Stalker just happened to catch the merest snippet of an episode of Neighbours recently.
In the scene, the cooking of mushrooms was central and even without the volume up one could tell that the mushrooms were going to be poisonous.
So it transpired, and there is a whole storyline devoted to several characters being inadvertently poisoned by these mushrooms that were nonchalantly picked out of the garden.
The story is fictional of course, but there can be real world effects to these images and storylines. It places the idea that mushrooms can be noxious and toxic, which is of course true. But the mushrooms used in the scene looked very much the ordinary large white cultivated mushrooms that consumers buy off supermarket shelves. Subliminally there is that connection that mushrooms ain’t good. Maybe it is a stretch, but Stalker wouldn’t be surprised if there was a slight dint in demand as that aussie soap storyline runs on Irish and British telly.
