Mycophilia Read online

  That night, Sven made a smoked pork loin stuffed with sausage and morels and a sauce of morels and caramelized onion, all on a small propane stove. It was like a miracle. Everyone was rather grubby, with earth under their fingernails and pine needles in their hair, and so relaxed that no one jumped at the occasional gunfire of campers elsewhere in the woods shooting, I guess, at the full, full moon. I asked the psychiatrist about our mushrooming obsession, and if it was somehow wired deep within us, like a lizard brain thing, and she said yes, she thought it was evolutionary: Just as having an orgasm inspired people to have sex, the rush of finding a mushroom inspired people to gather.

  Before heading back to the airport in Sacramento, I drove to a nearby campground. The Memorial Day weekend was over, and the campgrounds were deserted and exhausted. I came upon an ugly, unused campsite, a puddle of stagnant water beneath the picnic table. Behind the site was a low sloping hill covered with morels. I picked them in a frenzy, as if fearful they would disappear before I’d gathered them all. Among them I noticed a brown convoluted mass, rubbery and asymmetrical. I got up close. It was a false morel, a Gyromitra esculenta, which David had pointed out was not edible, or at least, not edible for me. Gyromitra are heat labile: Boiling the mushroom in water can reduce its toxic gyromitrin, which converts to monomethylhydrazine when heated, but the boiling water must not be drunk nor the fumes from the boiling water inhaled. However, the toxicity can vary from specimen to specimen, depending on things like altitude, so eating it is a risky business. The false morel is, according to Denis Benjamin, a doctor and mushroom expert, “an edible mushroom that sometimes kills.”

  “It’s delicious, if you want to go there,” said David.

  Some people do. When I was a child, we used to buy our live Christmas trees from the nursery of an old Italian named Nick Mastropietro in Somers, New York. He was sweet and wrinkled as a dried apple. Nick once pointed out a mushroom growing beneath the Christmas trees in his nursery, and told my father he ate them. My father flipped out: He recognized it right away as an Amanita muscaria, the mushroom that killed the count, and that is generally described as poisonous. But Nick said, no, they’re delicious.

  “But it’s strange,” he continued. “After eating them, I always fall asleep.”

  “I told him, ‘You’re lucky you wake up,’” said my dad.

  I tried it once: Two mushroom experts, Larry Evans and Daniel Winkler, stopped by our cabin in Colorado en route to the Telluride Mushroom Festival one August, armed with a big basket of A. muscaria. They sliced and boiled a few of the younger specimens, then sauteed them. There was no gamesmanship: I could try them if I liked. I’m glad I did, because they were scrumptious, buttery and mild. My tongue and lips tingled a bit, but so slightly I was quite sure my reaction was psychosomatic. Shortly after eating them, however, I fell into a heavy narcoticlike sleep. It was, to be honest, just like the sleep the doctor puts you into before a colonoscopy—the Michael Jackson drug. When I woke up about 2 hours later, I was wearing one shoe.

  There is a saying that there are old mushroom eaters and bold mushroom eaters, but no old, bold mushroom eaters. But actually, there are. There is a subset of wild mushroom hunters who are what Campbell calls expert mycophagists: people who eat or at least have tasted a wide array of mushrooms. A really wide array. “I stopped counting at 100 species,” he said.

  In 2000, Ken Litchfield, a Californian who has been studying and hunting mushrooms for more than 50 years and teaches mushroom cultivation at Merritt College in Oakland, conducted a casual survey of mycophagists’ 20 favorite mushrooms, and the results were published in the Internet newsletter The Fungizette the following year.* Some of the entries were startling: Michael Wood, editor of www.MykoWeb.com and a burly, enthusiastic man prone to pronouncements like “THIS is the best wine in Colorado,” then trying another and saying, “No, THIS is the best wine in Colorado!” pointed out that his #20 favorite mushroom, the false morel (Gyromitra esculenta), “CAN BE VERY DANGEROUS.” (Indeed, 2 to 4 percent of all mushroom fatalities are associated with false morels. Eaten raw they can be lethal.) “Eat it with great caution, if at all. I try to have one meal of it a year … it’s just TOO GOOD to ignore.” The lists ranked mushrooms that I was unfamiliar with, and many eaters selected mushrooms other than the heavy hitters (morels, porcini, chanterelles, truffles) among their top three: mushrooms like man on horseback (Tricholoma flavovirens), lion’s mane (Hericium americanum), and the shaggy parasol (Chlorophyllum rhacodes).

