- In March and April of 2023, 51 people got sick, three were hospitalized, and two died from eating this.

(screen whooshes) This is a morel mushroom.

(screen whooshes) Morels are generally regarded as safe.

They're one of the most highly sought after and widely eaten wild mushrooms.

In 2021, morels were a $657 million market.

There are a lot of people out there eating a lot of morels and being perfectly fine.

So how did two people die from eating them at one restaurant in Bozeman, Montana?

Well, the Montana Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA and the CDC all looked into it and they said, "We don't know."

No, I don't imagine that I have access to more information than either of these groups, but this report just wasn't satisfying to me.

I need to know more.

For starters, if morels aren't toxic, why are they so sure it was the morels that caused this?

I'm gonna figure that out first.

(screen whooshes) - And I wanna start wrapping my head around this mystery by first actually seeing a morel out in the wild.

Now since there's no way I would ever be able to find one on my own, I'm gonna call Annie.

(upbeat music) - [Annie] Or a little later, we'll get the- - [George] This is Annie.

She helped us on our last mushroom video, and today she's gonna help me find a morel.

- [Annie] Dude, it's so dried up.

It's so sad.

- Oh, yeah, I see it.

- Do you see it?

- Yeah.

- Okay.

Well, let's go look at it.

These are the dots.

- And after about an hour of searching, we did end up finding one morel.

- [Annie] They're called punctipe.

- [Speaker 1] But one was enough for Annie to show me how to identify them.

So first off, the top of the mushroom, also known as the cap is attached the whole way around, unlike something like a shiitake or a portobella.

And the other big giveaway for morels is that they are hollow the whole way through.

- [Annie] That's really a identification feature.

So you can see it's completely hollow inside.

- Would you eat a morel?

- Oh, yeah.

I have eaten many morels.

- [George] Because last time we filmed, you said that you wouldn't eat an amanita species because of horizontal gene transfer.

(Annie laughs) Did I make that up?

- No, you're correct.

- Okay, okay, okay.

- Like, did you follow the poisoning in Montana?

- So that's what the... Interestingly, that's what this video's about.

- Oh, great.

Okay, yeah.

- What happened back in Montana?

In April of 2023, two patients sought out medical care after they ate a specialty salmon and morel mushroom roll at a sushi restaurant and started experiencing some intense vomiting and diarrhea.

Both died soon after.

The CDC and local public health departments found additional patients by putting out press releases and alerts asking for anyone else who had experienced symptoms after eating at the restaurant around the same time.

They found 49 additional people who experienced everything from dehydration to nausea, vomiting and diarrhea after eating there.

Everyone's symptoms started about an hour after eating.

Now, the restaurant had been serving morel mushrooms for a few weeks, and they were prepped in different ways over that time, including par-cooking by pouring a boiling broth over them.

But on April 17th, 2023, they were served raw.

When health officials investigated the restaurant to take samples of the morels and salmon and other food, they also found a handful of health code violations like improper food storage and temperature control.

We're not off to a great start.

But just because some people got sick at the restaurant and the restaurant was serving mushrooms, doesn't necessarily mean that the mushrooms were the problem.

So why are they so sure that it was the morels?

- So the really dangerous thing about wild mushrooms is that you can have a perfectly harmless species that looks just like a very deadly poisonous species, and these two species can and do grow right next to each other out in nature.

Plus, mushrooms generally do not advertise their toxicity, like say, frogs or octopods.

So you can have a very bland, boring looking mushroom that will absolutely kill you.

For example, look at these two mushrooms.

This one is a puffball, totally safe to eat, harmless, delicious.

This one is a baby destroying angel.

Just one of these mushrooms.

One can totally destroy your liver and or kill you.

And by the way, I reverse these on purpose.

This one is the destroying angel, and this one is the puffball.

You wouldn't have known, you wouldn't have known.

Generally, mushrooms that tend to get confused with morals are called false morels.

But there are two big ones that get commonly misidentified.

Gyromitra esculenta and Verpa bohemica.

Pop quiz.

Look at all these mushrooms.

These are all true morels.

These are false morels.

This one is Gyromitra esculenta, and this one is Verpa bohemica.

And yeah, I would not have been able to call the true from the false either.

Now, the first thing that pops into my head when I see all these lookalike mushrooms is, is it possible that a false morel or two, or a whole box snuck into a shipment and found its way into our food supply?

And the answer is, yeah, not only is it possible, it has been documented on multiple occasions.

In fact, I spent half an hour on Google Docs, not Google Docs, Google Scholar.

I spent way more than half an hour on Google Docs writing this.

In this paper, scientists tested 16 foods that all claim to contain a certain type of mushroom on the label.

And they found that only five of the 16 foods were accurately labeled, meaning if it said porcini, then the bag actually contained porcini.

They also found that in one specific case, a bag-labeled porcini actually contained some Amanita pseudoporphyria, which is in the same family as death cap and other extremely toxic mushrooms.

Now, I went on Amazon, and I looked up this exact product, and I found a review that said that one guy claimed he found a cigarette butt in his bag... Of remember, what was supposed to be porcini mushrooms.

