>>1880838>>1880945What's interesting is that mushroom hunting culture is traditional in europe and east asian (china and japan), and doesn't seem to be traditional elsewhere.
My thought is both Europe and East Asia have temperate deciduous forests, which means there's a lot of diversity of edible species of mushrooms, and less weirdo tropical poisonous types.
The odd place out is eastern north america, where they also have temperate deciduous forests, but apparently native americans don't really have a mushroom culture (they didn't even eat them until europeans tried mushrooms). My guess is that people started coming into north america relatively late (20,000 years ago), and they were following the large game species, so there wasn't enough time or incentive for eating mushrooms as a subsitence food.
Also, it seems like in Europe there are many species where there are no poisonous lookalikes, like macrolepiota parasols or porcini boletes, whereas in north america there's more poisonous lookalikes (chlorphyllum, poisonous boletes), so there was even less incentive to encourage eating mushrooms.