  Throughout my years of attending forays, over and over again I encountered confident outdoorsy men with beards and shaggy hair who dabbled in a kind of mycophagic adventurism that struck me at first as being as much about chest thumping as it was about gastronomic pleasure. “For those who embrace the risky nature [of mycophagy] the danger confirms the ultimate triumph over a world they understand and respect,” wrote Gary Alan Fine in Morel Tales: The Culture of Mushrooming. But I came to understand that in the process of trying any mushroom that they can satisfactorily determine won’t kill them, these expert amateur mycologists gain knowledge about fungi that the microscope cannot reveal: They study the interaction between fungi and people, particularly our digestive tract. However, mycophagy is as much an art as a science, and the variability of people’s tolerances is such that one guidebook will tell you slippery jack is edible, and another will tell you it is not. Ultimately, the edibility of certain mushrooms depends on the collector.

  The father of American mycophagy is Charles McIlvaine, author of One Thousand American Fungi (published in 1900). He discussed in detail the edibility of many species, most of which he tasted himself. There are many entries like this one, for Amanitopsis nivalis: “A strong, unpleasant bitter [sic], which appears to develop while cooking, renders it unpalatable. It is harmless, but its use is not advised.” (The book also includes recipes like “Toadstools with Cheese,” which is particularly odd since the word toadstool has traditionally implied poisonous mushrooms.) As McIlvaine advised, “There are other species which contain minor poisons producing very undesirable effects. These are soon remedied by taking an emetic, then one or two doses of whisky and sweet oil….”

  While there may be some machismo or old-fashioned showing off going on, expert mycophagy is also about education, to help people better understand the diversity of fungi and appreciate the complexities of their biology. When I attended a lecture by Ken Litchfield, who is given to saying ballsy things like “the best mushrooms have worms in them,” Ken put a piece of an Amanita phalloides—the death cap—in his mouth and chewed. It is impossible to absorb enough amatoxin through your skin to cause death, but chewing them? The audience, as I am sure Ken expected, was awash in “Oh my Gods!” and “Holy shits!” But after chewing quite audibly, he spit it out: The death cap has to be metabolized in order to decimate your liver. “It’s a stunt,” said Ken, “but it makes a point.”

  I asked Michael Wood about this practice. “I know people who eat Boletus satanas” he said. (This hellishly red, wicked-looking mushroom is generally listed as poisonous.) “It grows on their property so they eat it. People all over the world eat foods that need special treatment, like cassava.” Wood is right (I later learned that he has tasted over 150 species), but the key word here is treatment, and what distinguishes mycophagists is that in order to eat all these different mushrooms safely, they must know them well, and it is the knowing that is, ultimately, the sport. Charles McIlvaine wrote, “There is but one way to distinguish the edible from the non-edible fungi; that is by mastering the characteristic of each species one by one.” It’s like Ken Litchfield said while he munched away on that bit of death cap: “Knowledge is power.”

  Back at my B&B in Sacramento, I went over my mushrooms. David Campbell had also pointed out Agaricus subrufescens, sometimes called the almond mushroom, a baby-pink gilled, almond-scented treasure in the same genera as the white button mushroom. They were too delicate to bring back to New York, and I wondered if I wou
ld have the confidence to eat them if I found them in the Catskills or Central Park. It dawned on me that I would never have the nerve to eat more than the few mushrooms I recognized from restaurant menus unless I got serious and learned the Latin binomial and the taxonomy and, bummer, the complex biology.

  And so I started to attend conferences, and there I learned not only that the science was not tedious at all, but completely alarming and bizarre and beautiful, and that the mycologists, the people who are hyperfocused on fungi all the time, were the most delightful collection of oddballs with a mission that I’d ever met.

  * * *

  *In recent years, the advent of new, exclusive tools like electron microscopy and genetic analysis—and their growing importance in mycology—has widened the gap between most amateurs and pros.

  *That doesn’t mean new toxins aren’t being discovered. One syndrome, called rhabdomyolysis, which causes a breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue, has recently been described in a Japanese Russula species.

