Mushroom foraging

To add to the edibility discussion, I think there's a huge degree of unwarranted paranoia surrounding mushrooms and fungi in general. Whilst it's better to err on the side of caution, there's only a couple mushrooms in this country that are legitimately toxic.

On the flip side a lot of mushrooms can be properly identified with a little nibble and there are so many species with incredibly distinct taste when raw, allowing an ID without the need for reagent tasting (as is the case with a ton of Russula species). The majority of inedible mushrooms just taste like shit or are likely to give some gastric distress, which is also the case for some known edibles. Plenty of people are known to have adverse reactions to wild mushrooms which are seen as choice edibles.

There's a really interesting passage in one of Paul Stamets' books where he discusses this topic and his excitement at every species with 'edibility: unknown' in ID books. His view was that someone's gotta find these answers and new choice edible or psychoactive species could be found along the way.