November 20, 2021 • 41 mins
Are more people identifying and even foraging wild mushrooms than in previous years? If so, why is this? In these classic episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe talk about mushroom foraging, the importance of human foraging and even some studies that pit forager against forager. (originally published 9/17/2020)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for an older episode.
This is Mushroom Foraging Part two. Part one was last Saturday.
This episode originally published September. Here you go, Welcome to
(00:26):
Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's part two
of Mushroom Foraging. We we started going into the woods
and we got lost, and uh so we had to
(00:47):
we had to say, you know what, this is actually
two episodes. Here we are again with part two. All right,
let's jump right in. So we already talked about how
mushroom hunting appears to be this really popular activity in Russia,
and this goes way back and so popular that there
are these common media stories about people getting lost in
the wilderness because they went into a trance while mushroom
hunting and then they couldn't find their way home. But
(01:09):
apparently things are very similar in Poland. It's also a
very common activity to go mushroom hunting in Poland. And Uh.
The Polish romantic poet Adam mits Kevitch, who lived from
eighteen fifty five, wrote famously about mushroom foraging in his
epic poem pan Tadash. And so I was looking at
(01:32):
this in a few different translations. I think the clearest one,
unfortunately doesn't go for the whole poetry and meter of it.
It's a prose translation by George Rapaul Noyus. But I
think this will give the best sense of the passage,
maybe losing a bit of the music. Are you ready,
Robert Okay? So there are these characters who are The
(01:52):
basic drama of Pantadash is about this conflict between these
clans over some kind of real estate dispute. I've never
read the whole thing, but I like the parts I
have read. And and so it's got all these, uh,
these fancy ladies and lads going out to hunt for
mushrooms in the forest, and they've announced that, you know,
whichever lad finds the fanciest mushroom will get to sit
(02:13):
next to the prettiest girl in the castle. And it's
that kind of thing. Uh. And so it goes into
the section on mushrooms, quote of mushrooms, there were plenty.
The lads gathered the fair cheeked fox mushrooms, so famous
in the Lithuanian songs as the emblem of maidenhood. For
the worms do not eat them, and marvelous to say
(02:35):
no insect alights on them. The young ladies hunted for
the slender pine lover, which the song calls the kernel
of the mushrooms. And that's colonel like the military rank,
not like popcorn. I don't know why it wouldn't be
the general of mushrooms. But moving on, all were eager
for the orange agaric. This, though of more modest stature
(02:57):
and less famous in song, is still the most delicious,
whether fresh or salted, whether in autumn or in winter.
But the snochal gathered the toadstool flybain. The remainder of
the mushroom family, are despised because they are injurious or
of poor flavor, But they are not useless. They give
food to beasts and shelter to insects, and are an
(03:20):
ornament to the groves. On the green cloth of the meadows,
they rise up like lines of table dishes. Here are
the leaf mushrooms with their rounded borders, silver, yellow, and
red like little glasses filled with various sorts of wine,
the coslac like the bulging bottom of an upturned cup,
(03:41):
the funnels like slender champagne glasses, the round white, broad
flat white ease like china coffee cups filled with milk,
and the round puff ball filled with a blackish dust
like a pepper shaker. The names of the others are
known only in the language of hay errors or wolves
(04:01):
by men. They have not been christened, but they are innumerable.
No one deigns to touch the wolf for hair varieties,
but whenever a person bends down to them, he straightaway
perceives his mistake, grows angry, and breaks the mushroom or
kicks it with his foot, in thus defiling the grass.
He acts with great indiscretion. I like at the end
(04:24):
there he gets a little bit offended on behalf of
the grass. I guess I'm not sure I fully understand
the meaning of that last statement, but I wanted to
look at a couple of things about this passage. Um.
So one is that first, while while Russian and Polish
cultures are considered to have a great affinity for mushrooms,
making them generally Mico philick in some terminology that will
(04:45):
address a little bit later in the episode. Uh, this doesn't,
of course, manifest as a love for all mushrooms unqualified. Instead,
it seems to me that the mushroom loving culture actually
has a highly discriminated eating I from mushrooms, noticing much
more the important and perhaps life saving differences between varieties.
(05:06):
So like a mushroom culture doesn't just love mushrooms. It's
more like they really love the good ones and really
hate the bad ones. But of course plenty of mushroom
hunting and accidental mushroom poisoning happens even in the modern era.
In Poland, I was looking at a scientific report compiling
cases of mushroom poisoning in Poland from the year's nineteen
(05:28):
sixty two to nineteen sixty seven by an author named
Eliza Lewandowska, and this was called Mushroom Poisoning in Poland
in the years nineteen sixty two to sixty seven. Species
of poisonous fungi. Now there's no surprise at all here
that the species representing the most danger was our old
friend Amanita feloides or the deathcap mushroom. We we've talked
(05:52):
about this already, right, yes, now, this one was responsible
for at least four hundred and sixty one cases of
poisoning and a hundred and twenty six deaths by this survey.
A commonly cited figure that I've seen elsewhere is that
death caps today represent more than of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide.
So so they're the real bad boy in terms of
(06:13):
accidental accidental mushroom poisoning. Um. But I was also reading
about how the specific way that Amanda filoids kills is deceptive,
lee devious. So when somebody eats this mushroom, it's not
necessarily what you would picture where you eat it and
then you're immediately doubled over in pain and you know,
and hallucinating and sweating with a fever and screaming. Instead,
(06:37):
when somebody eats the Amanda floids, it doesn't necessarily cause
any immediate pain or discomfort. In fact, people often don't
have any symptoms at all for many hours I've read,
sometimes maybe six hours later, sometimes even not until like
a full day later. And then the cramps and the
nausea and the vomiting and the diarrhea. Set in, and
(06:59):
I've read that this can make it easy to mistake
the poisoning for something else. You might think you've got
a stomach bug or whatever because of the length of
time between eating the mushroom and the onset of symptoms.
