBC announced the death of three people after Erin Patterson had served them beef Wellington, "a dish that includes mushrooms," the news says. If you don’t believe, you can read the news here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-67293752. Shall we be safe rather than sorry, and be aware: if they give us mushrooms, they want to kill us.