The Mushroom Manifesto

A bounty just waiting to be picked.

Nature seldom gives anything away - there's a price to be paid in labor, materials, environmental damage and untold other factors for just about anything that comes out of the ground.

We're prepared to declare an exception, however, for the mushroom. It grows as it will, needing little more than moisture and some source of organic debris for food. In exchange, it produces an amazing variety of fruits that can be delicious, insipid, bizarre, psychoactive or seriously poisonous.

Found everywhere from misty rainforests to brutally hot deserts, mushrooms come in thousands of varieties and are notoriously independent. They grow when and where they please, treating foragers to extremes of paucity and ridiculous abundance, as we were reminded on a recent gathering expedition along the Northern California coast.

Some definitions, to start: The thing we think of as the mushroom is only the sprouting fruit of what is usually a much larger fungus structure underground. (One honey mushroom colony in Oregon is believed to extend for more than 2,000 acres). This means it's hardly every an ecological error to pick a mushroom. You're just playing along with the fungus' scheme to spread reproductive pores.

Edible mushrooms in the U.S. include gems such as the king bolete (aka porcini), numerous variety of meaty chanterelle and one of our favorites, the sweet candy cap. Of particular pecuniary note are the matsutake, which can fetch prices up to $1,000 a pound in Japan, and the morel, the basis of a professional foraging economy in the Pacific Northwest that employs thousands of nomadic pickers. 

One important thing to note about edible mushrooms: They're no good unless you cook them. Some mushrooms are mildly poisonous raw but safe and tasty with a bit of sautéing. Safer mushrooms are still bland and pretty much indigestible raw. They're made of chitin, the same material as beetle exoskeletons, and there's no way to make use of the nutrients within without some heat.

Mushrooms don't help us just by perking up a veal cutlet or pasta sauce. The growing fields of mycofiltration and mycomediation are discovering myriad ways to use mushrooms to soak up pollution, prevent erosion and treat contaminated water. Medical researchers are finding promising compounds in mushrooms that could be helpful in treating cancer, mental illness and migraine headaches. And let us not forget their contribution to the ecosystem -- without mushrooms, we'd be neck-deep in dead plant matter and bereft of trees, which depend on the fungi to free up nutrients.

On the dangerous side, there are only a few extravagantly poisonous varieties in North America. But species such as the aptly named "death cap" can look very similar to safe, desirable mushrooms. Best advice is to only eat what you pick once you've had an expert verify they're safe. Even then, it's best to start with a little nibble and see how that sits. One more thing - even the most deadly poisonous of mushrooms can't hurt you unless you eat it. All mushrooms are safe to handle by hand.

In between yummy and toxic are few species of mushroom with legendary hallucinogenic properties enjoyed not only by thrill-seeking humans but all manner of wildlife. Lapland reindeer are fond of the trippy amanta muscaria, which is thought by some to account for the Santa Claus legend. The mushroom's bright red cap can be seen as resembling Mr. Kringle's, and reindeer could certainly seem to by flying after a ingesting a few of those babies.

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2 Members’ Opinions

March 21, 2008 12:08 PM
BobRoss said...

Traipsing around the mud and muck, potentially choosing a "death cap"? I'll stick to the ones offered in my local grocer, thank-you-very-much.

March 21, 2008 12:41 PM
ExPat said...

Portabello mushrooms are an interesting alternative to the usual mushrooms sold in the grocery store. You can saute them like a hamburger patty and use them as a meat substitute in a hamburger.

I don't know if there's a nutritional advantage to raw mushrooms, but cooked certainly has a better taste.

In England and Wales there is a mushroom called a "toadstool" (presumably a toad could sit on it). Eating it was fatal to humans (probably toads, too).

Magic mushrooms? Raw or cooked? Not that I plan to find out any time soon.