Last Sunday I went to Fungus Fest held by the New Jersey Mycological Association:  http://njmyco.org  The exhibition was held at the sprawling Frelinghuysen Arboretum in North Jersey:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frelinghuysen_Arboretum.
    It was a very enlightening presentation with lots of vendors, mushroom walks, classes, cooking demonstrations, etc.. The Frelinghuysen Arboretum was beautiful and would have been worth the trip by itself.  My friends and I ended the day with a long hike around the grounds. 
    I went there with the hope that afterward I'd be able to safely identify at least a few edible varieties of mushroom that don't have a deadly look alike.  Nothing like that happened... instead I learned exactly how daunting a task mushroom, lichen, and morel identifidation is.  There are at least twenty different criteria to identify a species and just about all mushrooms have poisonous look alikes.  Anyone who takes to the woods looking for edible fungi after one seminar is either insane, stupid, or suicidal. 
   We sampled mushroom curry, a mushroom/potato/cheese dish, and mushroom cookies.  I bought some Black Trumpet Mushrooms, Hedgehog Mushrooms, and Lobster Mushrooms, mostly because I'd never seen them before.  They are all excellent and the Lobster Mushrooms actually taste like lobster... for real. 
    Anyway, it was a fascinating trip that I'm glad we took. 

the lobster ones would be lions mane mushrooms ?

Picking mushrooms is pretty easy - in most countries there are 10-20 or so species that are very very easy to identify and eat. And you just don't pick anything else

Sounds like a great day out though

Fungi are separate from plants and animals. On the tree of life, there are 3 domains:

• Bacteria
• Archaea
• Eukarya

Within Eukarya, there are 4 kingdoms:

• Animalia
• Plantae
• Protista
• Fungi

there is a fungus among us

Curious Aardvark wrote on Oct 2^nd, 2014 at 6:57am:

They're the largest, most complex organisms in Kingdom Protista.

   It actually was fascinating.  One of the things I've wondered about mushrooms is how they sometimes grow out of very sterile white sand.  Often I'll find them popping out of a dirt road.  Like, what are they eating?  The answer is that most of the mushroom is under the ground as a system of (I forget the technical name) roots.  What we see above the ground is just the fruit of the organism.  In picking it you don't harm the main organism at all.  Some of these mushroom systems get very big.  At one of the seminars they told us about one out West that was as big as Rhode Island... a single plant.  They took DNA from both ends and it was the same.  Who'd a thunk it!!!