Growing up in the nineties, the only mushroom I had time for was Toad—Princess Peach’s loyal attendant and by far the best Mario Kart character. I thought the real thing, the fungus that my mom insisted on hiding in bolognese, carbonara, and stir fries, was straight up feral. Spongy, dirt-clad, and unsettling. Fast forward a couple of decades and the balance has tipped. Not only do I eat fungi daily—lovingly spritzing the yellow oysters that sprout creepily from a bag atop of my fridge and lacing my morning coffee with reishi-cacao mix—it seems everything outside of my kitchen is coming up mushrooms too.
They’re dominating my social media feed; taking over the beauty and wellness industries; inspiring various books, exhibitions, kitschy poster art, fashionable foraging shoots, and adorable home goods; providing, thanks to their unique structure and chemical properties, the ideal building blocks for everything from housing insulation to faux leather; and being pegged as ecological saviors sent to transform the way we manufacture, consume, and live. And yeah, the psychedelic ones are going mainstream too—reports show millennials are opting out of binge boozing culture in favor of microdosing tiny amounts of psilocybin in the name of self-care. If I knew anything at all about “The Stock Market,” I’d put all my money on mushrooms. (Okay, and those cute little robots that deliver food right to your door. Those are gonna be big.)
Of course, mushrooms have been around forever. In fact, we share a common evolutionary history—a limb on the genealogical tree that branched away from plants “perhaps 1.1 billion years ago,” Natalie Angier wrote for The New York Times in 1993. One researcher cited in the piece said this is why fungal diseases are so pesky to treat. “A lot of the metabolism is so similar that you can't target a fungus sufficiently without gravely affecting the human host as well,” said Dr. Mitchell L. Sogin of the Center for Molecular Evolution at the Marine Biological Laboratory. So, basically, we are mushrooms and mushrooms are us and that toenail fungus will plague you for years. Crazy!
While fungi have long been prized in other cultures, many non-Indigenous Westerners are only just waking up to them. “Over the last 70 years or so, America has been incredibly mycophobic,” says Gordon Walker, Ph.D., the mycologist behind @FascinatedByFungi—a TikTok account dedicated to getting its 778k-plus followers stoked on shrooms. “I think a lot of that dates from around World War II, when we lost much of our immigrant food cultures to the great whitewashing of American food—which came at the detriment to local food systems but to the boon of national processing companies.” As food was industrialized and optimized for speed, cheapness, and ease of manufacture, tater tots, TV dinners, and Spam cans pushed fresh produce to the collective periphery. Mushrooms may have particularly fallen out of favor because they’ve long been considered objects of fear.
“It’s always been like, ‘Eeeeww, [mushrooms],’” says chef, writer, and TV host Sophia Roe. “Like, they’re these phallic things that represent death, rot, and mold—none of which are actually bad.” But an influx of books, YouTube channels, and social accounts like Walker’s are granting us more information about mushrooms than ever before. “People used to be very suspicious of mushrooms because eating the wrong one could easily kill you or make you ill,” says Gina Rae La Cerva, a geographer, environmental anthropologist, and the author of Feasting Wild: In Search of the Last Untamed Food. “Now you can basically snap a photo with your phone and identify something, even if you’re in the middle of nowhere.”
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September 23, 2021 at 02:42AM
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From Lattes to Lamps, America’s Coming Up Mushrooms - Bon Appetit
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