And uh. And at this point, after the symptoms set in,
they can sometimes even retreat, they can grow milder if
the patient is properly cared for, properly hydrated, and all that.
(07:21):
The entire time the amanita toxins are in the background,
just massacring cells in the liver and harming the kidneys,
eventually leading to organ failure and eventually to death. And
I don't know that there's there's something kind of especially
terrifying about that that there's this You can have this
false sense that things are getting better and that, oh,
(07:44):
I'm actually feeling a little bit better than I was earlier,
or maybe I'm not even feeling bad at all, while
the mushroom is actively killing your vital organs. I think
it also underlines just the sort of precision that had
to take place in figuring out the properties of theirs
mushrooms and and other organisms in one's environment, you know,
(08:04):
because this is clearly something where you you would have
to do a little detective work to figure out it. Yeah,
exactly what had caused this awful illness in the individual. Exactly.
But in in second place for poisonings was a species
that is also interesting and and requires a similar kind
of precision, but with a different difficulty. I don't think
(08:26):
we've talked about this one yet. The second place in
the Polish survey for for most poisoning and death was
gyrometra esculenta, or the false moral. Mushroom. Uh, that's moral
like m O R E L moral mushrooms dot morals
you know, doing good h Yeah, And so in this survey,
the false moral was responsible for a hundred and sixty
(08:49):
four cases of poisoning and ten deaths in this time,
in the sixties. Now, the false moral is a very
strange and interesting case study in fungal toxicity because, first
of all, it looks crazy. It looks like a brain
on a stick, or not even a normal brain. It
looks like if you tried to make a raisin out
of a brain. Yeah, it kind of looks like what
(09:12):
you have, mushroom but ground chuck, you know. Yeah, it's
got the little grinder extrusion patterns. Yeah, it does. It
looks kind of like it's come out of a machine
in a way. I agree, had an extruded kind of
appearance to it. But a lot of delicious mushrooms look
very strange and very unlike other foods we eat. So
(09:32):
you know, that's fine. Um. But but gyrometra is an
interesting case because the toxicity seems to vary a lot.
Just one example I was reading in a stat pearls
entry by Horowitz, Kong and Horowitz and the author's report quote,
most poisonings occur in Eastern Europe, particularly in the conifer
forests of Germany, Poland, and Finland. In North America, most
(09:57):
exposures occur in Michigan, although I less toxic variety grows
west of the Rockies and has been clustered in Idaho
and Western Canada. Exposures occur mostly in the spring, unlike
other serious mushroom poisonings such as Amanita filoids, which occur
more commonly in the fall. So there's this geographical distribution
(10:18):
I've read about how there are different rates of poisoning
from the false morale depending on where the mushroom was grown.
You know, in in different countries and at different altitudes
and things like that. It seems to vary a lot
depending on you know, what local strain you're getting, and
possibly due to interactions with you know, with the body
(10:38):
of the person who eats it. Another thing I've read
is that poisoning is here are much more common when
these mushrooms are eaten raw. Now, there's one thing that
poison control authorities often emphasize, which is that you should
not use intuitive smell and taste senses to figure out
what is poisonous in the mushroom world, because even though
(10:58):
our senses of smell and taste are certainly evolved to
help us figure out what's good to eat, they are
not an infallible guide. And a great example of this
is once again the deathcap mushroom, one of the most
dangerous mushrooms to humans and the most deadly one in Poland.
During that survey we were just talking about the deathcap
mushroom does not taste like poison. It reportedly does not
(11:22):
taste bitter, does not taste sour, does not you know,
set your mouth on fire with needles going into your tongue.
In fact, it is widely said to be absolutely delicious.
There are people who have had these hepatotoxic mushrooms absolutely
destroy their liver. But they report that, you know, before
the pain and the nausea set in, six hours later,
(11:43):
twenty four hours later, when whenever it is while they're
eating these mushrooms, they are some of the best tasting
mushrooms that they've ever had. They're said to smell sweet
like honey and taste absolutely delightful, sauteed and butter. Don't
do this, don't It's not worth it. It will kill you.
Do not take the death cap challenge something like that
(12:04):
on YouTube. No, not at all. But but this does
bring me back to an interesting observation from Miskovich, which
is that some of the species of mushroom that are
detestable to humankind, and I'm sure the death cap is
one of these in in his survey, they're known in
the cultures of what he calls the wolves or the hairs,
(12:24):
you know, the language of wolves or rabbits. Now, you
might think that this is just another folk tale about
the animals of the forest, but I think that this
could actually be based on real observation, because despite being
one of the most deadly fungui to humans. It is
not necessarily deadly to everything in the forest all of
the time. It came across one statement about this when
(12:46):
I was reading an article about the spread of the
death cap mushroom throughout North America, and this was by
Craig Child's in The Atlantic. It's a very interesting article.
It's worth reading. A Child's talks about how death mushrooms
naturally live in a symbiotic relationship with host trees. And
we've talked about how several mushroom species are like this.
(13:07):
They attached themselves to the roots of trees, and they
sort of trade resources between them, uh and so that
they're able to get some nutrition from from tree roots.
