Mycophobia
I’m throwing an all-mushroom dinner on Nov 19th at Collar City Mushrooms in Troy. Tickets here.
Slimy and squishy, they grow stealthily after rainfall in dark corners of the forest. “Stealthily,” at least in our frame of reference, because they prefer shade to sunlight and bloom freakishly fast in comparison to plants. They are darkness and decay in unknown places. They conjure images of rotting corpses half-hidden under leaves, with worms coming out of the eye sockets. The macabre is implicit in mycophobia and mycophilia, both camps seemingly preoccupied with the spookiness of the neither-plant-nor-animal that completes the death-decay-food lifecycle of beings on this planet.
“I find the degree to which certain societies fear fungi not only intriguing but, upon deeper analysis, reflective of that culture’s relationship with the world — a more cryptic and darker expression of human-fungal relations,” writes Peter McCoy in Radical Mycology. I find it hard to generalize about cultures, though the Eastern Europeans I know tend to have a darker sense of humor. (“Is it a mushroom cloud?” asked a Russian artist friend, upon seeing my baby’s adorable toadstool-patterned shirt.) Gordon Wasson, who introduced psylocibin to the “modern” world in the 1950s (severing it from its context in Oaxacan shamanism) was inspired by his wife, a Russian immigrant who horrified him when she picked and cooked mushrooms from the forest on their honeymoon trip to the Catskills. Gordon and Valentina became obsessed with the discrepancy in their personal attitudes towards mushrooms. Together they constructed the mycophobic/philic dichotomy that frames how most of us think about mushrooms today.
The US, traditionally more of a mycophobic country, seems to be entering a bright new age of mycophilia. Mushrooms are having a “moment,” as they say, and you can see it everywhere from VC-backed mushroom growers like Smallhold to the sudden abundance of mushroom jerky, fried mushroom chips, and products like "mushroom crumble" made to resemble ground beef. Functional mushrooms (those that claim health benefits, especially mental ones) are booming in the supplement space. Psiloycibin is being legalized for therapeutic use. There’s that mushroom documentary that everyone keeps talking about. And then there are the scores of fungus activists who believe “mushrooms can save the world” and are pursuing that dream through the avenues like mycoremediation (breaking down harmful pollutants with fungus) or mycelium as construction material (I handled a beautiful fungal brick at the Fungus Fest last weekend).
All of this is exciting for someone who loves mushrooms, and I have to admit that their popularity is probably what feeds some of my obsession right now. But there is something discomfiting as well about the slimy being made shiny. A certain sect of mushroomers hold that mushrooms are resistant to the forces of capitalism, but the clean encouraging websites that promise 10x productivity with one of their chaga matcha drinks seem to be able to handle the difficulties of turning a wild food into a commodity. Some people are concerned about whether these companies are foraging ethically, which they probably aren’t. Some, like me, are probably just a little put out about sharing this space with VCs who trade in their fleece vests for faux fur on the playa and attribute their killer business deals to microdosing. Mushrooms are metaphor as well as being food and, much like the Internet, the dominant ones have been resource-sharing and decentralization and closed-loop ecosystems. Much like the Internet, it turns out that the architecture, or anatomy, does not preclude power amalgamation.
In a piece about food preservation and preppers, Adriana Gallo points out that while traditional preservation methods can “incorporate and welcome rot, transformation, and decomposition with all of their assorted waste and outputs” and make the human a partner of the process of death, preservation is also used effectively in the commodity chain, and separates people further from what they’re eating. “There is the temptation to position fermentation as political or in some way inherently in opposition to an industrial or capitalist food system when in fact fermentation is used quite expertly in that arena to create food that is shelf stable, easily shippable, and highly profitable.” Mushrooms, too, are not inherently political. Though they begin in dark corners of the forest, they can be severed from their origins as we find new ways to make them useful to ourselves.
A few weeks ago in the courtyard at Pioneer Works, two artists were connecting transducers to headphones tapping in to the electrical signals emanating from bags of reishi, oyster, and lion’s mane. (I feel proud that my baby’s first experience wearing headphones is to listen to the music of the mushrooms.) It’s part of a project they’re calling Sensory Kinship of the Third Kind, that seeks new ways to connect to mushrooms through our senses — beyond taste, they’re interested in letting us hear mycelium’s underground soundscape or simply asking us to smell thoughtfully around a mushroom’s environment. “What might it mean to forge a kind of kinship with mushroom that goes beyond their usefulness to humans?” they ask. I listened to the headphones connected to the bags and they sounded mostly like static if I’m being honest — random and unintelligible. But who am I to ask for a mushroom’s signals to follow a human rhythm? More translation is required than simply converting signals that we can’t detect into ones we can, but maybe some of that translation needs to occur in the imaginative realm.
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I finish writing this piece in the wake of loss, the kind that untethers you from whatever you were thinking about or working on before you heard the news. A wrong turn on a sunny hike, where suddenly the trees all look different, and though a moment ago it seemed to be the middle of the day, now it feels like evening could wrap you up at any moment. Certain themes keep resurfacing, though. That lifecycles are natural. That dark corners do not have to inspire fear. Whatever the success of our attempts to make the slimy shiny and clean, we are never really separate from the earth and its rhythms.
No newsletter next week <3
What I’m Cooking
Ginger-garlic Lion's Mane skewers
This was so good. I’ve made Lion’s Mane before, and it always resembles chicken to an uncanny degree, but I’m using a new method here of boiling it before roasting or grilling. The ginger-garlic marinade adds so much flavor, and is very easy to throw together.
Seriously, you have to try this one:
Great piece!!
The skewers look nice - I wouldn't mind attending your dinner - it's just a bit too far away. Enjoy!