Introduction
TALES FROM THE FOREST FLOOR
Nature alone is antique and the oldest art a mushroom.
THOMAS CARLYLE
Mushrooms—in their many colors, shapes, and sizes and with their complex life histories and growing habitats—are a fascination to everyone who possesses a love of nature. The deeper secrets and the tales of their lives offer an intriguing glimpse into a hidden world of complex relationships, powerful chemistry, mind-expanding potentials, and deep religious and magical associations. On a practical level, people are most interested in questions of edibility, toxicity, and health promotion, and in these areas, mushrooms touch our lives on a regular basis. When you expand the sphere of mushrooms to include all members of the kingdom Fungi, then their beneficial, neutral, or malignant influence touches us many times each day. As we eat our morning yeast-leavened bagel, lunch on blue cheese or Brie, take an antibiotic or antifungal for an infection, or unwind with a glass of wine or beer, fungi are an often unseen and underappreciated part of the picture. Fungi, and the mushrooms that represent a tiny but visible portion of this kingdom, are loved, worshipped, feared, and reviled, but most of all, they are ignored as they intersect our busy lives. Our relationship with the world of fungi is defined by a vast gulf of ignorance and lack of awareness. We don’t see what lies before us, and we know little about what we do see.
Who knows, for example, that as we walk on the needles and leaves carpeting the forest floor, that with each step we tread upon many miles of fungal hyphae, the microscopically thin threads that comprise the vegetative body of mushrooms? Collectively these hyphal threads combine to form an unimaginably vast network of mycelium growing just beneath the surface of the ground and connecting to the roots of the majority of green plants. This network of interconnected fungal mycelium and plant roots carries nutrients, water, and chemical messages throughout the forest ecosystem. Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running, refers to this system as “Earth’s natural Internet.”1
We know so little about fungi, and yet within our collective sphere of knowledge lies an ever-growing number of fascinating tales about mushrooms and their role in our lives and in our world. As I edge closer to my fortieth year of an ongoing love affair with the world of mushrooms, it is my intention to share a few of the many compelling stories I have learned. My goal is to help each reader take another step in transforming our culture from mycophobic (mushroom fearing) to mycophilic (mushroom loving). This can happen only when we gain a better understanding and appreciation of the mushrooms around us. The steps toward embracing mushrooms are built upon growing awareness of, and intimacy with, the lives of the fungi intertwined in our world.
The terms “mycophilic” and "mycophobic” were coined in 1957 by an international banker and famed amateur mycologist, R. Gordon Wasson, to describe differences between ethnic groups with regard to their attitudes, beliefs, and use of wild mushrooms. Wasson first realized these differences in 1927, while he was on honeymoon in the Catskills with his new bride, Russian-born pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna. Many years later the well-known ethnomycologist would recall the initial experience that started him down the path from mycophobe to mycophile.
We had been married less than a year and we were off on our first holiday, at Big Indian in the Catskills. On that first day, as the sun was declining in the west, we set out on a stroll, the forest on our left and a clearing on the right. Though we had known each other for years we had never discussed mushrooms together. All of a sudden she darted from my side, with cries of ecstasy she flew to the forest glade, where she had discovered mushrooms of various kinds carpeting the ground. Since Russia she had seen nothing like it. Left planted on a mountain trail, I called to her to take care, to come back. They were toadstools she was gathering, poisonous, putrid, disgusting. She only laughed the more: I can hear her now. She knelt in poses of adoration. She spoke to them with endearing Russian diminutives.2
For a mycophile like Valentina, each mushroom species had a personality and a spirit, and it made little difference whether they were eminently edible or dangerously poisonous. She knew and loved each for what it was and for the story it held in her world. Wasson refused to touch them. He had been raised to ignore and distrust all mushrooms. “I, of Anglo-Saxon origin, had known nothing of mushrooms. By inheritance, I ignored them all; I rejected those repugnant fungal growths, expressions of parasitism and decay. Before my marriage, I had not once fixed my gaze on a mushroom; not once looked at a mushroom with a discriminating eye.”3 The recognition of the impact of their polar-opposite cultural attitudes and fount of knowledge regarding mushrooms was striking for the Wassons. Over the next several years, they devoted their spare time to exploring multiple aspects of mushrooming in different cultures around the world. They identified and labeled mushroom-loving and mushroom-fearing cultures and more closely examined how attitudes, beliefs, and practices related to mushrooms were woven into people’s lives in mushroom-loving cultures. Their studies took them across Europe and into Asia and finally to Mexico and Central America, where their pursuit of reports on the use of mind-altering mushrooms in rituals led to the discovery of the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Wasson’s participation in a ceremony where he ate “magic mushrooms” was described in a famous 1957 article in Life. “Seeking the Magic Mushrooms” introduced hallucinogenic mushrooms to the western world for the first time. In the end, the Wassons coined the terms mycophilia and mycophobia to describe the cultural rift regarding mushrooms, and their work continues to strongly influence the study of mushrooms in culture today.