  *Sometimes there is a race to describe and name a mushroom. The mycologist Dr. Roger Heim named Psilocybe wassonii for his collaborator, R. Gordon Wasson, the father of ethnomycology—the study of mushrooms in religious practice—and the modern discoverer of psychedelic mushrooms. But another mycologist, Dr. Rolf Singer, published a description of the hallucinogenic mushroom first, so he got to name it: Psilocybe muliercula (muliercula means “little women”).

  *While most professional mushroom hunters seem to be men, a Mexican study found that women are actually more adept at mushroom hunting. The men in the study “climbed higher, traveled further, and used 70 percent more energy than the women, who made more stops but seemed to know where they were going.”

  *The Greek author Athenaeus, who wrote The Deipnosophistae in AD 200, described Apicius as “very rich and luxurious,” a man who spent “myriads of drachms on his belly” and, according to the Roman authors Seneca and Martial, devoured his whole fortune. When his money got low, he killed himself with poison at a fabulous last-meal banquet rather than curb his appetites.

  *Litchfield is a kind of Johnny Appleseed of the fungal world. In his native northern California, he likes to spread spores by chewing mature mushrooms and spitting the mash into cracks in wood or over rotting forest duff. Ken has been struck by lightning twice. The only other person I know who has been struck by lightning twice is Moses Pendleton, one of the founders of the dance troupe Pilobolus—named for the fungus.

  Chapter 2

  CONFERENCES AND COLLECTORS

  I eased myself into the study of the biology of fungi by attending events that trended more toward education than tromping around in the woods. The first science-oriented congress I went to was the 33rd annual Northeast Mycological Federation (NEMF) foray on Cape Cod one rainy October weekend. I’d picked up my fellow New York Mycological Society members Paul Sadowski and Alice Barner on the Upper East Side at 5:00 that morning: Even a crummy driver like me feels competent on the streets of New York at 5:00 a.m., but after 5 hours of being hemmed in by 14-wheeled Wonder Bread trucks going 70 miles per hour, we were all pretty jittery. Luckily, the bar was open when we arrived at the Eastham Four Points Sheraton, where the foray was headquartered.

  NEMF is a federation of 18 mycological clubs stretching from Canada to Virginia, and each year, one or more of the clubs hosts the foray. The year I attended, 2009, the foray was hosted by the Boston Mycological Club and was attended by 240 or so people: the usual crowd of middle-aged to ancient hobbyists wearing whistles and pulling wheelie luggage (but who would turn out to be bankers, filmmakers, literary agents, and pediatric surgeons), a scattering of hippies and outdoor enthusiasts, and quite a few professional mycologists who lent a little celebrity sheen to the festivities.

  I was aware that this was not going to be an acquisitional trip: I didn’t even know what kind of mushrooms grew on sand dunes, and the rules of the foray called for avoiding excessive picking anyway. Instead, we were to pick only the best specimens for species identification. Nor was the trip about snazzy accommodations and sexy restaurants, though that would have been nice. The Sheraton is like a hotel version of a fast-food restaurant. My room, which I shared with Alice, faced an indoor pool where a lone lady in a swim cap breaststroked at about 1 mile an hour up and down the length of the pool for what seemed like the entire weekend. The place smelled like chlorine.

  The NEMF foray followed the format of some other forays I’d been on, but with more programming. There were walks in the day during which specimens were collected, identification sessions and technical lectures in the afternoon, and entertaining lectures in the evening. In addition there were socials, games like the Polypore Pitch, where contestants chuck the tough, leathery mushrooms into various-size baskets, and an awards ceremony (honoring heaviest fungus found, best specimen, etc.). The indoor ID tables were set up in the Marconi Room (Marconi, a Nobel Prize winner for inventing the telegraph, also has a beach named after him in nearby Wellfleet), as was a kind of bullpen for the professionals and a select few amateur mycologists and their microscopes. The Marconi Room also housed the secretary of the foray and the database coordinator, whose jobs were to maintain the master list of species found. This year, the coordinator was a former NYMS member who had forsaken the club because it had been trending toward belly hunting. My friend Paul was on a microscope near Rod Tulloss, a tall, shy fellow and well-known Amanita expert whose proximity had made Paul blush, as if he were sitting next to Beyoncé. Bart Buyck, the curator of the mycological herbarium at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, had the Russula group station (Russula and Amanita are genera of fungi, like panthers and horses are genera of animals). Other mycologists came and went, like our own Gary Lincoff, who has probably seen and held more species of mushrooms in his hands than anyone alive today, and the DNA boys.

