I grew up deep in the woods. Like any good mother, mine was a little over-protective; I was instructed to not even touchany mushrooms (or other fungus). Period. But if I did touch them, to wash my hands as soon as possible. To this day, I generally leave them alone. If I do pick one up while on a hike, I'll generally wash my hands with whatever drinking water I have on me.
There is one mushroom called the Poison Fire Coral that can poison through touch. It just made the news rounds for being found for the first time in North Queensland.
“If found, the fungus should not be touched, and definitely not eaten. Of the hundred or so toxic mushrooms that are known to researchers, this is the only one in which the toxins can be absorbed through the skin,” said Dr Barrett, a mycologist from the JCU Australian Tropical Herbarium (ATH) who specialises in the study of fungi.
At least in the U.S. and Canada, there are no mushrooms where if a healthy adult nibbles on them to taste them and then spits them out, they will be anywhere close to the LD50. You might still get some minor liver damage or whatever, but not enough to kill you. This is as opposed to plants, where people have died just from putting water hemlock twigs in their mouths to play with.
There are a bunch of similar-looking species where the proper way to ID them to know if they're edible or not is actually to nibble on them and then just spit them out.
> At least in the U.S. and Canada, there are no mushrooms where if a healthy adult nibbles on them to taste them and then spits them out, they will be anywhere close to the LD50
LD50 is the dose that kills 50% of a test population. I don't think I'd try something if the only assurance I had that it was safe is that it is not anywhere near LD50.
There is literally only one known in the world (as linked above) - "poison fire coral" which is described[0] by a researcher as such: "Of the hundred or so toxic mushrooms that are known to researchers, this is the only one in which the toxins can be absorbed through the skin"