And this is the reason that you will often find
them sort of in a ring of deadly fruiting bodies
around the roots of a central tree trunk. But their
spores don't naturally tend to spread very far, at least
(13:28):
under normal circumstances, and it has taken human intervention to
really set them spreading far and wide. Specifically, what's named
by Craig Child's in this article is that deathcap mushrooms
have been spreaded spreading rapidly throughout northwest North America, riding
along on the roots of imported European trees, like imported
(13:51):
sweet chestnut trees and beech trees. So you get this
fancy tree from Europe, it's got deathcap mushrooms in a
relationship with it. You bring the tree over here planted,
and it brings the poisonous mushrooms with it. But anyway,
the reason I brought this article up was that there's
this quick side note where Child's mentions that that squirrels
(14:11):
and rabbits have sometimes been observed to eat deathcap mushrooms
without being harmed at all, which sounds again like like
mits Kevich, like that, you know, the hairs don't really
mind the mushrooms that the humans find absolutely detestable. And
so I think that's interesting. It's another indication of what
you should not do. You should not watch what animals
(14:32):
eat in the forest to determine what would be okay
for you to eat, because they may be able to
digest and metabolize stuff just fine that would absolutely kill
you with just a few mouthfuls. And also in this
just another reason to respect the mighty squirrel. Yes, yeah,
I saw squirrels were thrown in there too, So I'm
sure our fans are gonna gonna go hog wild about that. Sure,
(14:55):
meme away, yeah me until you drop. But one last
thing I wanted to add about this was I saw
some mushroom enthusiasts online just in common sections and stuff,
saying that they kind of wish they had whatever resistance
these rabbits have to to the death cap toxicity is
because they would love to taste them. For one, since
(15:16):
you know, by all accounts, when people eat them, even
though it kills them, they are very tasty. Interesting. Um,
you know, in our previous episode we mentioned were mentioned
a few different mushroom foraging cultures, and I believe Scottish
culture came up. As luck would have it, was watching uh,
the the TV adaptation of Outlander last night. Watching that, yeah,
(15:40):
and in the second episode what happens they're forging for mushrooms,
talking about them, the medicinal use of mushrooms and which
ones are good to eat and which ones are poisonous.
I found it rather interesting. Also castle they used in
that show, same castle they used in Highlander and in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, So it's got that
going for it. So even in your ultimate kilt lift
(16:02):
or narrative. You cannot escape a good mushroom hunt, right,
I mean that's I mean you've got time travel in there,
so it's a it's it's a big part of the
plot apparently, at least as I can gather thus far. Well,
whether you're time traveling or not, whether you forge for
mushrooms or not, stay away from the death caps. Just
just don't even try it now. Of course, this is
this goes way back, this this basic um reality that
(16:25):
we're discussing here, and we've we've covered humanities hunter gatherer
past on the show before. I mean the basic is
you know, we're we're omnivores, and mushrooms have always been
on the table. Uh. Though, of course our ancestors had
to devise the expertise to avoid harmful species, as well
as figuring out which ones are beneficial, which ones can
(16:45):
be food, etcetera. Right. One of the resources we were
looking at for this section was Eric BoA's Wild Edible
Fun Guy. A Global Overview of their use and importance
to people. Yeah, it looks like this was a report
compiled for the Food MAgric Culture Organization of the u
N in two thousand four. Yeah, and uh and Boa
points out and mentioned a few different facts. He points
(17:07):
out here, first of all, wild edible fungi are collected
for food in more than eighty countries, and we're dealing
with more than one thousand, one hundred species. And interestingly enough,
some cultures may be viewed is microphobic being you know,
meaning there's a fear of mushrooms or a reluctance to
engage in mushroom consumption and foraging, while other cultures are
(17:32):
are microphilic meaning you know, the loving mushrooms, you know,
being open to those experiences in those quests, with English
culture standing interestingly enough as an example of of microphobic
UH culture, while Chinese culture, he mentions, is a strongly
micophilic culture. He points out that a lot of Chinese
writings on mushrooms have yet to be translated, but there's
(17:55):
a lot of material there. Now. I found this very
interesting because I've've certainly seen some documentaries um that really
focus in on on British and Scottish traditions regarding mushroom hunting. Yeah,
and of course that highlights that these designations. I've seen
these designations used by other people as well. Burtleson talks
about this, where you know, cultures that are predominantly microphobic
(18:16):
or microphilic, they're all gonna be relative, right Like, within
each of these broad cultures there will be subcultures and
individuals that sort of run against the grain. Um. But
on the note of of of Chinese culture being microphilic,
of course that comes through in in certain types of
ancient medical practices, but also in cuisine. And I just
(18:37):
think about one of my earliest memories of Chinese food.
I've loved Chinese food as long as I can remember,
but one of my earliest memories is of the unidentifiable
fungus within the Chinese soup I was eating, and how
much I loved it, and how how it was like
there was nothing else like this in my diet. I
guess it was probably a type of black fungus in
(18:57):
a hot and sour soup, and I is just like,
what is this? I have no idea. It's like something
from another planet, and it's delicious. But as to microphobia,
Burdleston mentions evidence of strains of microphobic thinking in many
of the historic common names for mushrooms and some European cultures,
for example, though today we think of French cuisine as
(19:19):
being very very pro mushroom. Historically, there was some French
aversion to mushrooms, like calling mushrooms things like eggs of
the devil or the devil's paint brush, or toads bread.
