Mushroom inspection

Decades of the centrally administered mushroom inspection system in Hungary

The mushroom inspection system was started in the early years of the socialist era. Its explicit aim was to exploit wild mushrooms as a natural resource for the Hungarian socialist economy. Twenty years later, exports of dried wild mushrooms reached 1.5 million kilograms, while domestic consumption was half a million kilograms. 

The world has changed a lot since then. Socialism is over, people live in prosperity, and the remaining natural habitats have lost much of their productive capacity, but the remainder of the mushroom inspection system is still here. There is no such a system in the neighboring countries; the last one fell down with the Iron Curtain in East Germany. The Hungarian mushroom inspection system survived the Soviet era; the persistent propaganda that lasted three generations helped keep it alive.

The mushroom inspectors mainly work on the marketplaces, nowadays only part-time, only in larger towns. They inspect wild mushrooms to be sold in the marketplace and check forayers' baskets. If you visit a mushroom inspector, you can be sure that only the mushrooms you might eat will remain in your basket. The poisonous, not ("officially") edible, protected by law, and edible mushrooms that are not considered fit for human consumption are not returned.

Lessons learned about the Hungarian inspection system

• It is for exploiting wild mushrooms for trading but is trying to rebrand itself as a public service. The primary purpose has become hard to communicate, so the new message is to avoid mushroom poisoning. None of the neighboring countries have such a mushroom inspection system, and there have not been mushroom poisoning outbreaks. 

• It became obsolete, but those interested in mushroom inspection training keep it alive. It has lost its economic relevance; fewer wild mushrooms grow, fewer people want to live from foraging, and paying a full-time inspector in marketplaces makes no sense.

• It has an obsolete training system and curricula and cannot renew itself. It handles mushrooms as an object of trading; it focuses on commercially important species and growing regions; thus, no wonder it forgets ecology, conservation, habitats, and especially other regions.

• It involves large-scale waste and natural damage; containers full of mushroom bodies, including rare and protected species, can be seen during the season behind the marketplaces. The system tells you that everything you can collect will be inspected for you. There is a regulation limiting the volume of mushrooms per person per day, but nobody checks it, least of all the inspectors.

• It drives mycophobia. The self-certifying message of the system is that consuming wild mushrooms takes serious risks; you can not know them, you can not even learn them, and they must be inspected. That leads to fear of fungi and nationwide mycophobia. The neighboring countries are mycophilic, and by the way, they do not run propaganda about mushroom inspection.

• It degrades local Mycology to the level of a trade assistant. Rather than being a focal point of mycological science, research, education, and conservation, the national mycological organization was dedicated to mushroom trading and inspection. The legal predecessor of the mycological society started it 75 years ago and still serves it for its own benefit.