  Mycologists study fungi (not just mushrooms), and fungi are still mostly mysterious. That’s because they are very small—often only noticeable when they fruit as mushrooms or molds, which only some do, and they live in inconspicuous places: underground, in dead matter, or as symbionts of plants, animals, or other fungi. In fact, anyone whose heart’s desire is to name a species would do well to enter mycology, since only 5 percent of an estimated 1.5 million species have been described, although most are microscopic plant pathogens, or tiny soil or aquatic fungi. Traditionally, botanists lumped fungi together with plants. But in fact, fungi outnumber plants 6 to 1. Fungi constitute a huge, unique kingdom, the Kingdom Fungi, which represents a wide range of lifestyles and morphologies. This group of organisms is as complex as the kingdoms of plants and animals. Indeed, animals, plants, and fungi are nature’s most complex life-forms.

  The 17th-century Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, known as the father of taxonomy, determined there were two kingdoms of life: animals and plants, and then he divided these two kingdoms into different classes (mammals, reptiles, cactuses, etc.). He based his classifications on morphology—does it have thorns or horns? In 1866, after the invention of the microscope, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed three kingdoms: animals, plants, and protista, a kind of grab bag of simple microorganisms. In the 1930s, the American biologist Herbert Copeland proposed four kingdoms, adding monera, which consisted of prokaryotes, organisms whose cells lacked a nucleus. In the 1960s, the American plant ecologist Robert Whittaker proposed a five-kingdom system. This system was mainly based on differences in what an organism ate and how it got its food, and it led to the inclusion of fungi, the fifth kingdom.

  In the 1970s, molecular comparisons led to yet another redefining of the kingdoms, which split the prokaryotes (Kingdom Monera) into two kingdoms. In 1977, Carl Woese, an American microbiologist, took the long view: He established the three-domain system, composed of bacteria, archaea, and eukarya, in which the different kingdoms fall, and this has proven a durable and widely accepted scheme, though there have been other classification ideas since then, each responding to new knowledge about the
relationships between microscopic life forms.

  “You have to remember,” said Gary Lincoff when I asked him about this shuffling about of kingdoms, “it’s all just opinion. If you want to call a mushroom a plant, who’s going to stop you?” (Lincoff teaches botany at the New York Botanical Garden. “One of the first questions I bring up is: What is a plant? Is a mushroom a plant? It depends on how you define plants and mushrooms. It all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”)

  Many scientists use cladistics (from the Greek clade, meaning “branch”) to classify species of organisms. Cladograms, which look like genealogical trees, are diagrams that show the ancestral relationship between species, starting with an ancestor organism. Based on a variety of criteria, a cladogram can reveal the evolutionary relationship between plants, animals, and fungi.*

  In universities, the study of fungi is typically taught in the botany department, though one could argue it should be in the department of zoology, because based on biochemical and ultrastructural criteria (ultrastructural refers to cells and their parts that can be seen with an electron microscope), fungi are actually more closely related to animals than plants. The most compelling argument for this strange familiarity is their lineage: Both fungi and animals spent more time together on the same branch of the tree of life than either had with plants.

  Additionally, fungi and animals share more morphological and structural cellular features than fungi and plants do. For example, the cell walls of fungi are made of chitin—the same substance as crab shells and squid beaks—which doesn’t exist in plants. Plants make their own food by converting sunlight into chemical energy. Fungi, like animals, can’t make their own food; they produce enzymes to digest the food they find. Fungi retain their carbon reserve—the nutrients they can call on for energy—the same way animals do: as glycogen. Plants store their energy in the form of starch. Animals and many fungi are aerobic respirators: They respire atmospheric oxygen in (to produce energy) and release carbon dioxide out. (Other fungi are anaerobic fermenters—like yeasts. They are able to oxidize molecules in the absence of oxygen.) Plants do the opposite (carbon dioxide in, oxygen out).