Ask Lemmy

I 100% agree.

With that said going mushroom hunting even if you're not gonna eat them is fun because there is a lot of fucked up and cool looking fungus out there, they're a cool life form and they're everywhere! And to be fair, there are some fairly, generally safe to eat, fairly easy to identify mushrooms out there without many truly dangerous lookalikes (chicken of the woods, a lot of boletes aren't likely to kill you even if they are nasty, chanterelles, lobsters, morels, etc) And I still wouldn't recommend eating any white mushrooms in NA at all, even if there's an edible, delicious look alike.

It's absolutely not a thing to be taken likely, but if you take it seriously and carefully and take the time to learn things and maybe have an experienced person show you some basics, it's fun and very rewarding. Yeah eating a death angel will shut down your organs painfully and you will need a liver transplant and will likely die, but also people have been eating wild mushrooms for a long, long time. Teach your kids to never eat any mushrooms they find outside, but also you'll probably be entirely OK if you chew on just about any mushroom and spit it out entirely, even the really bad ones. That's one of the many reasons this hobby is so fascinating.

If anybody's interested in mushroom hunting, start by not eating any of them, know that you can't really die from just touching even the most poisonous ones and get a good mushroom field guide, like a Mass Audubon region specific field guide if you're in the US.

Here are some fun little mushrooms I've encountered here in Massachusetts (I'm not a real mycologist, so please correct me if I'm wrong) :

• Cinnabar-red chanterelles (Cantharellus cinnabarinus)- tiny little orange to red mushrooms. I think these have lookalikes, but the real thing are pretty edible with some garlic and butter, but the gills catch dirt and you need a lot of them because they're teeny. Luckily they grow in groups.

• No idea what this wild shiny blue little guy is. Left it alone, but there are fairly common around here.

• Cauliflower or noodle mushroom (some kind of Sparassis). This one I think was old, but edible after you washed it and got all the bugs out. Has the texture of an egg noodle. A little too slippery in soup, but tastes great with garlic and butter, like every other mushroom. Very alien looking mushroom and apparently grows back in the same spot eventually.

• These look like young turkey tails (Trametes versicolor?), but I'm not 100% sure. Very pretty, maybe have some medicinal properties. Pretty common around here, maybe not even a turkey tail.

• Indian ghost pipes (Monotropa uniflora). Not actually a mushroom, but a very interesting parasitic plant that doesn't do the whole photosynthesis thing. Beautiful, haunting, translucent and morose looking. There are some supposed health benefits and native people maybe used them for medicine, but who knows?