About
Identification first. Cooking second. Nothing pretending to be certainty.
01
The unit of content is a pair, not a species
Nearly every serious mushroom poisoning is somebody eating one thing while believing it was another. A list of species does not help with that, because the reader already believes they know what they have. 16 pairs put the edible one and the one that resembles it side by side, with the separating features in the order they should be checked.
02
Nothing here says a mushroom is safe to eat
This site helps you rule things OUT. Ruling something IN depends on characters of the specimen only the person holding it can see, and no website, photograph or app can do it. That constraint shapes every page, and it is why the key ends by naming what could still hurt you rather than by naming dinner.
03
Toxins are named, and so are the consequences
Where a mushroom causes liver failure this site says liver failure, not "may cause stomach upset". The 8 poisoning syndromes are organised by onset time because that is how clinicians triage them, and because the counterintuitive part, that the fastest poisonings are the mildest, is the single most useful thing a forager can know.
04
Folklore is called out by name
Silver spoons, peeling caps, whether animals eat it and whether it tastes bad are all worthless, and each has a documented counter-example in the death cap itself. Rather than ignoring them, the safety page lists them and says why each one fails, because a reader who has heard them needs the refutation and not silence.
05
Growing is treated as a first-class answer
Cultivating a known species is the only way to eat mushrooms with no identification risk at all, and it is usually presented as a separate hobby rather than as the obvious response to the risk. A grow kit is a fortnight's work. A shiitake log crops for six years.
Where the figures come from
Species descriptions, toxin classes, onset windows and treatment notes are compiled from the standard mycological and clinical toxicology literature. Counts quoted anywhere on the site are computed from the data files rather than typed in, so 43 specimen sheets means 43 rows exist. Seasons are northern-hemisphere and indicative: fruiting swings by weeks with rainfall and by a month or more with latitude.
Anyone identifying mushrooms to eat should be working from a REGIONAL field guide and, ideally, alongside somebody who already knows the local species. A guide to European mushrooms will confidently mislead you in North America.