And I don't have to tell you and everyone else out there that a cigarette butt is not a mushroom.

Now, the second paper that caught my eye is older but more alarming.

This was written by the FDA after a two-year long investigation in the late 1980s, in which they collected over 300 samples of canned, fresh and dried imported mushrooms.

Now, of those 300 samples, 42 were morels.

And what they found is that three of the samples were contaminated with both Verpa bohemica and Gyromitra esculenta.

And six were contaminated with just Verpa bohemica.

Now, this paper also describes a case from 1977 in which four people ate morels and got sick, but it was later discovered that the morels that they ate were actually Gyromitra esculenta.

- When the investigators in Montana looked at people who dined at the restaurant and either did or did not have symptoms, they found by a logistic regression, the people with symptoms were almost 16 times more likely to recall eating the specific morel sushi roll than those who didn't.

And that it mattered how much of the roll they ate.

The more they ate, the more likely they would be to experience symptoms.

The likelihood of having symptoms after eating the special roll was also higher when eating the fully raw versus the par-cooked morels.

So that's even more data to suggest that the raw morels were the culprit.

Additionally, the symptoms matched previous cases of morel poisoning.

These happen from time to time, but perhaps the most horrifying to me is a case where 77 people all got sick at a single banquet within about 20 minutes of eating a pasta salad topped with morels.

77 people all experiencing extreme nausea, diarrhea and vomiting within 20 minutes all in one venue.

(audio thudding) You know that that venue did not have 77 bathroom stalls.

It just didn't.

The Montana investigation tried to look for known toxins and samples both from the patients themselves and the food samples, and didn't find anything.

Frustratingly, their final report doesn't list out exactly what they looked for, but we have to hope they looked for some of the known offenders from false morels because they are toxic.

- The next thing I wanted to do was to get a handle on the toxicity of Verpa bohemica and Gyromitra esculenta.

Now, both of these mushrooms are toxic if they're eaten raw, but they're also cooked, and regularly eaten and enjoyed relatively safely in various parts of the world.

And we actually don't know what the toxin is in Verpa bohemica, but we do know what it is in Gyromitra esculenta.

Acetaldehyde N-methyl-N-formylhydrazone also known as gyromitrin.

Now, if we look at the middle part of the molecule right here.

(bright music) We see a carbon, double bonded to a nitrogen, single bonded to another nitrogen.

And this part of the molecule makes it as a whole relatively susceptible to breakdown by water, which looks like this.

Now, the end product here, this is monomethylhydrazine, which is toxic, but also used in rocket fuel.

Unrelated factoid for your consumption and enjoyment.

Anyway, if you want to eat G. esculenta which Finnish people do on a regular basis.

(patriotic music) You have to boil the mushrooms, pour out that water, rinse them with fresh water, boil them again, and then pour out that water and then rinse them with more fresh water.

The other thing to note is that monomethylhydrazine is volatile, meaning it will come out of this water as a gas.

So anywhere that you're cooking these mushrooms (patriotic music) needs to be very well ventilated, unlike my kitchen.

And definitely, don't stick your head over the pot and take a big whiff.

That would not be good.

If you are unlucky enough to eat raw or even undercooked gyromitrin containing mushrooms, you could be in for a real wild ride.

And this includes vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, liver symptoms, neurological symptoms, and even death.

- The investigation in Montana traced the mushrooms, which were originally grown in China back to a single importer and a separate distributor, which means that they were able to find other restaurants that received similar batches of mushrooms.

None of them saw any signs of illness, but all of them fully cooked their mushrooms.

Now, these were cultivated morels, but what does that really mean?

Because morels are super finicky to grow.

They're decomposers.

They often grow in wooded areas, and there's really only one species that people have had luck growing.

Even then, successful cultivation is limited to a handful of US growers, a pair of Danish brothers and Chinese farmers.

There are different setups out there too.

There are things like seeded greenhouses, there are special nutrient mixes, and all sorts of other approaches being developed.

Even despite that yields aren't always good, but they are often seeded, not just allowed to pop up.

So it feels unlikely to say the least that a false morel would just sneak in there somehow.

You might get genetically diverse real morels, but getting a separate species showing up just randomly seems unlikely.

Not impossible, but unlikely.

And moreover, both the people picking them and the people cooking them should have been able to spot the difference between the two.

And while we're not sure what it is about true morels that can make them so bad for you, it's not unknown that they can make you sick.

Morel lore often states that they contain hemolysis or compounds that will break down red blood cells.

But while there's a big, long citation chain of people who keep citing people, who keep citing people that say this happens, there's not really a lot of real data out there pointing to specific cases of it happening.

Experts do note the popular Catalan saying however, that (speaks in foreign language) he who ears morels, has dark urine, which would indicate some red blood cell breakdown, even if not enough to kill you.

(bright music) And anyways, you should really, really be cooking all mushrooms.

Their cell walls contain chitin, the same stuff found in many shellfish shells, which makes them hard to digest.

