My encounter with the chanterelle—or was it a false chanterelle?—put me in touch with one of the most elemental facts about human eating: It can be dangerous, and even when it isn’t dangerous, it is fraught. The blessing of the omnivore is that he can eat a great many different things in nature. The curse of the omnivore is that when it comes to figuring out which of those things are safe to eat, he’s pretty much on his own.
