Mycophilia Read online

  Mycophilia

  From the Greek,

  myco = fungus, philos = loving

  To the members of the New York Mycological Society:

  my companions in the woods

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Chapter 1: FORAYS AND FESTIVALS

  Chapter 2: CONFERENCES AND COLLECTORS

  Chapter 3: MUTUALISTS, DECOMPOSERS, AND PARASITES

  Chapter 4: HUNTERS, GATHERERS, AND THIEVES

  Chapter 5: THE EXOTICS

  Chapter 6: TRUFFLES

  Chapter 7: ALL ABOUT BUTTONS

  Chapter 8: THE NEW SUPERFOOD

  Chapter 9: FUNGI THAT MAKE YOU WELL AND FUNGI THAT MAKE YOU SICK

  Chapter 10: SHROOMS

  Chapter 11: MYCOTECHNOLOGIES

  Chapter 12: THE SUPERORGANISM

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARTWORK CREDITS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  I have always loved to eat mushrooms. Even as a child, I found mushrooms to be satisfying in some mysterious way that other foods simply were not. That flavor has a name now, umami, a word borrowed from the Japanese. The noun umami means “good taste” in Japanese, but in English it is generally understood as meaty savoriness, the flavor of the non-essential amino acid glutamate, as found in steak and cheese and MSG.

  My appreciation for mushrooms, especially wild mushrooms, might be in the blood. We have a family story about how my mother went into labor with me in a restaurant in Florence while eating tagliatelle with truffles, and the waiters had to clear off a couple of tables so she could lie down. My grandmother used to can honey mushrooms (using a technique I now know could have taken out the lot of us with botulism poisoning), tender rubbery discs seasoned with parsley and garlic that she added to braised rabbit dishes during the winter. And my parents were foragers, too.

  Our family didn’t really participate in any sports. Unlike the middle-class kids I grew up with in suburban New York, we didn’t ski or sail. We foraged. When we were on the beach, we gathered mussels and sea snails, seined for whitebait, and collected blueberries. At our home in Westchester County, we collected watercress and dandelion greens, and I was still in elementary school when my parents taught me how to identify a morel.

  Likewise, they made sure I could identify the death cap, Amanita phalloides, and the destroying angels, A. bisporigera and A. virosa. Within 6 to 24 hours of consumption Amanita induces severe vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea, then jaundice, kidney failure, liver deterioration, and convulsions. Finally, in a matter of days, death.

  “Just don’t touch it!” my mother would say. “Don’t even look at it!” my father would rejoin.

  As a child, it seemed magical to me the way mushrooms suddenly appeared where they were not the day before. And indeed, in hunting them with my family, I felt like finding mushrooms was a kind of conjuring: If I concentrated hard enough, if I longed to find one deeply enough, the mushroom would reveal itself to me.

  But then I grew up and moved to New York City and, except for preferring dishes on menus that included mushrooms, I didn’t really think about them for 20 years. That is, until my husband, Kevin, and I bought a cabin in Colorado and I met a gal named Peggy Lindsey. Peggy was, at the time, the masseuse at the Ouray hot springs. She was also a regional arm wrestling champ. We conversed during the pummeling she gave me: she, energetic and friendly, and me, responding between grunts through the face hole in the massage table. She told me about the mushrooms she found on the nearby Uncompahgre Plateau, the chanterelles and porcini that, when circumstances were right, came up in abundance. I didn’t have many friends in Colorado at the time, and when she invited me to join her on a mushroom hunt, I was motivated not only by my love of eating mushrooms but also by my need for company.

  We drove along rutted roads, past miles of aspen trees quaking and quivering in the sun, until we reached a deep pine forest, cool and quiet as a graveyard. There were not a lot of mushrooms up that day, but Peggy showed me a small patch of bright orange chanterelles littered among the pine needles, and pointed out one porcini, a Boletus edulis, growing on the periphery of an open grassy clearing in the woods. If I had seen those chanterelles in a market basket, I would never have felt confident identifying them in the wild. But observing them growing in their habitat was a different story. All their minute variations—some were stumpy, others open like a flower—which can never be fully conveyed in a single or even a few illustrations, revealed a sort of cohesiveness in form and color. It was more like recognizing family resemblances. We found about 2 pounds of chanterelles that day, and once home we sautéed them with butter. We rolled up the slick, fleshy nubbins of mushroom in delicate crepes with queso anejo cheese, sweet and sour as the milk burp of a baby.

