ASHEVILLE - On an unseasonably warm fall day, wild mushrooms grew in abundance in the dappled sunlight of Bent Creek Experimental Forest.

There were honey mushrooms, chicken of the woods and a bonanza of what's known as shrimp of the woods.

The latter is a strange but delicious beast formed when a certain fungus parasitizes a honey mushroom and creates something akin to a particularly tasty Styrofoam peanut.

This abundance, said foraging guide Alan Muskat, could be leveraged to financial independence, even a sovereign food system, if only people were equipped to identify wild edibles.

He pointed to the log where the shrimp of the woods sprouted like pallid Cheetos.

Imagine, he said, the financial freedom that might come if everyone could walk into their backyards and pick $50 worth of mushrooms in 20 minutes. "And all you'd need is a rotting log."

New changes to state health code legalizing the sale of wild mushrooms to restaurants may bring that vision a step closer, but a gray area remains as far as who gets to sell those mushrooms, rotting log or not.

Restaurant dining rooms, where wild mushrooms can be found in everything from omelets to steak sauce, could be a major source of income for foragers.

But since 2009 until recently, your wild mushroom risotto contained unregulated contraband.

That's the year N.C. Department of Health and Human Services Division of Public Health declared selling wild-gathered mushrooms to restaurants forbidden, unless they were gathered or inspected by an approved mushroom-identification expert.

The problem? The state never bothered to define what exactly constitutes an "expert."

There was no sanctioned certification program, nor state-approved course and no official paperwork required. Just a triangle of trust between the customer, the chef and the forager. By default, serving wild mushrooms was illegal.

Last year, there was even an effort to create a state-certified training course. That's no longer on the agenda.

In an about-face, the state this year decided selling wild mushrooms to restaurants is legal, with some caveats. And although a wild mushroom identification training course is strongly encouraged for mushroom sellers, it's not required.

Tradd Cotter, a mushroom cultivator and specialist, says that gray area is a dangerous one.

Cotter teaches Wild Mushroom Food Safety Certification courses for South Carolina, and Georgia, where permitting is required, and North Carolina.

"I think there needs to be a clear interpretation or requirement by the state that says you either have to have a class or you don't," he said.

The new rules do require foragers to provide to restaurants a “North Carolina Wild Mushroom Verification Form,” specifying the species of wild mushroom the forager is qualified to sell, which restaurants must keep on file for 90 days.

The forager must also submit with each sale "North Carolina Wild Mushroom Verification/Sale Tags," which they can get from the Health Department by providing a statement detailing their qualifications.

The tags must indicate the species of mushroom being sold, checked off a list of 16 approved varieties.

Not included on that list? The shrimp of the woods mushrooms.

That's a shame for diners, but no matter for Katie Button, chef and co-owner of Cúrate and Nightbell in downtown Asheville.

She said rarer wild mushrooms often aren't harvested in the quantities she needs, anyway.

She also said the extra paperwork the new law requires is a small price to pay for safety.

"This was created to protect the dining public," she said. "Knowing that (foraged mushrooms) come from a reliable source that's educated about what they're selling and knows what they're doing is important."

But Cotter said he worries some foragers are trying to leverage the ambiguity in the new codes to their advantage, trying to score tags from the Health Department without what he considers proper training.

"I told the Health Department they were handing out unloaded guns with the tags," he said.

Even people with decades of foraging experience could fail the food-safety portion of his mushroom classes, he said.

Anything edible can be made deadly in the wrong hands, he cautioned.

Muskat and Cotter both said the state's ambiguous stand on certification is an effort to shift liability to the chef-forager relationship.

"But I feel like the state is even more liable now, because they're handing out tags to people without any toxicology or food-handling training," Cotter said.

Cases of wild mushroom poisoning are rare but not unheard of.

"Death cap" mushrooms picked in California, where mushroom hunting is legal outside of state parks, poisoned 14 people late last year, with three requiring liver transplants, including an 18-month-old girl.

Some of those poisoned picked the mushrooms for themselves, while others received the fungi from others.

In 2012, four people died at a Northern California senior care facility after eating soup made from poisonous mushrooms.

Felissa Vazquez, food and lodging supervisor for Buncombe County Health and Human Services, said in an email Tuesday that the department has not received any recent poisoning complaints linked to the consumption of wild mushrooms.

"Usually you get laws when something goes wrong," said Muskat, adding that's not the case here. Western society, he said, seems to have a case of "myco-phobia."

Experts who have foraged for years now have an extra burden of record-keeping, he said, and there's a financial burden for people who decide to go the training route.

That's why it's hard to say whether the new requirements represent a positive step or not. "A clearly positive step, in my view, would be a public education program."

Muskat envisions a world where children gather and sell mushrooms in some sort of sylvan 4-H club. But don't tell him that sounds a bit Utopian.

"If Utopian means 'idealistic,' it's the opposite of that," he countered.

The agricultural system upon which our society is built is broken, he asserted. Learning how to live on wild abundance, he said, is essential.

He envisions a pyramid of mushroom training, where 500 trainers train 500 teachers, who each train 500 schoolchildren, until all fourth-graders are crawling through the woods.

"I feel like children could be commercial foragers. It's no different from 4-H, where they're selling eggs or milk, but it's wild stuff and you can get into it right away," he said.

Would such wide-scale invasions of forests and woodlands be sustainable?

"That's like worrying about cutting yourself with a knife while you're shooting yourself in the head," Muskat replied. "Systematically, all the food we're eating, everything we're doing is so much worse."