Of course, there's the English expression toad stool. In Danish
and Norwegian you have variations on PoTA hot toad's hat,
(19:42):
and in Germanic and Celtic cultures. Burtleson writes that you
sometimes see an association between mushrooms and witchcraft, and this
association may have played a role in keeping the British
aisles relatively microphobic for for many centuries. You know, I
can't help be reminded. I'm sure I've brought this up
up on the show before. Um, but there's that that
(20:02):
wonderful um a little bit in uh burd of Echos
the Name of the Rose, where there's the story of
of one monk. You know, it's like a multi multi cultural,
multi linguistic community of monks there, and one is talking
about having this pig that will accompany them into the
woods to search for truffles, and the the other monk
(20:24):
that's hearing this story is I believe German, and he
thinks that he's not saying truffle but to full, which
is a German for devil. So he thinks this is
a horrific story of this weird pig that will accompany
uh you into the woods so that you can seek
out the devil. I remember that moment, and that's oh man,
that's so emblematic of everything I love about Name of
(20:45):
the Rose. Now, in terms of the ancient uh uh
foraging for mushrooms and the use of mushrooms by by
human beings, you know, there's there's apparently evidence in what
is now Chile of mushroom consumption by humans thirteen thousand
years ago. Um Obsouly the iceman who we've mentioned on
the show before, who lived between thirty four UM hundred
(21:07):
and thirty bc uh somewhere in that area, was found
with two varieties of fungia on his person, one of
which we've discussed on our other show or previous other show.
Invention was likely a dried fungi used to help start fires,
but the other was a birch fungus that was likely
consumed for medicinal reasons, and so that the consumption of
mushrooms for culinary and or medicinal purposes dates back in
(21:30):
a number of ancient cultures. They're they're more examples of
this than we could easily cover on the show here. Uh.
And with the agricultural revolution came the eventuality of mushroom
cultivation as well. Though, as we previously touched on, there
are so many varieties that are resistant to cultivation. Yeah.
I think specifically a lot of the ones that you
think of that are most commonly used in food that
(21:52):
are the hardest to cultivate, or are the ones that are,
for my corpsal reasons, unable to be cultivated because they
exist in these symbiotic relationships with other plants, trees, and
forest atmospheres. And so the truffle is a common example,
but of course Sean trells are like this as well.
I believe also porcini mushrooms, uh, that it's just really
(22:14):
hard to recreate the conditions in which they arise. Yeah.
So even as as humanity inevitably be you know, began
to shift uh this revolution in neolithic times, uh, shifting
away from the hunter gather existence to one dependent on
intensive agriculture, there's kind of this you know, this tendency
to sort of think of that as Okay, well, you know,
(22:36):
you're just changing the way you live entirely, you're just
stopping where you are and now you're gonna grow plants,
and maybe mushroom foraging is one of those things that
remains outside of that tradition for these very reasons we've
been discussing. Um. However, this was quite interesting. I was
looking around for resources on this and I ran across
a paper published in the Royal Society b by Curtis w.
(22:57):
Uh Marine titled the Transition to Foraging for Dense and
Predictable Resources and It's Impact on the Evolution of modern humans.
And in this uh the the author um is discussing,
you know, this basic shift, but he points out, they
point out that there's another shift to consider. Quote the
foraging shift to dense and predictable resources is another key
(23:18):
milestone that had consequential impacts on the later part of
human evolution. Now, the basic idea here is that there
wasn't just this sudden shift from hunting and gathering to cultivation.
And there are many hypothesized explanations for this, but Marine
argues that hunting and gathering would have seen an increased
focus on dense and predictable resources. As such, this also
(23:41):
means that a given area becomes increasingly worth defending and
staking a claim to. Oh this is interesting. So this
could be the transition point between um between people who
just roam about following resources and consuming them wherever they
can be found. That and then on the other hand,
having far land in between. You could have places where
(24:02):
there are naturally high density resources that can be exploited
over and over that you might not be quite farming yet,
but might be worth defending as a stable territory. Yeah. Yeah,
And I have to admit I hadn't really thought about
this before. I without giving it a lot of thought.
I always just kind of, you know, had this this
inaccurate picture in my mind that was again like, okay,
(24:24):
we're not hundred gathers anymore, let's start growing this corn.
Why don't we? You know, like I don't. I didn't
really think about some of the potential, you know, for
for areas in between. This would be very interesting to explore.
Paired with something that came up in our Invention episodes
on Bread and Toast, where we talked about the studies
indicating that bread and may actually have been invented before
(24:45):
grain was was an agricultural product like people may have
been making and I think the archaeological evidence is that
people were making bread from wild grains and wild grasses
before they had farms and wheat. Yeah. Absolutely, It makes
me wonder if they were getting these grains from some
kind of like a location where there were a lot
of them growing together and could be exploited over and
(25:07):
over again. Yeah, exactly, Now marine rights to some all
this up quote. I hypothesize that the origin population for
modern humans made this shift to dense and predictable resources,
and thus was subject to high levels of territoriality and
intergroup conflict, which provided the selection regime for high levels
of cooperation with unrelated individuals within one's group. The downstream
(25:30):
effect was that all modern humans inherited these hyper pro
social provoclivities that are unique to our species. Now, to
bring this back to mushroom foraging, it is interesting to
process one's thoughts about the predictable times and places one
will find, say Chantrelle's or into the woods, and the
competitive feelings that they may force we may be forced
(25:53):
to confront during this. In fact, I understand that more
serious mushroom foragers are, you know, their loath to reveal
the secrets, uh, their secret places, their quote unquote honey spots,
the places where they can dependently find the best patches
of mushroom. Do you remember the story in Michael Pollen's
book where he's going hunting for psilocybin mushrooms with Paul Statements,
(26:15):
and he's going to great pains to try to tell
you what he's doing without revealing the site of Paul
statements mushroom psh Oh yeah, yeah, because Paul really doesn't
want people to know where he gets him that's his
honey spot. Now, I think though that, yeah, you can
certainly see that with plants, especially, how this could be
(26:35):
this intermediary zone between hunting and gathering and cultivation where
you realize, oh, well, the the wheat that we can
make into bread, it grows really well here. Uh, this
is a place that we need to keep secret or
even protect from other other individuals. This is our spot,
this is our sacred spot that we return to. It's
a very interesting possibility. I wonder what what would be
(26:57):
the evidence that you could find to back that up.
