Mushrooms are quite the oxymoron. Granted, there are different types, but if you look at them as a whole they are interesting. Edible and delicious yet deadly, beautiful but ugly. They are an intriguing fascination.  

To put it simply, a mushroom is the fleshy, spore-bearing body of a fungus, which is typically above ground, on soil, or a food source. They are known mainly for their red and white spotted look, however, most mushrooms around the State College area are brown or white. The term mushroom is typically used for the spore bearers with a stem, cap, and gills.  Some use mushrooms to define the edible ones and toadstool to define the nonedible ones, and some just use mushroom or toadstool for all of them.

The terms mushroom and toadstool go back centuries and were never precisely defined, and there wasn’t a consensus on defining them. In the 1400s and 1500s, the terms mushrom, mushrum, muscheron, mousheroms, mussheron, or musserouns were used. The term mushroom and its variants possibly were from the French word mousseron based on the word mousse(moss).

A good rule of thumb is never to eat a mushroom outside and only eat store-bought ones.  The most dangerous mushrooms are The Death Cap, Conocybe Filaris, Webcaps, The Autumn Skullca[p, Destroying Angels, Podostroma cornu-damae, and the Deadly Dapperling.