Mycelium

Last year I read this book:

Its actually about economics but the author used the collection and sale of matsutake mushrooms as a metaphor for how economics can adapt and develop in an ever changing world.

The economics aspects were the least interesting aspect. More interesting were how the matsutake pickers live, some completetly cut off from all of modern society, living deep in the woods in North America and how the markets work between pickers, buyers, wholesalers and high end Japanese restaurant

Matsutake mushrooms are highliy prized and have developed a smell thats irrisistable to animals so that it can get eaten and its spores spreads in the animal faces.

Then in Wilding,

She talks about how forests and grazing land is supposed to be undisturbed and untidy, and how the mycelial networks spring into action and devour animal carcasses and dead wood, essentially recycling nature.

But there are a million other interesting and incredible things about them. Mycelial networks are probably the link that allowed sea dwelling creatures to crawl out of the sea and survive on land. And perhaps this is why we will carry mycelium in our guts and all over our skin. Its the link that has allowed evolution to develop on land.

Mushrooms were originally, and incorrectly classified as plants but in fact they are closer to animals and share more DNA with humans than plants.

The more people study mycelium the more we are finding out even though scientists think that only 6% of mycelium varieties have been identified.

Mycelium has been shown to to allow trees to literally talk to each other. Mycelium has shown the best way to build road networks and is strong enough to lift roads, to clean oil spills, to reduce radiation in Chernobyl.

Thats all on top of the amazing things that we already knew it could do such as make beer and penicillin.

I wish I had taken notes about all the interestng things these books have said about it, but I haven’t and probably. Won’t have time to go back through them to read them again. So instead, I have bought a mushroom growing kit. Oyster musrooms, not magic (that would be illegal). I will try and report back when the first crop grows.