I don't know, I have to keep thinking about that.
All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll
be right back. Thank and we're back. Now. Another interesting
topic to to consider in all of this is that
that there is essentially a foraging gene uh So the
(27:19):
key gene of note in most studies, especially with fruit
flies and fruit flies, it's p r KG one uh
and uh this is um this is something that we
see presented in a wide variety of animals, from fruit
flies to even humans. But p r KG one is
president fruit flies and has previously been shown to influence
(27:39):
foraging behaviors. Researchers and studies that I think date back
to at least night have looked at this, and multiple
researchers found that one variant of the gene and fruit
flies induces what is called sitter behavior and in the
other's rover behavior. Now, the difference here is that when
a sitter enters an area can taining fruit, the they
(28:02):
scalut the perimeter of the area and then they move inward.
They sort of you know, they scouted out, they make
a perimeter, and then they move in. Rovers instead move
right in and go for the first fruit they encounter. Interesting, Now,
the human form of The gene is apparently a nucleotide
polymorphism genotype called r S one, and in two thousand
(28:25):
and nineteen, researchers from Canada, the US, and the UK
this would be struck at all um. They experimented with
it in a paper published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science. The title is self regulation and
the foraging gene p r KG one in humans UH.
Here's how the study went down. So, the authors analyzed
the genotypes of rs and four thirty seven undergraduate students
(28:50):
who performed two virtual foraging tasks. So this was a
touch screen situation in which subjects search for and collected
as many red bear areas as possible within five minutes.
And then so they compared the subjects with C A
or CC genotypes of rs UH. Individuals with the A
A genotype were more likely to hug the boundary of
(29:13):
the search environment, pick smaller berries, and stop to pick
berries and patches with fewer visible berries a k A
sitter behavior. The findings suggests that the A A genotype
is associated with a search strategy that restricts exploration and
exploits the local environment extensively. In other words, distinct patterns
(29:33):
of goal pursuit for foraging are associated with particular genotypes
of pr k G one. That's very interesting. Now, as
we've talked about on the show before, you always have
to remember when you're drawing correlations between particular gene variants
and a behavior, it's it's almost never going to be
like an on off switch that like, if you have
a certain gene variant, you show X behavior and if
(29:56):
you don't have it, you don't. But instead you you'd
be charting sort of like you know, percentages of influence.
Can can you see correlations between gene variants and a
and a tendency or a certain proclivity to a certain
type of behavior and uh and so yeah, this would
say that somehow foraging behaviors or downstream from things that
this gene does to the brain that make you more
(30:19):
likely to kind of like go out on a long
search of versus try to exploit all of the resources
you can in your nearest immediate environment. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, Now,
and of course we also have to keep in mind
that the scope in the size of the study here,
but um, and also I should point that the authors
mentioned that the human foraging behavior is ultimately far more
(30:40):
complex than the the foraging behavior fruit flies, and instead
they're just being two distinct foraging strategies. It seems like
they are three. So you have siderin rover, but then
you have a mixed uh disposition as well, the combines
elements of both. But on top of that, they point
out that this would go beyond mere foraging and humans,
(31:01):
that that it that it would instead impact human behavior
regulation across multiple domains. And I think we can imagine how, yeah,
that would involve various things that are like foraging, but
also potentially impact just sort of risk assessment, etcetera. Oh yeah,
I mean, I think it's easy to see how complex
modern behaviors are in a way kind of probably uh
(31:23):
minor reconfigurations of traditional instinctual behaviors like foraging, like hunting
and that kind of thing. Uh, So you can see
how whatever we're most instinctually inclined to do in terms
of foraging could manifest in the way you accomplish work
around the house, in the way that you know, go
shopping or whatever. I mean again, you you have to
(31:43):
be careful about drawing too direct and inference about anything
like that, but the fact that there's some kind of influences.
Seems pretty clear. All right, we're going to take a
quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank and we're
back now. Another aspect of early human foraging tactics, and
indeed the way these these early humans use spatial abilities
(32:06):
to gather resources, is that there was seemingly a division
of labor between males and females. This is the sexual
division of labor, sometimes abbreviated as sdl UM. And this
is a subject that has received a lot of study
over the years, especially of studies that look at extant
hunter gatherer populations in the world. And there are varying
(32:26):
hypotheses for the evolutionary origins of this divide. Now, for
our purposes here, I was looking at a study by
Louis Pacheco, Cobas, Marcos Rosetti, Cecilia Quanti Emquoees, and Robin
Hudson titled sex differences in mushroom gathering Men expend more
(32:47):
energy to obtain equivalent benefits and this was published in
Evolution and Human Behavior back in so the authors here
pointed out that the evidence was accumulating quote that women
excel on tasks appropriate it to gathering immobile plant resources
while men excel on task appropriate to hunting mobile, unpredictable prey.