  My husband is one of those hiking people. His first Christmas gift to me was a sleeping bag. (“But it zips up to mine,” he said when I looked at him for an explanation.) The truth is, I couldn’t understand the attraction of clambering over scree only to reach the top. I recognize that other people find this immensely rewarding, but true to my upbringing, when I connected to nature at all, it was via food.

  Hunting mushrooms on Bald Mountain

  A few weeks after the mushroom hunt with Peggy, I reluctantly agreed to a hike up Bald Mountain, near our cabin. We had company, and company expects to climb mountains when they’re visiting Colorado. We had walked maybe 5 minutes when Kevin called for me to come and look. He’d found a mushroom with a cap as big as a salad plate and a stem so fat I couldn’t get all my fingers around it. Right away I recognized it as a porcini. It didn’t look at all like the small sample Peggy had shown me, yet I knew it the way you know when you have met someone before. One minute we were walking through a forest, and then, as if by magic, we witnessed the conversion of the forest floor. Everywhere, boletus: big spongy mature specimens and hard young ones that looked like beige softballs growing in tidy rows along the side of fallen timber. I took off my jacket and filled it with mushrooms. I took off Kevin’s jacket and our guests’ jackets and the kids’ jackets, too, and tied the sleeves to sticks so I could carry my haul like a hobo’s pack. Kevin and our guests continued up the hill, but not me.

  After gathering as much as I could carry, I returned to the car and pored over each individual in the hoard, until the rest of our party had reached the summit and walked back down the trail. Once home, I totally ignored our company. I divvied up the mushrooms into meals. Some of the big caps we grilled on the fire with a few slabs of eggplant, and I ground the two together with garlic and salt and lemon juice. We dipped big tortilla chips into this lewdly earthy dip, washed down with cold beer. We sliced up the rest of the caps and cooked them with farfalle and chicken broth and lemon zest, and then threw all the stems into an oxtail and posole soup. And so my husband’s desire for a hiking partner has come true. I now accompany him enthusiastically, but while he forges ahead, his long strides covering the miles, head high, breathing in the view, I walk in circles, head down, checking the foot of every tree.

  But mushroom hunting in Colorado can be lousy, and because of drought, it was lousy for years. So I decided to step up my game. At first, I joined the New York Mycological Society (NYMS) in the hopes of finding new, more bountiful hunting grounds. The composer John Cage, an avid mushroomer, founded the current incarnation of the NYMS, and many of the older members remember hunting with him. This was the first time I’d joined a club, any club, and I liked the fact that it was so easy to socialize. After all, everybody was interested in the same subject, and the other members were charming and weird and erudite. Nonetheless, I stayed mainly on the periphery of the club, taking note of information pertaining to organized mushroom hunts where I might
hit mushroom pay dirt.

  Before long I started to attend forays—first those organized by the NYMS, then farther afield. I traveled all over the country in the ensuing years, once in the spring to look for morels, again in the fall to find chanterelles or porcini or matsutake, and in the summers in Colorado. These organized outings, put together by mycological societies or professional mushroom hunters, are kind of like Trekkie conventions for mushroom enthusiasts. There are classes on dyeing fabric with mushrooms and on mushroom cultivation, lots of mushroom eating (called mycophagy), lectures by academics, and guided walks in the woods with knowledgeable leaders.

  “Mushroom hunting is not simply a matter of traipsing through the woods after it rains. It is an art, a skill, a meditation, and a process,” writes David Arora, a persnickety genius whom I like to think of as the high priest of mycology and author of the classic guide Mushrooms Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to the Fleshy Fungi. Of course, he’s right. Mushroom hunting, or “the quiet hunt,” as it is also known, requires knowledge both of the organism and of its habits and habitats. Ultimately, I recognized that learning the biology of mushrooms was how I was going to increase my effectiveness as a mushroom hunter.