Strongly mycophilic cultures exist in Russia, Siberia, the Czech Republic, and many other Eastern European, Scandinavian, and Baltic countries. Mushrooms are also interwoven into the fabric of daily life as food, medicine, fable, and folklore in China, Japan, and Korea. Wasson described these regions and their cultures using, perhaps, overly optimistic language. According to Wasson, “These are the areas where mushrooms are considered friends, where children gather them for fun before they can read and write, where no adult feels the need for a mushroom manual” and described these lands as places where mushroom-poisoning “accidents are unknown.” We know that a lot of people are poisoned by mushrooms in mushroom-loving lands (see Chapter 1), but Wasson had a point to make. He summed it up by saying that in a mycophilic land, “all the references are friendly, favorable, and wholesome.”4
By contrast, in America wild mushrooms are widely looked upon with distrust and disfavor. Coming from dominant cultural roots entwined in Anglo-Saxon norms, Americans mistrust and fear the mushrooms springing up in the lawn, garden, and forest following a rain. If it does not come cooked on a pizza or aseptically wrapped in a clear layer of plastic from the store, a mushroom is not to be trusted. When I ask participants in talks I give on wild mushrooms what their parents told them about mushrooms as they were growing up, they say: “Don’t touch that. It’s a toadstool. It could kill you! Quick, go wash your hands!” For the most part, Americans’ questions about the mushrooms growing on our lawns are not about beauty, but about ugliness; not about potential edibility, but about the risk of toxicity and how to make them go away, permanently. Our beliefs have deep roots in British culture. In the words of British mycologist William Delisle Hay in his 1887 book British Fungi, “The individual who desires to engage in the study [of wild mushrooms] must face a good deal of scorn. He is laughed at for his strange taste among the better classes, and is actually regarded as a sort of idiot among the lower orders. No fad or hobby is esteemed so contemptible as that of the ‘fungus-hunter’ or ‘toadstool-eater.’” In referring to British culture, Hay went on to state, “This popular sentiment, which we may coin the word ‘fungophobia’ to express, is very curious. If it were human—that is, universal—one would be inclined to set it down as instinct and to reverence it accordingly. But it is not human—it is merely British.”5 No culture has colored our American viewpoint on mushrooms more than the British.
My family was as typical as the one next door. As a child growing up in New Mexico, we ate no mushrooms, at least not in any recognizable form. This was true in spite of the fact that my mother and her French and German parents collected and ate several wild mushrooms from around their ranch in Montana when she was a child. My fourth-generation Anglo-Saxon Irish father was able to thwart any of my mother’s dangerous tendencies toward mushroom experimentation. His beliefs and attitudes were perfectly in line with the norm for his background and generation (i.e., one does not eat those damp putrid evil fruits of the earth). Raised as a second-generation Irish Catholic living off the ranch in the town of Bozeman, Montana, his parents and grandparents had no family history of using wild mushrooms. He then raised his family in a city at a time when American food production was becoming increasingly mechanized, processed, and corporate. I grew up with Velveeta cheese, Swanson TV dinners, Wonder Bread, and tuna noodle casserole. The closest we came to anything resembling a mushroom was using Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup in the casserole. The very idea of collecting the puffballs off our lawn (which I did as an adolescent) and transforming them into sauce for the egg noodles or elbow macaroni was as foreign and suspect as eating tofu became to many older adults in the next generation.