And this would be due So the thinking goes to
(33:09):
this ancient labor divide in human societies. But it also
means that intrinsic foraging abilities and tactics would differ from
males to females. So the researchers here decided to put
this to the test with a mushroom foraging experiment, which
is the other key reason to discuss it here, because
people are are This is an experiment that includes not
touch screen um practices, not some sort of touch screen experiment,
(33:33):
but an actual foraging for mushrooms, let's forage. So in
their study they use GPS and heart rate monitors that
had been affixed to the researchers themselves, and then these
researchers would follow twenty one pairs of men and women
from an indigenous Mexican community in uh Tlex Cola while
foraging for mushrooms in the wild. So the researchers are
(33:56):
the ones where in the gear they're following the actual foragers,
but in doing so, they're going to be able to
chart where the foragers went and how much energy seems
to be expended in the silent hunt, so they ultimately
measured the costs, the benefits, and the general search efficiency
of everyone's movements, and then they analyzed them. The resulting
(34:17):
foraging patterns showed that while males and females collected similar
quantities of mushrooms, males achieved this at a significantly higher cost.
So the males they traveled farther. The males climbed to
greater altitudes. They had higher mean heart rates and energy
expenditures while partaking in the foraging, and in addition, they
(34:38):
also collected fewer mushroom species and visited fewer collection sites.
And this is interesting. They seemed to focus on large
patches of mushrooms, even if these were harder to come by,
so they were like bypassing or not even looking for
those smaller patches they wanted wanted to get the big
game mushroom patches. The females, meanwhile, it seemed to know
(35:00):
where to go and they foraged of from many small
patches as opposed to seeking out those greater patches of
fun guy. This was also compared by the way to
previous research on the way males and females navigate, which
indicated that males tend to create mental maps and then
superimpose their position, while women tend to remember landmarks and
(35:20):
memorize the routes quote. These findings are consistent with arguments
in the literature that differences in spatial ability between the
sexes are domain dependent, with women performing better and more
readily adopting search strategies appropriate to a gathering lifestyle than men.
So basically, the idea is that if you were primarily
charged with hunting prey two point five million years ago,
(35:42):
it made sense to travel far, to take widening paths
in pursuit of that big payoff prey, and then take
the shortest, most direct path back home so as to
make for up for all that time you spent wandering
and pursuing the prey. Meanwhile, if you were tasked with
gathering fungi or plants, it would serve to remember where
(36:03):
the most productive plant food sources were found, you know,
those honey spots, and then retrace your steps exactly so
as to take advantage of them in the future. And like, no,
making a bee line back for camp. That's very interesting. Uh. Now,
one thing that we always got to say whenever you
talk about studies that explore sex differences, is that people
a lot of people like to take these and really
(36:25):
run with them and say like, oh, this means that
men are like this and women are like that. I
think we always try to caution people not to not
to over interpret findings of sex differences in in particular studies.
It's very easy, I think, just because people want to
have strong intuitions about gender and sex and like what
(36:46):
men are like and what women are like and stuff
that they want to say like, oh, this explains why
my husband does this or why my girlfriend says that
kind of thing. You can you can easily go way
overboard with with looking for explanations in that way. Yeah.
I mean it also it comes down to what is
the Barnum effect that we've discussed before, where we say, oh, well,
that's me, this this study is correct because that's me.
(37:09):
I totally am like that when I go to the
to the grocery store and my my partner is like this, etcetera.
But but yeah, like you're saying, like, we're talking about
general perceived trends in the sexual division of labor and
as reflected here in particular studies. Uh so, yeah, I
don't don't have it printed on a T shirt or anything,
(37:29):
but but it is interesting research and and certainly it
was neat to find a study that was that was
actually involving mushroom foraging, like the scientific study of mushroom
foraging behavior totally, and it highlights how there can be
different types of foraging strategies that are effective in different ways.
I was looking at some other studies that were about
different types of foraging strategies and birds, you know, and
(37:52):
how this is kind of interesting, like some birds tend
to forage by moving in little random types of motions
around a central locust, uh in a way that's very
comparable actually to the movement of tiny particles on the
atomic scale that's known as Brownie in motion and physics.
Whereas other birds tended to forage by sort of taking
(38:12):
large leaps at a time. And that these, uh, these
different strategies could be differentially effective depending on what types
of things you're looking for while foraging, what the surrounding
landscape is, and things like that. Yeah, it's such a
foraging itself is just such a fascinating thing to think
about because it's easy to just sort of dismiss it
as this kind of primal thing that we sometimes engage
(38:34):
in when we decided to go into the woods and
look for mushrooms, etcetera. But it is again something basic
like neural activity that we're continually engaging in and and
something that also comes down to this kind of like
like this the basic mathematics of it, like how do
you go about looking for resources in a given area?
And then how are you how do you deal with
spatial awareness in that given area? Like there it seems
(38:57):
like a rich domain for you know, AI research in
the like totally because strangely enough, I feel like search
activities are one of the ways in which human behavior
can be most closely compared to what computer programs do.
Does that make sense? Yeah, that there are some pretty
(39:17):
direct analogies actually having to do with energy is expended
and efficiency in different ways of searching through randomly organized material. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean in the same way that you can imagine
someone in desiring an AI program that will find you
a good deal on something. There are also plenty of
humans out there like that's their thing, like let me,
(39:40):
let me help you find a good deal on that.
Because I love looking for him, So, yeah, I mean
a lot of it does come back to foraging. I
mean I would be interested in studies looking at foraging
behaviors in humans and animals compared to what search engines
do to get you your results. That would be interesting.
So who knows, perhaps will have some additional foraging episodes
(40:02):
in the future, as as you and I go out
into the wilds seeking out fruitful papers on these topics.
Bring it on home, all right, We're gonna have to
call it there. Uh. Likewise, we weren't able to touch
on everything regarding mushroom foraging and foraging related topics here,
but we certainly would love to hear from everyone out there. Um,
(40:24):
you know, are you involved in in mushroom foraging? Are
you an active forager? Or let us know your experiences.
