After a discussion with my group, it was clear that the Guardian only published this article on the second page because they knew that they had the readership for it. Other newspapers don't seem to comment on the environment, however the Guardian has its own "Head of Environment" who wrote the article in question. Also it was suggested that maybe this story was something that they had been working on for a while and isn't necessarily 'recent' news, they just happened to put it in Saturday's paper.
When I got home I did find more articles about illegal wild mushroom foraging, although they were mostly from a year ago. Though I have managed to find an article from from BBC news published this month about warning people to take care while foraging after a rise in hospital admissions due to eating poisonous mushrooms. This suggests that there might be need for more education on different types of poisonous mushrooms.
The most famous case of mushroom poisoning in recent years occurred in the Highlands in 2008, when the author of the Horse Whisperer and his family accidentally ate deadly webcaps, thinking they were ceps. Nicholas Evans, his wife and her brother all had to have kidney transplants and were lucky to survive.
There is another article from a local paper for East London (where Epping Forest is situated) highlighting the issue of foraging. This was posted on Saturday the 11th October. The article brings to light that warnings given out to foragers are "at an all time high" so I decided to investigate and see if perhaps foraging had become more popular in recent years and why there is such a high demand for wild mushrooms in restaurants.
Also on the BBC website I found a small quiz on how well you know your wild mushrooms, whether the ones shown are edible, not tasty or poisionous. You can find it here. I actually scored 5 out of 7 which isn't bad for someone who has only just started researching wild mushroom varieties!
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