Foragers warn of foraging safety risks

The extraction of a disease from a woman's brain at a Canberra hospital has inspired experienced foragers to remind people of the importance of food safety.

While the removal of the live roundworm from the New South Wales woman's brain was a world first, less daunting parasites and other bacteria are a potential hazard of foraged food.

Diego Bonetto, author of Eat Weeds: A Field Guide to Foraging, said the woman's case was unheard of even by foragers.

It does happen that there are parasites that you can pick up by harvesting wild things, but usually it does not get to this stage, he said.

Mr Bonetto said common sense safety measures such as proper washing of produce were the best safeguards against hazards.

I believe that it's essential to approach the practice with common sense. You will wash everything you harvest, he said.

As well, you would do that with every sort of green you buy at the supermarket. You take them home, you give them a good wash.

Bonetto said the most important part of foraging safely was careful identification of anything harvested.

I think the most important thing is identification, which is obviously for mushrooms, but it's true to everything, he said.

The popularity of foraging is increasing, and many people just pick up information from the internet and books.

It's good to actually go out with experienced foragers to actually have hands-on experience that will tell you plants in hand what to look for and how different it would be from a look-alike plant right next to it. Many species that were foraged including the warrigal greens that plant researchers believe could have been carrying the woman's parasite needed to be cooked, Mr Bonetto said.

If you don't eat them raw, you don't eat them raw, for various reasons famously the fact that they contain quite a lot of oxalic acid, so you'd want to at the very least blanch the greens before ingesting them.

Washing thoroughly and cooking, that will look after the vast majority of issues you may encounter. Bonetto said it was not just foraged or home-grown food that can be contaminated, for example in April 2022 Coles recalled baby spinach packets in the ACT, NSW, and Queensland due to potential salmonella contamination.

He added that purchased and home-grown produce was susceptible to the same parasites and bacteria as foraged food.

It's not necessarily isolated to wild plants, but that could happen absolutely anywhere, any time. One of the Australian National University's doctors, Sanjaya Senanayake, of the Australian National University's College of Health and Medicine, shared Bonetto's sentiments about the importance of vigilant hygiene.

It is worth keeping in mind that there could be cross-contamination and that's always an easy thing to do, he said, to wash your hands after touching wild plants.

We are now seeing higher levels of novel infections passed from animals to humans because of greater interaction between human and animal habitats, said Dr Senanayake.

In the past 30 years, three quarters of the 30 new infections have come from the animal world, he said.

With the closeness of our habitats, humans and animals are more connected and we're more prone to foraging, picking out beautiful flowers or warrigal greens.