Comment Re:Most boletes are safe to eat, but (Score 1) 67
If you feel the need to eat an unidentified mushroom, though, boletes (pore mushrooms) are what you want to pick. Leave anything with gills alone. The family lacks the deadly amatoxins and orellanine. They only have gastrointestinal irritants and potential allergens (and, apparently, novel psychedelics!), and even then, it's only like a dozen species that have them, and nearly all, if not all, are either red and/or stain blue, with the biggest culprits doing both. There's only been one confirmed death from a bolete that I'm aware of (from the red-+pored bolete (red pores, stains blue), an elderly man, and it seems to have been linked to (at least in part) severe dehydration from the mushroom's gastrointestinal effects (dehydration, vomiting). This despite the fact that boletes are among the most popular mushrooms globally to collect.
Don't get me wrong, if you eat the wrong bolete, you're going to have a really miserable time of it. If you're really unlucky you'll need to go to the hospital (among other things, to get an IV to keep you hydrated). But it's exceedingly unlikely that one will kill you. And it's quite unlikely that anything bad at all will happen.
Still, yeah, not worth it for a fancy meal!
Random agarics (gilled mushrooms), though, that can readily kill you. There are certain *subcategories* of agarics with very distinct characteristics that are safe, but if you just go out there and pick some random white mushroom or some LBM (Little Brown Mushroom), well, roll the dice