So with that expertise, would you sit down to a steaming plate of Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) if he cooked them?
Wild-food blogger Langdon Cook did and got an education.
More than any other species, though, Arora is known for serving his guests Amanita muscaria. This practice is not uncontroversial. Amanita muscaria, also known as the fly agaric for its ancient use as a pesticide, is generally considered by English-language field guides to be a dangerous toxic mushroom. It’s been documented as a hallucinogen and used as a drug by social groups as varied as middle-class American hippies and Siberian reindeer herders, and occasionally it’s implicated in deaths, though not directly. In one recent case a victim ate the mushroom for its psychotropic effects and died of hypothermia.
But, as Arora points out in his workshops, Amanita muscaria is also used as food. It turns out the mushroom can be easily detoxified and consumed.
But you still get the feeling that Cook is torn between his desire to write honestly and worries about telling people to go eat any kind of Amanita.