Wait until you hear about mushrooms. This one tastes great. This one will send you to a deep mind state for an afternoon. This one will melt your liver. They all look the same.
They definitely don’t all look the same haha. I’ve picked and eaten thousands of mushrooms without issue. Most people can learn how to do it in an afternoon with proper instruction (not on your own though, there is real danger if you don’t know what you’re doing).
Fun fact, most people who died from poisonous mushrooms thought they or the one they trusted knew what they were doing. Thinking you know what you're doing doesn't prevent mushroom poisoning, thinking you know what you're doing is almost a prerequisite.
Well at a certain point you have to take responsibility for your own actions. I’m just saying it’s not hard to learn if you actually have the right instruction, either from someone who does know or from quality guides. The issue is as a beginner, you may not know what that looks like.
By the way, most poisonings happen when people just eat random things without even attempting to identify them. So it’s not like they died from the deadly false button mushroom or something. They’re just morons.
A large category of dead mushroom hunters is people who know the mushrooms of where they are from, but find mushrooms elsewhere that look like a good one from home
In my city it's Chinese trained mushroomers thinking death caps are a good eating mushroom (it isn't)
Yeah it's really important to know which mushrooms grow in your area. Then you know which mushrooms to avoid, and which have look alikes. Also just use mushroomexpert.com if you're unsure
Mushroom expert is updated much more frequently. Local field guides are good for getting a general idea of what you're looking for out there. But if you want to know exactly what you've found, running through the whole process on mushroom expert will give you a positive ID. The local mushroom hunters I learned from told me to not trust books as they are almost always out of date in some way.
I guess using two good sources is good. If you get different results you can just not trust that ID
The danger of using a universal guide is it opens more confusion. The death cap in my earlier comment is an example, a Chinese guide will tell you a mushroom that looks like that is good; an Australian guide will tell you it's deadly
For a differentiation of the two you need to check in more detail, but if you had the local you'd be fine as there's no safe mushroom that looks like that here and no dangerous one that lives there