To Heath, treating every ingredient with seriousness and care was a basic skill for a chef. It was like eating pufferfish: pufferfish tasted delicious, but it was poisonous, so chefs needed specialized training and an examination to obtain a license to prepare it. Without that, every time a customer ate pufferfish, the chef really would have to leaf through the criminal code and consider how many years he might spend behind bars.
In the past, some veteran chefs had grown arrogant, relying on their seniority, extensive experience, and years of preparing pufferfish without a mishap. When the government required certification to prepare pufferfish, those old chefs had scoffed, only to regret it too late when something went wrong.
Wild mushrooms could be every bit as poisonous as pufferfish, if not more so. In fact, some wild mushrooms contained toxins more potent than those of pufferfish.
They could kill in an instant. A single pot of mushrooms killing an entire village was nothing strange, and the deaths were horrific. After all, this was poisoning, and being poisoned felt utterly dreadful.
Many people thought wild mushrooms only caused hallucinations. Some even said brainless things like, "I want to buy some wild mushrooms and poison myself to experience hallucinations."
Although Heath had enjoyed reading funny stories on a certain Q&A site about people who had eaten wild mushrooms in his previous life, that was actually survivorship bias. There were plenty of people who had been poisoned and no longer had the chance to tell their stories. An online search for news about accidental deaths from poisonous wild mushrooms in Yun Province each year would turn up countless results. That was why Heath was extremely careful with ingredients like these, which were highly poisonous and required complicated, meticulous preparation before eating.
It was precisely