Mushrooms are enigmatic creatures. After a long drought they spring up out of the humus on the heels of a soaking rain. When you turn to look back up the trail, their caps press skyward in the dent of your footsteps. You swear they weren't there a moment ago. Your boot-soles would have crushed them, right? Yet there they stand, bald heads glistening in the dappled light.
And when you arrived home from work last night, ambled across your lawn with your head full of agendas and to-do's, wondering if that's dinner you smell cooking or if you'll have to prepare your own, no circle of mushrooms stood beside your driveway. The kind with grey-green caps, a colour not of this world. The kind that whisper of fairies emerging from the forest to dance hand in hand long after you've gone to bed. You swear they weren't there last night. Yet there they grow in the morning, just as though little feet had trod them into being, in the middle of your neatly trimmed lawn.
And when you took your kids hiking last autumn, you swear you heard a giggle from inside a hole pecked into a pine tree. You peered into the hole, directly above the shiny red wood conk that your mom used to call fairy's balconies, hoping to glimpse a character from one of her tales. She’d spin yarns of wee folk standing atop their conks, calling to each other as the sun set, making plans for their nightly dance. You shake your head to clear the vision. What nonsense.
You probably have ancestors, or know someone with a Gramma, Grampa, Babushka, a Nona, Baba, Opa, Nana or Papa who talks of mushroom hunting in the Old World. How they'd wake the morning after a good rain, skip breakfast in their rush to beat other hunters to the prime spots. How they'd scramble through brambles filling their baskets until they became too heavy to carry. Nona might shake her head and say: “It's just not the same here. I don't know which mushrooms to eat. I just go to the store and buy those little white ones. Blech, like styrofoam, they are!”
Maybe you heard her speak of famine. While butter melted on your potatoes and sank into the crevices of your corn on the cob, perhaps she spun a tale of boiling mushrooms in three changes of water, to render their poison harmless. All the trouble they took to gnaw nutrition from the land.
In North America, these tales make their listeners shudder. A continent on which many are afflicted with myco-phobia. We might look to the origins of our culture for reasons as to why this irrational fear runs rampant, though like mushrooms themselves, traces of them are hard to find after too much time has passed. Dig as I might, I've found no evidence that prehistoric humans consumed mushrooms. Fear might have kept them away from this ample food source. Or maybe our distant ancestors had rich oral traditions bearing the knowledge of which to consume and which to avoid, long lost to us who have silenced ancestral voices with the finality of the written word.
Delving deeper into the mystery, consider the reverence held in one of the formative cultures of Western civilization. We venture now to Ancient Rome where they carved their veneration of mushrooms into stone, immortalizing their love of fungi for their idolizers to ponder in modern times.
We can read Roman works extolling fungus as the food of the gods and listing their perceived divine qualities with awe. Traces of mycelium are woven through myths. In the damp shaded places beneath grapevines, mushrooms sprang up from the fertile soil. The two non-human entities became eternally united in Roman myth: the sacred fruit of the vine pouring from the cup held aloft by Bacchus, the god of wine, who inspired the Roman spirit of revelry. And crushed beneath his sandalled, dancing feet, one might find the remains of mushrooms who had formed a mycorrhizal relationship with the grapevines.
The Romans attributed mushrooms to the god of wine, Bacchus, as they often appeared in areas where grapes grew abundantly. Additionally, mushrooms were associated with the goddess Ceres, symbolizing fertility and abundance. Despite their admiration, the Romans approached mushroom consumption with caution, recognizing the potential dangers of poisonous varieties.
Nevertheless, they cultivated edible species, such as the prized Amanita caesarea, (pictured below with chanterelles) as delicacies fit for the elite, further cementing their status as divine sustenance in Roman culinary culture. The earliest evidence of cultivation dates around 600 A.D. The technique fell into disuse alongside their vast networks of roads. There's no evidence of its resurrection in the Western world until Victorian times. Commercial mushroom growing, or even harvesting, didn’t gain traction in North America until the 1920’s. Meanwhile, mushroom cultivation continued and advanced in the East, with China and Japan perfecting shiitake growing methods, keeping extensive records dating back a millennia. Much of our modern technique is owed to this diligent record keeping.
As a result of this lack of relationship, an archaeological dig through European texts on the medicinal uses of plants yields precious little information on mushrooms. As far as natural science is concerned, mushrooms have only distinguished themselves from plants in the last few hundred years. Through medieval times, interest in them went underground, knowledge about them became arcane. Alchemists studied their life cycle to dissect the secret of life and revered them for their ability to create new material from decay. They became known as messengers from the Underworld, creatures of the night, of illusion and poison, witchcraft, and occult mysteries, lumped into the realm of magic and vilified by religious bias.
Along with steamer trunks overflowing with their worldly goods, Europeans hauled all this cultural baggage to the shores of North America. The many and varied peoples here passed on incredible and invaluable information about plants, animals, ecology, climate, and even fungus. European settlers benefited from this knowledge, giving precious little in return aside from trickery, disease, and the usefulness of metal worked into tools. Some have argued that we brought civilization to their door, or further, salvation. And if one considers the Western culture to be the pinnacle of human evolution thus far, as our literature clearly does, then in one context at least, that is true. But in so many other worldviews, it’s a falsehood that would do well to pass into the dust of human history.
For this is not the first time an entire people have paid this price. A Blackfoot elder once told me that he believes: “everywhere there is land wide enough to stand on with two feet, there have been people who have paid the price of blood to defend it, and it has been taken from them.”
Why must one culture entirely override and destroy the other? There are precious few examples of this in the natural world. In contrast, there are untold billions of micro-organisms both competing and cooperating to hold our planet in balance. Our fungal cousins would be disappointed in the way we’ve behaved out of step with the great cycles. What is lost when there isn’t exchange: of nutrients, resources, ideas, language, knowledge? The answer is: too much.
Rich oral histories containing untold caches of knowledge have been wiped out by those operating under the ideology of colonialism. The idea that if a people prove themselves superior to another by way of outsmarting or outfighting them, then the victorious deserve to build a new world in their image, in the ashes of the world destroyed.
We brought this violent tradition to Turtle Island. It’s best not to romanticize, this continent was not a land free of social issues, disease or war before the arrival of Europeans, but it was one that had flourished in a state of balance under its people’s ideologies of reciprocity and stewardship. I’ve no doubt that those values grew from witnessing the effects of over-consumption, and the felt results of living out of balance. Those same people watched us rush in, eager for a thriving natural world to feed our operating ideologies. They tried to tell us. They try to tell us still. The natural world is lucky to have some people still advocating for her. Our own indigenous ancestors are too far removed, their voices have faded, destroyed by another colonizer thousands of years ago.
Thankfully, pockets of resilience and protection of traditions have kept alive some knowledge of the relationships with plants, animals, and some fungus. Some is carried by traditional knowledge keepers. Some is alive and well in practical use. Some we had printed on pretty white pages and dispersed into the world. Much was certainly lost under the onslaught of colonization, as the native grasslands disappeared under the plow.
Early guidebooks grouped the North American specimens into families with their European doppelgangers. Most have since been re-named and re-classified. As genome mapping evolves and becomes actively applied to the Kingdom Fungi, we're discovering vast differences between our local population and their kin on the other side of the pond. Though they may look alike, most share very little genetic material. This has been hypothesized to mean that mushrooms evolve rapidly, adapting to new environments much more readily than other organisms. That perhaps, these mushrooms started out the same, and took separate evolutionary paths as the continents drifted apart. Not unlike the paths we humans took as we migrated out of the crib of our species, in search of habitats in which we could thrive when the one that birthed us became overwhelmed with our multiplication.