That’s just ridiculous; nobody is claiming to be perfect.
In fact, let’s just look carefully at that post of yours, Dingbang.
For a start, you omitted slaphead’s second paragraph, which in fact deals with most of your comments about depth of knowledge and whether or not it is a simple task.
And the rest of your post is… actually… a big straw man. There is no need to hurriedly gain the necessary skills and there is no need to apply them under adverse conditions. I’m not sure what your point is any more, but you’re resorting to intellectual dishonesty to try to defend it. Why?
Yeah, but you’re then going to be picking the thing up, taking it home, cleaning it off and looking at it again on the kitchen table with your recognition book handy.
After you’ve changed out of your wet clothes, put your specs on and had a coffee.
They’re not hamburgers, you know - gotta prepare them before you chow down, as well as making sure you didn’t miss any slugs, maggots, rotten bits or whatever.
Sure you are. Hey, I’m giving you props for your mad mushroom skills, just pointing out that this overinflated confidence can get a person in trouble.
This is a good one, too:
So, i.e. other people make mistakes but I don’t.
Yes, but people make mistakes when they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s that simple. People make the same sorts of mistakes when they go out picking berries or nuts or wild salad leaves without knowing what they’re doing, with similar consequences.
Identifying morels from other mushrooms really is as simple as telling the difference between a cow and a horse. Which is to say, anyone who’s ever been shown a cow and a horse, and had the key features of each pointed out to them, could do it. If you just sent someone into a field who had never seen either (even in pictures), and told them to tell you which was which, yeah, you’d get a lot of mistakes. And someone who had seen horses, but never a cow, might well think that a cow was just a funny sort of horse. The only difference between mushrooms and hoofers in this regard is that most people have seen cows and horses, while most haven’t seen the different kinds of mushrooms.
A more apt comparison might be the problems of identification encountered by deer hunters:
Not to mention that I’ve discovered that even mushrooms from the grocery can be dangerous.
After 2 incidents of praying for swift death (one of which involved a lot of hugging the porcelain god and the sink. This is impressive when you consider that I have never, ever thrown up since I was a little kid) post-ingestion of chanterelles from the grocery store or a snooty French bistro, I have sworn off the lovely buttery tasting things permanently. 
I’ll stick with white mushrooms, portabello, and shiitakes from now on.
That, I believe, is precisely the reason for the tension in this thread.
For the record, in case I’ve come across wrong; I am not an expert mycologist by any stretch of the imagination; I can identify many of the common genera with relative ease, but I can probably only identify a few dozen species with complete certainty, but as I say, that’s all it takes; you don’t have to know everything or absorb a superhuman amount of information; you just have to learn the methods of identification for a small number of wothwhile edible species, and stick to them absolutely. It isn’t a case of making mistakes, because there isn’t really any subjective judgment required; if you follow the method, you simply can’t go wrong, or to put it another way, the only way to go wrong is to fail to follow the method.
If you’re prepared to simply pass over anything you cannot identify, or are even the slightest bit doubtful about, and return home empty handed, then there just isn’t any measurable risk.
If someone can drag up a citation showing that the mexican restaurant guys followed the proper methods of identification in accord with a detailed reference source, reached a firm conclusion, and still ended up with deadly fungi, I’ll retract everything I have said in this thread, but I’m sure that won’t be found to be the case; what will have happened is that someone said “Hey, look, mushrooms in the yard! They look tasty - let’s put them in the sauce!”, or something like that.
…You know, your username is actually very appropriate for this thread. 
And those deer hunters probably got a shitload of shit for that llama misidentification. shakes head
Went out foraging in the New Forest today and came back with a basketful of goodies; some fantastic ceps which are (unusually, for these parts) completely free of insect damage - these I sliced and threaded on fishing line and hung in the airing cupboard to dry. There were lots and lots of Agaricus bisporus (thought to be the wild ancestor of the common farmed mushrooms sold in shops) - these were great lightly fried and served on toast.
The most common fungi we saw, though, were the false chanterelles and lots and lots of different Amanita species - mostly Amanita rubescens - ‘the blusher’ - which is poisonous unless boiled and drained (why bother eating it?), but we also saw one little patch of deathcaps and some lovely Amanita muscaria, with their classic white-spotted-red caps. I love finding these (even though they are poisonous), because not only are they very pretty, but they are often a good indicator that ceps can be found nearby, as they seem to thrive in exactly the same habitat.
I used to work in a machine shop. The only time anyone got hurt was because they ignored the simple safety procedures we all were trained to follow. If you call not following safety procedures a mistake, then I can be certain I would never make that mistake. My confidence is based on my commitment to safety, not that I am confident that it could never happen to me. In fact, it was because I was fully aware that it could happen to me that I was always careful to follow procedure.
I have no problem with Mangetout’s confidence. His confidence is based on his commitment to following safety procedures, not that he is some sort of hotshot that is above safety procedures.
If you always have both hands on the touch buttons when you cycle the machine, you will never cut off your fingers even though you run a machine that has cut off the fingers of idiots that willfully defeated the safety mechanisms and didn’t follow safety procedures. They made a mistake I know I would never make.
Yesterday evening I stumbled across a patch of mushrooms in a wooded area; visually, I was fairly sure they were Agaricus augustus - all of the descriptors (perhaps ten different criteria) matched quite closely, but the smell was wrong (‘inky’ instead of almonds) and there was a small amount of yellow discolouration of the cap when broken(which I subsequently found out would not be abnormal for the species). I left them there.
Thing is, I’m reasonably sure that they are in fact just slightly atypical specimens of Agaricus augustus, but ‘reasonably sure’ is not sure enough.
Yesterday evening I stumbled across an animal in a grassy area; visually, I was fairly sure it was a *bos taurus * - all of the descriptors (perhaps ten different criteria) matched quite closely, but the smell was wrong (“horsey” instead of milky) and there was a small saddle on the back (which I subsequently found out would not be abnormal for the species). I left it there.
Wow. So there is a quantifiable risk involved! - I might get beaten up.
Seriously though, I can understand why it gets so intense; the ceps I picked at the weekend (four smallish specimens and one large) have finished drying now, and I reckon it would cost me upwards of £20 to buy that quantity of dried ceps in the shops here.