  Like many people, I had always assumed mushrooms were a plant. They’re not. Mushrooms are the fruiting body of fungi, just as apples are the fruiting body of apple trees. When you kick up the duff in the woods, that white fluffy-looking stuff under the leaves and rotting wood is a fungus, a network of branching tubelike structures one cell thick that traces a vast pattern underground, like a living spiderweb. Fungi are organisms that comprise their own kingdom of life, equal in complexity to animals and plants. There are an estimated 1.5 million species, second only to insects in number and diversity, and only 5 percent of them have been identified. Fungi outnumber plants by a ratio of 6 to 1 and make up 25 percent of the Earth’s biomass. The biggest single living organism on Earth is a fungus. It is 2,200 acres in size, weighs 6,286 tons, and lives in the Malheur National Forest in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon. Some fungi are so tiny they live between the cells of other organisms. The first terrestrial creatures may have been fungi, and they are more closely related to us, evolutionarily speaking, than they are to plants.

  It slowly became evident to me that fungi were everywhere: We inhale 1 to 10 spores with every breath, as many as 300,000 spores a day. They live on every surface, in every organism to some degree or another, and some can theoretically live forever. They function as a shadow immune system for all plants, a shadow digestive system for trees, and are the source of some of the worst plagues of man and animals and crops, and the best medicine we have. Fungi can decompose all sorts of organic compounds, even petroleum and sarin gas; and given enough time, they will likely evolve to recycle all the rest of our chemical inventions. Indeed, as the mycologist C. J. Alexopoulos put it, “scarcely a day passes when we aren’t helped or harmed by fungi.”

  I also came to know of the existence of a small but intense—and intensely quirky—group of people who knew all this: brilliant people like the guiding light of the NYMS Gary Lincoff, author of The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, whose knowledge is huge and whose delivery is borscht belt; the great mycologist Tom Volk, with his earplugs and blue hair and sleeve tattoos; Britt Bunyard, the punster mycologist who edits Fungi magazine; Mark Miller, the bantamweight, quick-witted spawn maker at Lambert Spawn; Daniel Winkler, the German-born Grateful Deadhead turned world expert on Cordyceps sinensis, which grow from the heads of caterpillars and have been treasured in the Chinese pharmacopoeia for centuries; John Getz, who was there when the business of wild mushroom harvesting in America blew open and got married in his favorite matsutake patch; Elio Schaechter, the eminent microbiologist and notorious flirt; and the entrepreneurial Paul Stamets, the “Steve Jobs of fungus.” The list goes on and on. These were folks who live every day with an intimate knowledge of a huge segment of the natural world that I didn’t even know existed. It was on par with finding out there were people who knew what caused the Big Bang, but the language available to communicate that revelation was incomprehensible to normal people like me, and so they could only marvel among themselves.

  I became someone who, when a friend mentioned LSD, would say, “You know that it’s synthesized from a fungus.” Or if someone mentioned that the potted trees on their patio weren’t doing well, I’d say, “They are probably missing their symbiotic fungal partner”; or if they complained of dandruff, I’d observe they might have an overgrowth of fungus on their scalp; or if the discussion turned to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, I’d point out that if it weren’t for an evolutionary gap between fungi that can decompose some parts of wood and fungi that can decompose all wood, there wouldn’t be any oil in the first place; or God forbid, if someone mentioned truffle oil, I went into a spiel about how truffle oil is flavored artificially, and the bottle costs more to produce than its contents. My husband said I was getting a bit tedious. But I couldn’t help it. I was seeing fungi everywhere.

  At a screening of Know Your Mushrooms, a documentary by Ron Mann, Gary Lincoff, who stars in the film, told the audience, “People who are into mushrooms see them everywhere and they think mushrooms are responsible for everything.” Which is true. Mushroom fanatics do see the solution to just about every problem on Earth in mushroom biology. It’s a bit crazy. On the other hand, they are everywhere. And I was finally seeing them, too. It was like on a hunt: At first you see nothing and think there are no mushrooms up, and then you see one, and then the pattern recognition sets in and suddenly you see them all over the forest floor.

