One valuable benefit of purchasing cultivated mushrooms (The world is your oyster mushroom! The expert guide to cooking delicious fungi, 21 February) is that it avoids the worry of poisoning yourself from an incorrectly identified wild sample while reducing excess wild forage collection. Home cultivation is another option, with further benefits of using food byproducts. Fungal spawn is available online and grows well on a mix of cereals and sawdust. Try a local microbrewery for spent grains or a cafe for used coffee to develop your own fungi farm.
Keith Thomas
University of Sunderland
• I’m afraid Valerie Smith (Letters, 23 February) has misremembered the “gruesome account of the launching of canoes over the trussed, living bodies of prisoners”. This is not from Robinson Crusoe but from The Coral Island by RM Ballantyne, which is probably no longer read. I read both books as a child and remember it well.
Pat Parkin-Moore
Croft, Leicestershire
• Researchers say that men who regularly sleep well, getting seven or eight hours a night, could live almost five years longer than those who do not (Good quality sleep can add years to people’s lives, study suggests, 23 February). But aren’t they just spending those extra five years in bed?
Adrian Brodkin
London
• A gem of a headline (Vegetable shortages in UK could be ‘tip of iceberg’, says farming union, 25 February).
Paresh Motla
Thame, Oxfordshire
• Isn’t there an old saying about fools and their money (Crypto firm with links to parliamentary groups appears to have vanished, 23 February)?
Ann Gordon
Romford, London
