Qu'est-ce que c'est?

As its name would suggest, Mushroom People is a magazine that loves mushrooms. It also loves gentle, charming, whimsical storytelling, as shown in the following report from the French countryside. Because while the French pharmacist plays a potentially lifesaving role for foragers across the country, it seems the so-called “guardian of poisons” isn’t always happy about such everyday heroism.

On a fall day, just before 2:30 in the afternoon, there’s already a queue outside the local pharmacy in Bois-le-Roi, a town on the edge of the Fontainebleau. Summer ferns crowding the floor of the sprawling pine and oak forest have faded auburn, and after autumn’s rainy days, mushrooms have manifested overnight. The afternoon crowd waits to fill their prescriptions, buy diaper rash creams and aspirins, and then there’s me: in line for mushroom identification.

When it’s my turn to approach the counter, the pharmacist doesn’t blink an eye. Unfazed, she immediately procures a pair of glasses and rolls up her sleeves. Her eyes rapidly scan my bounty, a mixture of spongy fungi picked from my garden. She tuts.

“Rule number one: Never mix your mushrooms. And don’t pick anything that you don’t think is edible.” She waves at a few small, shriveled, bruised gray mushrooms I’d scooped up in a hurry, and makes a whooshing sound. “These you can throw out immediately.”

France’s socialist regulations dictate that mushroom picking on state-owned forêt domaniale for personal use is legal. For those that want to feast on foraged luxury like cêpes and boletes without high prices per kilo, every pharmacy offers a free mushroom identification service.

“The pharmacist is the guardian of poisons, and in France, they have an important role to play in public health – that is to say, to prevent poisonings,” Joël Boustie dashed off to me via email. Boustie is a mycologist and professor of pharmacognosy, the study of medicines derived from natural sources. He explained, “All students who wish to become pharmacists must learn to recognize mushrooms, most notably the toxic and mortal ones, by theoretical learning and in practice with forest outings and then an exam. Each student has an average of 60 hours of training.”