Yet many Americans have ancestral roots in rural agrarian Europe and Asia, where collecting and eating wild mushrooms was a seasonal, much-loved, and relied-upon part of the diet. In every mushroom class I teach, in every talk or walk I offer, there invariably is someone who offers the reason for attending as an effort to recapture the connection to mushrooms present in his or her childhood. They talk fondly of collecting mushrooms with an aunt, uncle, grandparent, or some other beloved person. The elders retained the connection with mushrooms from “the old country” and shared their passion with the children in their lives. The students tell of the mysterious, unshakable certainty with which their guides would distinguish edible from non-edible mushrooms. They recall the pleasurable experience of collecting in damp woods and wet fields, the transformation from basket to pan, and the shared pleasure of eating their mushroom treasure. Invariably they speak emotionally of their regret over the loss of knowledge about mushrooms, the loss of the tradition of mushrooming in their families. Then they talk about their desire to reconnect to the mushrooms in their world, to reconnect with a deep, nurturing set of family and archetypal roots symbolized in the generational relationship with mushrooms. They seek a return to their roots of mycophilia.
Why did the elders not bless the following generations with the gift of mushrooms? Did they drop the ball or did the emerging generations, flung hell-bent into the race to make their mark in America, turn their backs on their forest roots and family traditions? It may be a blend of both. Immigrants to America over the past 150 years have entered a process called acculturation by which they are immersed into the values and norms of the dominant culture and, over time, become integrated. This process often has involved a sense of isolation from ethnic roots coupled with a devaluation of traditional practices of the homeland and an idealization of the new culture of the melting pot. In late nineteenth and early twentieth century America it also often included general movement from a European rural agrarian life to one that was urban and industrial. Many new immigrants settled first in the cities. New foods, unfamiliar land and forest, and a new language probably furthered their movement away from integrating local mushrooms and other wild foods into their diets. The accommodation of diet and food was rapidly accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s with the increase in processed foods and the idealization of “instant” food, pushing people further away from their own rich dietary traditions. As immigrant families turned away from historic roots related to food and lifestyle, America as a whole was turning away from our farm-based food roots. The mass exodus from farms and ranches into towns and cities was accompanied by a vocational shift to factory and office work and a trend toward buying food rather than growing, foraging, or raising it. “Mushroom” began to refer to one species of bland, pale, supermarket origin most often seen canned or as a minor ingredient in the ubiquitous casserole. Or, as in my middle-class suburban family during the 1960s and 1970s, generally not seen at all.
Times change. America slowly came awake to a curiosity about, and an appreciation for, more diverse and traditional foods including the world of wild or “exotic” mushrooms. The decades following the 1960s were a time when many Americans recognized that the homogenization of the melting pot came with the devastating loss of individual and cultural identity. Many sought to reconnect with their ethnic roots before cultural memory was lost forever. One of the most visible, enduring, and endearing aspects of culture is culinary and revolves around the dining table—that bastion of conveyed love, social connection, and nurturing. Though not everyone has family dining traditions they’re looking to brag about, almost all will tell you that the memories of dinnertime traditions are enduring and powerful. Rediscovered food roots have resulted in the rapid proliferation of ethnic restaurants, cookbooks, and cooking classes. Once we began to expand our food horizons to include traditional ethnic dishes, we needed the proper ethnic ingredients. Many European and Asian dishes included the use of “exotic” mushrooms far removed from our pale supermarket variety, and adventurous chefs and family cooks required a source for wild and exotic mushrooms. This need could be filled by importing, but what about the wild mushrooms surrounding us in forest, field, and garden? In the 1970s America began to turn away from Wonder Bread and to look toward nature as source of healthy and natural food we had almost left behind.
The movement to rediscover our ethnic roots through diet also coincided with a period when many people were re-evaluating their overall relationship with nature and the environment. The term “environment” took on entirely new meaning through the 1970s as we struggled to address the effects of 100 years of industrialization upon it. The “back to the land” movement was born of the 1960s urban and suburban disillusionment and a search for deeper meaning and reconnection with the natural world. For some, myself included, the appreciation of nature included, in late adolescence, a growing interest in wild foods and foraging (thank Euell Gibbons). My growing fascination with wild mushrooms was further fueled by the possibility of filling a basket and cooking pot with great edibles. The two streams, connecting to ethnic heritage and recommitting to a connection with nature, are embodied in the vision of the Slow Food movement, which emerged out of France and Italy in the 1990s. The Slow Food movement celebrates regional and ethnic traditions related to food production and preparation, and a strong desire to support regional and sustainable food practices. The movement has further energized people to integrate the use of local foods, including mushrooms. More Americans are rediscovering a family history of wild mushrooming or creating their own traditions of incorporating mushrooms into their lives as a way to develop a relationship with nature and as a source of interesting, healthy, and desirable food. No mushroom in America embodies this better than the morel.