We'd love to hear your insight on all of this. Likewise,
if you were, if your culture of origin, or you're
you know, if you're immersed in a particular cultural uh
take on mushroom foraging, be it you know, the activities
or or beliefs and strategies tied up with the foraging
(40:47):
uh activity, let us know. We'd love to be enlightened
on those topics, huge things. As always to our excellent
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, suggest a topic for the future, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Stuff to Blow Your
(41:15):
Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for an older episode.
This is Mushroom Foraging Part two. Part one was last Saturday.
This episode originally published September. Here you go, Welcome to
(00:26):
Stuff to Blow your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's part two
of Mushroom Foraging. We we started going into the woods
and we got lost, and uh so we had to
(00:47):
we had to say, you know what, this is actually
two episodes. Here we are again with part two. All right,
let's jump right in. So we already talked about how
mushroom hunting appears to be this really popular activity in Russia,
and this goes way back and so popular that there
are these common media stories about people getting lost in
the wilderness because they went into a trance while mushroom
hunting and then they couldn't find their way home. But
(01:09):
apparently things are very similar in Poland. It's also a
very common activity to go mushroom hunting in Poland. And Uh.
The Polish romantic poet Adam mits Kevitch, who lived from
eighteen fifty five, wrote famously about mushroom foraging in his
epic poem pan Tadash. And so I was looking at
(01:32):
this in a few different translations. I think the clearest one,
unfortunately doesn't go for the whole poetry and meter of it.
It's a prose translation by George Rapaul Noyus. But I
think this will give the best sense of the passage,
maybe losing a bit of the music. Are you ready,
Robert Okay? So there are these characters who are The
(01:52):
basic drama of Pantadash is about this conflict between these
clans over some kind of real estate dispute. I've never
read the whole thing, but I like the parts I
have read. And and so it's got all these, uh,
these fancy ladies and lads going out to hunt for
mushrooms in the forest, and they've announced that, you know,
whichever lad finds the fanciest mushroom will get to sit
(02:13):
next to the prettiest girl in the castle. And it's
that kind of thing. Uh. And so it goes into
the section on mushrooms, quote of mushrooms, there were plenty.
The lads gathered the fair cheeked fox mushrooms, so famous
in the Lithuanian songs as the emblem of maidenhood. For
the worms do not eat them, and marvelous to say
(02:35):
no insect alights on them. The young ladies hunted for
the slender pine lover, which the song calls the kernel
of the mushrooms. And that's colonel like the military rank,
not like popcorn. I don't know why it wouldn't be
the general of mushrooms. But moving on, all were eager
for the orange agaric. This, though of more modest stature
(02:57):
and less famous in song, is still the most delicious,
whether fresh or salted, whether in autumn or in winter.
But the snochal gathered the toadstool flybain. The remainder of
the mushroom family, are despised because they are injurious or
of poor flavor, But they are not useless. They give
food to beasts and shelter to insects, and are an
(03:20):
ornament to the groves. On the green cloth of the meadows,
they rise up like lines of table dishes. Here are
the leaf mushrooms with their rounded borders, silver, yellow, and
red like little glasses filled with various sorts of wine,
the coslac like the bulging bottom of an upturned cup,
(03:41):
the funnels like slender champagne glasses, the round white, broad
flat white ease like china coffee cups filled with milk,
and the round puff ball filled with a blackish dust
like a pepper shaker. The names of the others are
known only in the language of hay errors or wolves
(04:01):
by men. They have not been christened, but they are innumerable.
No one deigns to touch the wolf for hair varieties,
but whenever a person bends down to them, he straightaway
perceives his mistake, grows angry, and breaks the mushroom or
kicks it with his foot, in thus defiling the grass.
He acts with great indiscretion. I like at the end
(04:24):
there he gets a little bit offended on behalf of
the grass. I guess I'm not sure I fully understand
the meaning of that last statement, but I wanted to
look at a couple of things about this passage. Um.
So one is that first, while while Russian and Polish
cultures are considered to have a great affinity for mushrooms,
making them generally Mico philick in some terminology that will
(04:45):
address a little bit later in the episode. Uh, this doesn't,
of course, manifest as a love for all mushrooms unqualified. Instead,
it seems to me that the mushroom loving culture actually
has a highly discriminated eating I from mushrooms, noticing much
more the important and perhaps life saving differences between varieties.
(05:06):
So like a mushroom culture doesn't just love mushrooms. It's
more like they really love the good ones and really
hate the bad ones. But of course plenty of mushroom
hunting and accidental mushroom poisoning happens even in the modern era.
In Poland, I was looking at a scientific report compiling
cases of mushroom poisoning in Poland from the year's nineteen
(05:28):
sixty two to nineteen sixty seven by an author named
Eliza Lewandowska, and this was called Mushroom Poisoning in Poland
in the years nineteen sixty two to sixty seven. Species
of poisonous fungi. Now there's no surprise at all here
that the species representing the most danger was our old
friend Amanita feloides or the deathcap mushroom. We we've talked
(05:52):
about this already, right, yes, now, this one was responsible
for at least four hundred and sixty one cases of
poisoning and a hundred and twenty six deaths by this survey.
A commonly cited figure that I've seen elsewhere is that
death caps today represent more than of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide.
