On Sat, 25 Aug 2018 17:34:04 -0400, Nancy Young wrote:

> I always joke, hey, free dinner but I wouldn't dream of eating
> random mushrooms. Seems like even people who know about them
> can be fooled.

My Dad & I used to collect & eat (amongst other edible species) what he
called a 'morel'. One day I found a strange-looking one, and looked it up
in a book. It turns out it was a morel. The others we had been eating I
also identified as the 'false morel'. The book warned that "the conditions
under which false morels are toxic are not clear, possibly unusual recent
weather, local sub-species identical in appearance to non-toxic ones,
incomplete cooking, etc."

I stopped eating them after some mild visual hallucinations. My dad stopped
picking them as well, and decided to stick strictly to the ones he knew
'for sure' were okay. It turns out that one 'okay' kind can sometimes grow
close to extremely toxic ones, and their mycelium (root) systems allow easy
passage of toxin from the bad ones to the edible ones. This often happens
when the dangerous ones do not have visible fruiting bodies above ground.

To make a long story short, *everyone* who visited him in the hospital was
certain that he would die, and he lost a kidney.