Mushrooms are fascinating. After watching them in the great outdoors, reading fascinating texts about them, and hearing my mom warn me about them, I’ve gotten to the conclusion that mushrooms are the absolute best. Here are 7 reasons why:
Super smart
We got used to the idea that organism needs to have a brain in order to have intelligence and consciousness. Mushrooms prove us that brain is unnecessary, and that intelligence isn’t limited to one organism, but can be spread among an entire living network. While humans use their brains to perform basic tasks like 9-5 jobs and Netflix binges, mushrooms use their intelligence to balance the biochemical conditions of their ecosystems and ensure life itself goes on.
Super fresh old souls
Mushrooms have a curious duality. While their life cycle can be extremely fast, their entire life can be unbelievably long. The fungal germination cycle can happen in less than a week. That’s where the idiom “like mushrooms after rain” comes from. Fields of mushrooms can pop out almost instantly when conditions are right. On the other hand, the oldest living organism known to man is a mushroom, estimated to be 2,200 years old or possibly more. This colony of Armillaria ostoyae found in an Oregon Forest is covering 3.4 square miles (2,200 acres; 8.8 km²) is nicknamed the “Humongous Fungus”.
Super clean
Mushrooms are nature’s sanitation workers, and they’re doing hella good job! They’re not freaked out by the dead, they happily decompose them. Burial suits of mycelium can potentially make human death more environmentally beneficial. Certain types of mushrooms have found to decompose even plastic more efficiently than any synthetic process and even clear out radioactively contaminated environments.
Super healthy
Mushrooms are the source to some of the most effective types of medicine we use. Starting with the revolutionary penicillin, through cholesterol and diabetes control, to shitake mushrooms that are prescribed to cancer patients in Japan. No wonder: highly adapted to the world’s filthiest habitats, mushrooms are boosted with antiviral and antibiotic defenses.
Super gastronomic
Mushrooms turn our culinary world into a delightful experience of taste and nutrition. Thinking about mushrooms as a pizza topping? Think twice! Without mushrooms there won’t even be such thing as pizza. A crucial component of pizza dough is yeast – a microscopic type of fungi. Some cheese culture starters depend of mushrooms. Beer to go with your pizza? Another yeast product. Chocolate for desert? Wouldn’t be an option without fungi fermenting cacao beans.
Super psychoactive
Psychoactive drugs are not recommended. Avoid them. However, if you do chose to partake in psychoactive drug consumption, mushrooms would be the safest choice. Out of all the common recreational drugs, psilocybin mushrooms are the least physiologically harmful and the least addictive. By far less harmful than legal alcohol and nicotine, and by far less addictive than caffeine.
Super badass
If you’re not convinced so far that mushrooms have super powers, I dare you to take a bite of a death cap and get back to me in one day. But really, please don’t. You won’t be able to get back to me since you’ll by lying dead in a puddle of bloody diarrhea. Certain types of mushrooms have poisons strong enough to damage and kill massive animals and reshape environments. Fungal colonies have destroyed forests and rotten manmade structures. The rice blast fungus is estimated to destroy enough rice to feed more than 60 million people each year. Mushrooms can be deadly, and we better be on their good side.
To conclude, mushrooms are mighty. Perhaps mightier than we can understand. Mycologists are only beginning to unveil their mysteries. While us humans are making attempts of cultivating certain types of mushrooms and harnessing them to our benefit, I suggest a shift in point of view. Mushrooms inhabited earth before humans did, and they have all the features to outlast us. They’re more complex, ancient, faster to adapt and intelligent than us, and yet they are much more humble. So instead of trying to make mushrooms work for us, maybe it would be better if we observe, listen, and try to learn the deep knowledge they have in store. If we’re lucky enough, the mushroom kingdom might choose to cultivate us.
This post was written in response to readings from NYU’s class “The Fungus Among Us” with professor Justin Peake. Here are some of the reference texts: