FINDING WILD MUSHROOMS that have actually been picked in the wild, often referred to as “wildcrafted mushrooms,” is not difficult. I see them sold at our local farmers’ market; your own local farmers’ market may well have a table run by a mushroom forager, too.

You can also find wildcrafted mushrooms in dried form in organic supermarkets, but their provenance can be uncertain. According to LocalHarvest, an online site (http://www.localharvest.org) devoted to putting buyers together with local sellers of mostly organic products, wild-harvested American mush- rooms are sometimes shipped to Europe for packaging and then sold as dried European wild

mushrooms, and some packages of dried morels sold as French morels were identified as being harvested in northern India and smoked over dung fires to preserve them. If you can afford it, it’s better to buy fresh wildcrafted mushrooms at a farmers’ market where you can meet the forager face to face.

Foraging for your own mushrooms is a great activity, and there are plenty of books available on the subject. But a word about eating mushrooms you’ve picked from the wild: A mistake can kill you in a particularly agonizing way. I knew a young man with a bright future who died this way, and it was a tragic end to a promising life. I also knew the composer John Cage, who loved to hunt mushrooms. He put himself in the hospital several times experimenting with new types. I hunt mushrooms, too, but here’s my personal rule: Unless I’m 100 percent positive that the mushrooms I’ve found are edible and harmless, I don’t pick them and I certainly don’t eat them. By 100 percent, I mean that I would feed them to my kids. A great basic guide for anyone interested in foraging for wild mushrooms is David Arora’s All That the Rain Promises, and More.