Mushroom season

As autumn falls so fungi's reign begins. It's still early in the season, and it's still quite dry, but the frequency with which you see mushrooms is slowly increasing. Some of those mushrooms are edible favourites. Today I saw Beefsteak (Fistulina hepatica), nearing the end of its season some Chicken of the woods (Laetiporus sulphureus) and the often present Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus ostreatus).  Commercial picking has long been forbidden in the forest, although collecting for personal consumption up to 1.5kg has been permitted. I say permitted as the Forestry Commission have just announced that mushroom picking has been banned throughout the forest, full stop. What nonsense, based on little scientific evidence, in fact, the evidence suggests that picking helps fungi communities, or at least has no negative effects. Also, there are a couple of thousand types of mushroom in the forest and of those only a tiny handful are collected to eat. The other reason they say, are these mythical hoards of organized pickers sweeping the forest, well they may, although in 30 years of forest foraging I've never seen them, or evidence of them. This ban follows a worrying trend, such as some local councils bans on collecting wild berries. Foraging is our human right, wild food is just that, wild and therefore in my mind at least free. Few even forage anyway, and the seasonal increase sometimes seen in the forest is driven by the media harking on about how much fungi is worth, encouraging people to collect, the same media that then runs angry stories about too many people collecting mushrooms.  As I say, I've been collecting mushrooms for years, you have good years and not so good and in both I always see countless mushrooms go uncollected. Stop publicising mushroom collecting as a profitable activity, stop creating and fuelling the problem, and see the numbers of those picking drop back to just those who are into it for the right reason and pick responsibly. Anyway, I can't see it being enforceable, if the can't stop the hoards (oh, that's right, they can't because they're bloody mythical), then how are they going to stop the responsible individual.  And more to the point, why bother? What's the real agenda here?