Foraging safety comes first.
ForagePal helps you learn the forest — it never tells you what to eat. Positive identification, confirmed in person by an expert, is the only safe standard.
ForagePal is a discovery aid, not an identification authority. Never eat anything based on an app ID alone. Always verify with an expert.
Never eat anything based on an app ID alone.
ForagePal is a discovery aid, not an identification authority. It gets you looking in the right place — positive identification is always a human job.
Positive identification, step by step
- The species is confirmed by its full combination of features — cap, gills/pores, stem, ring/volva, flesh changes, smell, spore print, habitat, host tree and season — never any single feature alone.
- Those features are cross-checked against an authoritative field guide, not a single photo or a single app suggestion.
- The specimen is verified in person by an experienced forager or mycologist who can handle, smell and section it.
- For anything with a deadly lookalike, that verification is repeated by a second, independent expertbefore anyone eats it.
Positive identification — confirmed by the full combination of features, cross-checked against an authoritative field guide, and verified in person by an experienced forager or mycologist (plus a second, independent expert for anything with a deadly lookalike) — is the only safe standard before eating any wild mushroom. Never eat anything based on an app ID alone. ForagePal is a discovery aid, not an identification authority, never that standard.
Why we still won’t give you a verdict
The Death Cap (Amanita phalloides) causes an estimated ~90% of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide, with a 10–20% mortality rate even with treatment. It is the classic lethal confusion for anyone collecting look-alike field mushrooms — which is exactly why an edibility class and named toxic lookalikes are as far as ForagePal ever goes.
The decisive field checks: white gills that never pink or brown, a skirt-like ring on the stem, a white membranous volva (sac)wrapped around the swollen base, and a white spore print. Every one of those must be confirmed in person — not from a photo.
Deadly — amatoxin poisoning
Onset is dangerously delayed — typically 6+ hours — often with a false recovery before organ failure sets in. That delay, not any single visual feature, is the red flag: by the time symptoms start, the toxin has already been absorbed.
Contains amatoxins (alpha-amanitin) that destroy the liver and kidneys. Symptoms are typically delayed 6-24 hours - violent vomiting and watery diarrhoea, then a deceptive 'false recovery' of a day or two while the liver is silently failing. There is no home antidote. A single cap can kill an adult.
One deadly mix-up: Field Mushroom has pink gills that darken to chocolate-brown, a brown spore print, and no volva or sac at the base; the Death Cap keeps white gills, drops a white spore print, and always has a white membranous sac around a bulbous base.
This is real, in Ireland
Source:Safefood / National Poisons Information Centre (Ireland). Figures are approximate and under review ahead of launch.
Why we don’t just add a disclaimer
Under EU law, liability for personal injury from a defective product is strict and non-disclaimable — a business cannot write its way out of it with a "we are not responsible" line in the small print. So instead of disclaiming, ForagePal designs for safety: an edibility class and named toxic lookalikes, never an eat/don’t-eat verdict, and the non-dismissible safety note on every identification surface.
Read the detail in ourTermsandPrivacy Policy.
Where this content actually comes from
Every species and tree entry in the ForagePal app’s library is informational, not expert-verified — drafted from published field guides and toxicology sources, not signed off by a mycologist. A named mycologist review is planned as a later content-quality pass. Until then, treat every entry in the app the same way you’d treat a field guide: a starting point for your own verification, never the verification itself.
Our Ireland library is curated and growing. When photo ID lands on a species we haven't written up yet, you'll see a 'coming soon' note rather than a guess — we'd rather show you nothing than unverified content. It is not a complete field guide.