We had a family gathering to celebrate a Birthday last weekend.
The usual: having barbecue, hanging around, eating cake.
I became really bored in the afternoon and my increasingly sluggish body clearly desired a little walk.
But I didn’t like to walk alone, so I tried to get my son to join me, but he thought that idea to be even duller than hanging around in the garden.
So I half jokingly suggested that we might look out for mushrooms to have something more interesting for dinner than just barbecue leftovers.
He was instantly convinced and I was happy to have a walking partner.
But little did I know what had happened in the woods overnight…
Turned out, we not only secured dinner, but next day’s lunch on top of it!
The big problem with wild mushrooms isn’t so much identification, but lookalike. Yes, those are basically the same thing, but it’s nuanced. If you’re in the United States, you won’t bother with a small white mushroom because it probably isn’t tasty, but also because it might be seriously poisonous.
In other parts of the world a small white mushroom could be a tasty species and not have a poisonous lookalike. Now imagine immigrating to the US from somewhere like that. You don’t know all the colorful mushrooms in OP’s pictures, but you recognize those small white ones from home.
That’s how a lot of wild mushroom poisonings happen, unfortunately.