Mushroom Hunting

Mushroom Hunting, also called mushroom foraging, mushroom picking or mushrooming, is the activity of gathering wild mushrooms, collected for use as food, usually cooked and in some cases edible only under specific conditions, as well as for psychotropic drugs and dye. Because useful and poisonous species can closely resemble one another, correct identification requires care and sometimes advanced technique, and numerous field guides exist to help distinguish edible, medicinal, psychotropic and poisonous mushrooms from one another. The practice is popular across most of Eurasia and Australia, as well as in West Africa and temperate North America, and it remains both a food gathering tradition and a recreational pursuit in the regions where it is practiced.