Thursday, November 1, 2007
Food & Life Mmm, this mushroom tastes like George Bush doesn't exist
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Thu, Nov 1, 2007 at 1:31 PM
In a prescient event of my childhood, I picked some huge toadstools, inverted my tricycle and sliced them with the spokes. Then I popped them in my mouth, chewed and swallowed them. Soon I was in the hospital having my stomach pumped.
Then there was that summer — what? — 13 years later when I joined friends in a cow pasture hunting for ’shrooms. We ate ’em and a bit later I rolled in the wet grass with Grace Slick and Jim Morrison. Or maybe it was a couple of dogs.
Now it's nothing more exotic than portobellos, enokis and shiitakes for me. No magic mushrooms.
But I love this example of civic culinary pride: Amsterdam has outlawed magic mushrooms — which you could long openly buy in "smart shops" — after a French teenager with a history of psychiatric problems ate some and hurled herself off a building to her death.
Amsterdam's citizens, who claim only idiotic tourists consume the mushrooms unsafely, organized a protest and Reuters has a slide show of protesters wearing mushroom hats and holding mushroom signs, cheerfully demanding that their magic not be taken away. Check it out here.
Come on, admit it. Wouldn't it be great to live in a country where people had nothing to do but protest on behalf of the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms, instead of organizing against elected war criminals and greedy crooks who would rather prostitute themselves to draconian insurance companies than provide affordable health care to children?
(’Shroom poster from mog.com.)
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