  Then came a breakthrough that for me was the greatest of all. Slowly but surely, as I learned more about the huge role fungi play in nature, I started to understand that everything on Earth functions as an ecosystem; in fact, an ecosystem within an ecosystem within an ecosystem. Since 1979, there has been what the mycologist Bryce Kendrick calls an “explosion of knowledge” about the microscopic world. Scientists now know that within a spoonful of soil there is an incredible complexity of microscopic, interdependent life; that every complex creature—every plant and animal and fungus—is an ecosystem of coordinated organisms. I came to realize that no thing on Earth can properly be considered a single entity, but I am and you are composed of multiple life-forms, from different kingdoms of life, all working in concert to be me or you. And every bird (and the tree it lives in) is an ecosystem that participates in an ecosystem that eventually scales up to the planet. This notion has totally upended my idea of what an individual is, be it plant or animal or fungus, or person or place. In light of the new science, the singular noun “I” is obsolete because in reality, “I” is a community.

  One spring weekend in Long Island I was walking with my friend Gia. I noticed that there were lots of dead ants on the sidewalk, but some were still alive and in a big hurry, and I saw a queen traveling, too. I pointed out that the colony looked like it was on the move; maybe the original nest had been poisoned. Gia said she was surprised how observant I was, that she hadn’t noticed the ants at all. Silly as it sounds, I was kind of proud of myself at that moment. And then, immediately after, humbled. I realized that it was only because I had been paying attention to fungi for the past 10 years that I had developed the habit of looking beyond the end of my own shoe.

  This book chronicles my learning curve. It touches on all aspects of mycology in the United States today: the festivals, forays, and camps; the biology of fungi; commercial wild crafters; the cultivation of exotic mushrooms, including truffles; the history of the ubiquitous white button mushroom; mushroom nutrition (they are considered a superfood now); the traditional and new science in medical and medicinal mushrooms and nutraceuticals; psychedelic mushrooms and ethnomycology (the study of psychedelic mushrooms in culture); new technologies utilizing fungi; and fungi’s role in the symbiotic planet. I have had the help of many smart, passionate, and inordinately tolerant people in sorting through what was
for me often very difficult literature.

  But I was never a disinterested journalist, observing from the sidelines, gleaning just the information I needed to get to the next chapter. I found the subject utterly engrossing. There were many nights when I couldn’t resist reading one more article with the word ectomycorrhizal in the title, even though I could hear my husband click off his reading light and pull up the bedcovers. At first I may have been, as a friend suggested, the Lucille Ball of mycology, blundering my way through the science and foisting myself upon a tight-knit community, but I’ve come a long way since then. I mean, I would never have guessed that I would become one of the presidents of the New York Mycological Society, and that like them, I would become a full-fledged mycophiliac. But here I am.

  Chapter 1

  FORAYS AND FESTIVALS

  My journey into the realm of fungi started with basic venality. I love to eat wild mushrooms, but I don’t love paying for them. They’re hellaciously expensive in Manhattan where I live. The problem was: How to find them? And then I learned about the New York Mycological Society (NYMS) and their promises of guided mushroom hunts. It sounded good. Plus, the price of membership was right: $20 a year.

  The NYMS offers lectures on fungal biology, slideshows of mushroom photography (Taylor Lockwood’s show packed the room), a banquet featuring mushrooms during the winter (a Roman Feast, a Cantonese Banquet), many small guided walks, and a few big forays every year, the most popular being the Morel Breakfast.

  When I first joined the club, I tried to mask my true motivation. At the winter lectures, I pretended to be interested in all mushrooms, nodding with phony delight at the slides of inedible molds or polypores or whatever. The truth is, I was embarrassed to admit I was participating in a scientific club mainly in anticipation of spring, when the morels came up and the hunting would begin. But shortly after the announcements for the Morel Breakfast went out, I realized I was not alone in my greed. Everyone in the club was horny for morels. Free, fresh, fat morels.