Cooking also just makes them taste better.

But even if you cook them, morels can sometimes cause neurological problems.

There have been a number of incidents of people eating lightly cooked fresh morels and reporting dizziness, tremors, headache, muscle cramps, vertigo and unsteady gait, and other inebriation like symptoms.

You really, really need to cook them well.

Additionally, mushrooms in general could bioaccumulate things like heavy metals from the environment.

I feel like this would be unlikely to cause such rapid onset symptoms like what was seen in the Montana case though.

Unfortunately, despite all of this, we still don't know exactly what happened that made the morels in Montana so toxic.

Uncooked, wild morels can be toxic.

But we don't know what influences why some seem to be more toxic than others, and we don't know specifically what those toxins are.

And it seems like these same problems could pop up in the cultivated morels too.

Which is great, just makes me wanna go back to the part of my life where I didn't like mushrooms.

It also makes me wanna cook these really, really well.

Or just not eat them at all.

I think I'm just not going to eat them.

When we started this video, I was like, "Yeah, I'll just cook up some morels."

And now I'm like, "I don't... (container thuds) It's not worth it."

One of the things that I would imagine that the CDC tested for would be contamination by pesticides or herbicides.

And they didn't find any, and honestly, I think that that's a pretty unlikely source of these illnesses anyways, given how quickly these people got sick and how closely their cases resembled other known morel poisonings.

- There are some pesticides that can produce similar symptoms as mushroom poisoning.

Aldehyde is one example, but you'd also expect that pesticides would not be so affected by cooking, so I think we can safely eliminate that possibility.

But a mushroom could have picked up a toxic gene from a nearby mushroom in a process called horizontal gene transfer.

I know nothing about genetics, so let's cut to someone who does.

- There has been evidence of a horizontal gene transfer event with a likely bacterial intermediary moving a toxin creating gene from one mushroom species to the other before.

And there's also evidence that horizontal gene transfer is how things like psilocybin and naturally occurring psychedelic has spread between some mushrooms.

But this is a really rare event, and it just seems unlikely that a toxic mushroom gene made a jump from one species to another in this exact batch of mushrooms.

Since undercooked morels are already known to be toxic, we don't need a gene transfer event for them to become dangerous.

I think it's slightly more likely that what the customers actually ate and what gave them symptoms were false morels.

But it's still not what I think actually happened here.

The health inspector's, DNA tested mushrooms from the batch and confirmed that they were a species of true morel called Morchella sextelata.

It would be weird if there were false morels in the batch, but all they found by sequencing were the true morels.

It's also unlikely that a trained chef preparing a special morel mushroom roll would make this mistake.

So I agree with the experts that this is most likely not what happened.

- There is another reason why this is very unlikely.

And to understand it, let's consider a hypothetical scenario in which one or two Gyromitra esculenta got mixed into a box with true morels.

The maximum amount of gyromitrin that those could contain is about 300 milligrams.

To sicken 51 people and kill two, you would need in the realm of 20 grams of gyromitrin, and that would be more than a hundred mushrooms.

So while a chef might misidentify like one or two Gyromitra, I do not think that they would misidentify a hundred plus.

Now, having said all that, the CDC does not specify whether or not they tested for gyromitrin in their report.

All it says, in a footnote, is that the mushrooms were tested for quote "various known toxins," which is way too vague.

Like at least give us a table of everything you tested for.

You know, gyromitrin not detected, metaldehyde not detected, whatever it is.

Or a list if you don't wanna fire up Excel.

So TLDR, poisoning by Gyromitra esculenta, very unlikely, but I still would've liked to see a list of the toxins that were tested for.

- Maybe the morels could be absorbing something from their environment that could be causing these symptoms.

I think it's like possible, but not likely.

Or maybe they picked up some kind of bacteria like listeria along the way that grew on improperly stored mushrooms, but the tox screen came back negative for whatever the CDC checked for.

And there aren't a ton of things that would give such immediate symptoms like this that would also be at least partially destroyed by cooking on all those other mushrooms from the other restaurants.

And this just looks too much like the pasta salad morel banquet debacle again.

So I just don't think any of that is what happened here.

What I really think happened is that these were true morels, and that true morels have something in them that can be destroyed by heat.

But if it's not, can make you very immediately sick.

And this is (retches) so frustrating to me because why is nobody running morels through an NMR or something to create a complete list of all chemical compounds in them?

Because it feels like this is something we should be able to figure out.

What is the compound in these mushrooms that makes you so sick?

- Yeah, so I agree.

I think the culprit here was in fact undercooked morels.

And the most important takeaway from this video is to never eat random wild mushrooms.

If you're going to eat wild mushrooms, make sure they've been properly identified by somebody who knows what they're doing, and thoroughly, thoroughly cooked.

And hopefully, now restaurants know to do the same.

- By the way, George, it's octopuses not octopods.

- [George] Octopods is in the Oxford English dictionary.

- [Alex] Octopuses is the more common usage.

- [George] Just 'cause it's common doesn't mean it's correct.

- Octopus.