The morel has become the most widely collected and consumed wild mushroom in America, and because it draws such broad appeal from people in all walks of life, it may represent a change agent, a harbinger of a broader acceptance of wild mushrooms in the United States. Morels are not just a “blue state” food consumed in the glittering urban kitchens of the educated, sophisticated, and elite. No way. They are found and collected in abundance in the Midwest and mountainous Southeast by rural and country folk who might bring their mushroom bags into the woods along with their turkey call and shotgun.
Everyone who collects mushrooms for the table is responsible for learning the skills needed for accurate identification in order to avoid the risk of poisoning. Those skills are vital as you sift through 2,000–3,000 species in search of the great edibles. For me, however, learning the more intimate stories of mushrooms and their impact on us and the forest environment broadened my appreciation and deepened my relationship with them. When I first started mushrooming, my interest was drawn to understanding their diversity, but my curiosity quickly focused on the interrelationships of fungi in their environment as I studied botany and ecology in college during the 1970s. My gastronomic interests also drove me to focus on the edible mushrooms, to learn about cooking with them, and then to direct my interest toward growing exotic mushrooms at home. Over the past ten years my fascination with the medicinal and health-affirming potential of mushrooms became a passion and then a business.
The web of interconnectedness between mushrooms and the rest of nature seems limitless. Consider, for example, an obscure dark gray finger of a mushroom known as the goldenthread cordyceps, Cordyceps ophioglossoides. It is a parasite with a yellowish stem and yellow root-like mycelia that connect it to its host, a type of false truffle called Elaphomyces that is buried in the soil. The false truffle lives in a complex symbiotic relationship with the roots of the hemlock tree, and those roots also may be connected symbiotically with several other species of fungi, which can include the porcini, Boletus edulis, and the destroying angel, Amanita bisporigera.
The interrelationships don’t end there, however. The northern flying squirrel is a rarely seen nocturnal rodent prone to spending the day in tree cavity nests. It is attracted to the strong scent of the false truffle as the truffle begins to mature and digs up the nut-like fruit in the night. Along with other fungi, truffles make up a dominant part of the squirrel’s diet for much of the year. The spores of the false truffle are unusually thick-walled, enabling them to pass unscathed through the digestive tract of the squirrels. The well-nourished rodent then deposits the spores in its feces, where the spores are more likely to find a new host tree than if they were dependent on the truffle alone for dispersal. In short, a common squirrel that we rarely see due to its nocturnal lifestyle feeds primarily on truffles and other underground fungi that we also almost never see unless we spot the elusive parasitic cordyceps easing its obscure head above the forest floor. The truffles rely on animals to unearth and consume their fruit as the only way to distribute their spores, and the forest trees require root associations with fungi like the truffles in order to obtain vital nutrients for growth.
The interrelationships don’t end there, either. As the hemlock declines, it becomes prey to fungi that attack and decay the heartwood of the trunk. The rot-softened wood provides an opening to woodpeckers for feeding and nest cavity excavation. Who else, beside the woodpeckers, do you suppose uses these cavities as homes? The shy nocturnal flying squirrel.
This kind of story—and the natural connections it illustrates—brings mushrooms to life for me. Stories make the abstract real, build familiarity, and transform understanding from a vague recognition of separate elements seen on the forest floor to an inkling of the dynamic and intricate web of relationships that move in choreographed dance steps in a natural world we rarely glimpse. These are the kinds of mushroom stories you will find on the pages ahead.
As America travels the path toward embracing mushrooms, toward mycophilia, we will need to develop (or recall) a language and stories about mushrooms as we invite them more deeply into our lives. There are signs that this is already under way. Our growing fondness for morels is one sign. Where forty years ago there were few mushroom field guides available, there are now many that cover specific regions of the country and some that represent the entire United States. Web sites celebrating and offering education about mushrooms are springing up like, well, like mushrooms. Another sign of movement to embrace mushrooms, though not as uplifting, is the increase in the number of mushroom-related poisonings reported in this country. Mycophilic cultures have far more people poisoned by mushrooms each year largely due to the fact they have so many more people eating wild mushrooms. An inevitable, though unfortunate, result of America’s growing interest in wild edible mushrooms will be the increase in these poisoning cases.
All of these signs of interest will grow as we develop our relationship with the world of mushrooms. For the moment, I invite you to share in a few of the stories about those denizens of the forest floor.