Relying on Grandma’s Mushrooms: How Cultural Models Affect Appraisals of Edibility

The accumulation of knowledge within any given domain is dependent on sharing and transmission. During this process, new pieces of information become embedded in existing cultural models, and the growing body of knowledge thus diversifies across cultures and over time. Knowledge about mushrooms and their edibility is a case in point. In principle, whether or not a mushroom is poisonous should be a matter of fact, and information should gain in accuracy as it passes from one generation to the next. In reality, appraisals of edibility are influenced by traditional perspectives on mushrooms, as implicated in a group’s cultural models. To expound on how such influences are reflected even in official guidelines for mushroom foraging, we describe the first Norwegian standard list of edibility recommendations (Normlisten) and compare it with two sources from diverging cultural traditions that informed these recommendations.