Mushrooms

It was just after dawn on an October morning in the Montmorency Forest north of Paris. The stands of oak and chestnut trees were still shrouded in mist. Earthy, pungent vapors rose from the ferns and soft humus on the forest floor. Suddenly a man in tie and business suit, his trouser legs rolled up to his knees, burst into the open from a narrow trail. Startled by a stranger on his dawn mission, he held up a wicker basket by way of explanation.

The Food and Drug Administration announced Monday that it will indefinitely ban all shipments of canned mushrooms from China following what the FDA called "a significant and alarming" series of outbreaks of severe food poisoning. FDA officials said they believed that contamination with staphylococcal enterotoxin "may be widespread" throughout the mushroom processing industry in China, and the ban will continue "until satisfactory sanitation control measures" are implemented in China.

Chanterelle -- the very name of the prized mushroom smacks of elegance, the hush of fine dining, the discreet sigh of the discerning gourmet. But in Lompoc these days, it has another image: felony fungus. Santa Barbara County sheriff's deputies Thursday showed off a haul of chanterelles -- the booty, they said, of high-tech mushroom thieves from the Pacific Northwest who have allegedly plagued local ranchers for a decade or longer.

The migrant pickers are still arriving--it's nearly the peak of the morel mushroom harvest on Little Wolf burn, site of the largest forest fire in northwest Montana last year. In the Pacific Northwest and northern Rocky Mountains, edible wild mushrooms are a $44-million-a-year business. Morels, the most widely harvested edible wild mushrooms in the region, often appear after a fire. About 1.3 million pounds are harvested annually.

Like most Russians, Sergei Kayava and his family considered themselves mushroom experts--but the assumption proved fatal. On July 8, he and his family eagerly dished up helpings of buttery fried forest mushrooms prepared by his mother-in-law. "She is very good at cooking mushrooms. She boiled them and then fried them and then served them with boiled potatoes. It was delicious," Kayava recalled Saturday. But the dish killed Kayava's wife, Marina, 40, and her father.

Greg Miller has an unusual idea of what constitutes good weather: The more rain, he said, the better. "With all the sun out here it's sometimes terrible," said Miller, a wildlife biologist who volunteers at the Environmental Nature Center in Newport Beach. This year's abundance of precipitation has made him a happy man. To show just how happy he has become, Miller recently led the season's first wild mushroom walk at the center.

A teenage girl, near death from eating handpicked "death cap" mushrooms, was to undergo an emergency liver transplant late Wednesday. The 13-year-old girl, her two brothers and her mother were poisoned last weekend after eating the mushrooms, which they had cooked in spaghetti sauce. The girl was placed on an emergency waiting list.

In a case that points to the increasing popularity of a drug from the '60s, three teenagers have been arrested for allegedly giving hallucinogenic mushrooms to a Newbury Park girl who was fatally struck by a car as she wandered naked on the Ventura Freeway, law enforcement authorities said. Victoria Nugent, 17, began partying the night of Aug. 14 with friends, who are now charged with providing the drugs that led to her death.

Somewhere out in the darkening trees there is a sound: a shrill scream like the death wail of an animal, if you could only think of an animal wild enough. Then another screech, this time from another part of the woods. Then the report of a gun. Then silence. Out in the dense pine forest that carpets the eastern Cascades of southern Oregon for a hundred miles, the sound brings all footsteps to a halt. But to scan ahead, or behind, is to confront a wall of brush, bark and pine boughs.

Aaron Sorkin, Emmy-winning creator of NBC's White House drama "The West Wing," was arrested Sunday at Burbank Airport on suspicion of possessing illicit mushrooms, authorities said. Sorkin, 39, was heading for a Southwest flight to Las Vegas when he was detained at a security checkpoint about 3:15 p.m., airport spokesman Victor Gill said Monday. An X-ray camera had shown a suspicious object in a carry-on case, prompting a hand search and a call to police, Gill said.