You’ve gotten heavily into the urban foraging trend. You spend your weekends identifying and harvesting wild mushrooms, ramps, and berries from local public lands. To share your bounty, you host a massive dinner party for six of your closest friends, serving a wild mushroom risotto.
Four hours after dinner, three of your friends are violently ill, suffering from severe gastrointestinal distress and liver pain. They are rushed to the emergency room, where they spend two days recovering from toxic mushroom poisoning. Their health insurance subrogates against you, demanding $45,000 to cover the hospital bills. You call your homeowners insurance, terrified, hoping your personal liability coverage will protect you.
The Brutal Truth: Why Standard Policies Complicate This Claim
This scenario sits on a razor’s edge within your HO-3 Homeowners Policy.
Generally, Coverage E (Personal Liability) covers accidental bodily injury caused by your negligence (like cooking bad food for a guest). However, because the poisoning resulted from wild, unverified fungi, the carrier’s legal team might try to invoke the Expected or Intended Harm Exclusion. They will argue that serving unverified, potentially lethal wild mushrooms constitutes gross negligence and a reckless disregard for human life, stripping away the “accidental” nature of the claim.
The absolute fatal blow, however, comes if money changed hands. If you charged your friends $20 a plate for an “underground foraging dinner experience,” or if you occasionally sell jars of foraged jam at the local farmer’s market, the carrier will instantly deploy the Business Pursuits Exclusion. Standard policies offer zero product liability for food sold for profit.
How to Actually Protect Yourself (The Fix)
If you feed people things you pulled out of the dirt, you must strictly manage the financial and legal context of the meals.
- Never Charge Money: The second a single dollar changes hands (even via Venmo for “ingredients”), you become an uninsurable food vendor in the eyes of an HO-3 policy. Keep it strictly as a free personal hobby.
- Buy a Personal Umbrella Policy (PUP): Medical bills from severe poisoning escalate rapidly. A standard $300,000 liability limit can be wiped out by one intensive care visit. Secure a $1 Million Umbrella policy to act as a buffer against catastrophic medical lawsuits.
- Form an LLC and Buy CGL (If Selling): If you decide to monetize your foraging, you must form an LLC and buy a Commercial General Liability (CGL) policy that explicitly includes Products-Completed Operations coverage to protect you if your product harms a consumer.
The Claims Adjuster’s Secret
During a severe bodily injury investigation related to food, we will pull your Venmo, CashApp, and social media histories. We are hunting for the Business Pursuits trigger. If you claim it was just a casual dinner party, but we find an Instagram post advertising “Tickets available for my exclusive Wild Foraged Pop-Up Dinner,” your personal liability coverage is voided immediately for operating an unendorsed commercial restaurant.
The Verdict (TL;DR)
The Risk Level: Extremely High (Misidentifying toxic flora can lead to death and massive legal liability). The Solution: Never charge guests money, rely on HO-3 liability for accidents, and secure a $1 Million Umbrella policy. Estimated Cost: $150 to $300 annually for an Umbrella policy.
A free dinner party is an accident; a $20 ticket is an uninsured commercial liability.