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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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