<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

Someone kindly posted recently about learning from a reliable, direct source that mushrooms are SOMETIMES grown on a substrate containing wheat.  I don't want to be responsible for proliferating celiac urban myths, but based upon this new information & my personal experiences I believe eating mushrooms CAN be a source of gluten contamination.  I don't eat mushrooms often, but I can remember getting sick from eating them sometimes & wondering if I'm allergic to them.  Yet, other times I ate them w/o problems.



But, silly me, I wanted to make sure.  After reading that post about the mushrooms, I made a marinade vegetable salad with whole mushrooms.  I washed & trimmed each mushroom individually, carefully removing every little bit of soil I could see clinging to the mushrooms.  Well ... apparently, I wasn't able to clean them well enough because I got very sick.  There were no other suspicious ingredients, foods or incidents (grandkids, eating out, etc.) associated with eating that salad.  So I believe with 99.99% certainty that I got "glutenated" from eating mushrooms ... at least this time.  [This crazy disease is enough to make one barking mad, huh?  Ha ha ha!]  



So ... it appears mushrooms & other fungi are the only "one ingredient" fresh produce items that CAN be a source of gluten contamination for us.  As far as I can tell, all other fruits & veggies are safe.  I don't believe wheat in the soil of other produce items would pose the same contamination problems as for mushrooms & fungi.  Another factor making mushrooms more dangerous for us is they have a delicate velvety texture & many little folds under the cap where bits of the soil can get trapped & be impossible to remove.  All other produce are firmer, smoother & easier to wash clean than mushrooms and are grown in well composed soils rather than freshly rotting organic material  While, it's true that lettuce, asparagus, carrots & potatoes are also grown very close to or IN the soil, these veggies are firmer & easier to clean.  Besides that, wheat isn't used as a fertilizer for green veggies & fruits as it "sours" the soil encouraging the overgrowth of ... you guessed it, MUSHROOMS & FUNGI!



So I'm still banking on the safety of fresh produce as long as it's not mushrooms or other fungi.



Valerie in Tacoma     
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