So so they're the real bad boy in terms of
(06:13):
accidental accidental mushroom poisoning. Um. But I was also reading
about how the specific way that Amanda filoids kills is deceptive,
lee devious. So when somebody eats this mushroom, it's not
necessarily what you would picture where you eat it and
then you're immediately doubled over in pain and you know,
and hallucinating and sweating with a fever and screaming. Instead,
(06:37):
when somebody eats the Amanda floids, it doesn't necessarily cause
any immediate pain or discomfort. In fact, people often don't
have any symptoms at all for many hours I've read,
sometimes maybe six hours later, sometimes even not until like
a full day later. And then the cramps and the
nausea and the vomiting and the diarrhea. Set in, and
(06:59):
I've read that this can make it easy to mistake
the poisoning for something else. You might think you've got
a stomach bug or whatever because of the length of
time between eating the mushroom and the onset of symptoms.
And uh. And at this point, after the symptoms set in,
they can sometimes even retreat, they can grow milder if
the patient is properly cared for, properly hydrated, and all that.
(07:21):
The entire time the amanita toxins are in the background,
just massacring cells in the liver and harming the kidneys,
eventually leading to organ failure and eventually to death. And
I don't know that there's there's something kind of especially
terrifying about that that there's this You can have this
false sense that things are getting better and that, oh,
(07:44):
I'm actually feeling a little bit better than I was earlier,
or maybe I'm not even feeling bad at all, while
the mushroom is actively killing your vital organs. I think
it also underlines just the sort of precision that had
to take place in figuring out the properties of theirs
mushrooms and and other organisms in one's environment, you know,
(08:04):
because this is clearly something where you you would have
to do a little detective work to figure out it. Yeah,
exactly what had caused this awful illness in the individual. Exactly.
But in in second place for poisonings was a species
that is also interesting and and requires a similar kind
of precision, but with a different difficulty. I don't think
(08:26):
we've talked about this one yet. The second place in
the Polish survey for for most poisoning and death was
gyrometra esculenta, or the false moral. Mushroom. Uh, that's moral
like m O R E L moral mushrooms dot morals
you know, doing good h Yeah, And so in this survey,
the false moral was responsible for a hundred and sixty
(08:49):
four cases of poisoning and ten deaths in this time,
in the sixties. Now, the false moral is a very
strange and interesting case study in fungal toxicity because, first
of all, it looks crazy. It looks like a brain
on a stick, or not even a normal brain. It
looks like if you tried to make a raisin out
of a brain. Yeah, it kind of looks like what
(09:12):
you have, mushroom but ground chuck, you know. Yeah, it's
got the little grinder extrusion patterns. Yeah, it does. It
looks kind of like it's come out of a machine
in a way. I agree, had an extruded kind of
appearance to it. But a lot of delicious mushrooms look
very strange and very unlike other foods we eat. So
(09:32):
you know, that's fine. Um. But but gyrometra is an
interesting case because the toxicity seems to vary a lot.
Just one example I was reading in a stat pearls
entry by Horowitz, Kong and Horowitz and the author's report quote,
most poisonings occur in Eastern Europe, particularly in the conifer
forests of Germany, Poland, and Finland. In North America, most
(09:57):
exposures occur in Michigan, although I less toxic variety grows
west of the Rockies and has been clustered in Idaho
and Western Canada. Exposures occur mostly in the spring, unlike
other serious mushroom poisonings such as Amanita filoids, which occur
more commonly in the fall. So there's this geographical distribution
(10:18):
I've read about how there are different rates of poisoning
from the false morale depending on where the mushroom was grown.
You know, in in different countries and at different altitudes
and things like that. It seems to vary a lot
depending on you know, what local strain you're getting, and
possibly due to interactions with you know, with the body
(10:38):
of the person who eats it. Another thing I've read
is that poisoning is here are much more common when
these mushrooms are eaten raw. Now, there's one thing that
poison control authorities often emphasize, which is that you should
not use intuitive smell and taste senses to figure out
what is poisonous in the mushroom world, because even though
(10:58):
our senses of smell and taste are certainly evolved to
help us figure out what's good to eat, they are
not an infallible guide. And a great example of this
is once again the deathcap mushroom, one of the most
dangerous mushrooms to humans and the most deadly one in Poland.
During that survey we were just talking about the deathcap
mushroom does not taste like poison. It reportedly does not
(11:22):
taste bitter, does not taste sour, does not you know,
set your mouth on fire with needles going into your tongue.
In fact, it is widely said to be absolutely delicious.
There are people who have had these hepatotoxic mushrooms absolutely
destroy their liver. But they report that, you know, before
the pain and the nausea set in, six hours later,
(11:43):
twenty four hours later, when whenever it is while they're
eating these mushrooms, they are some of the best tasting
mushrooms that they've ever had. They're said to smell sweet
like honey and taste absolutely delightful, sauteed and butter. Don't
do this, don't It's not worth it. It will kill you.
Do not take the death cap challenge something like that
(12:04):
on YouTube. No, not at all. But but this does
bring me back to an interesting observation from Miskovich, which
is that some of the species of mushroom that are
detestable to humankind, and I'm sure the death cap is
one of these in in his survey, they're known in
the cultures of what he calls the wolves or the hairs,
(12:24):
you know, the language of wolves or rabbits. Now, you
might think that this is just another folk tale about
the animals of the forest, but I think that this
could actually be based on real observation, because despite being
one of the most deadly fungui to humans. It is
not necessarily deadly to everything in the forest all of
the time. It came across one statement about this when
(12:46):
I was reading an article about the spread of the
death cap mushroom throughout North America, and this was by
Craig Child's in The Atlantic. It's a very interesting article.
It's worth reading. A Child's talks about how death mushrooms
naturally live in a symbiotic relationship with host trees. And
we've talked about how several mushroom species are like this.
(13:07):
They attached themselves to the roots of trees, and they
sort of trade resources between them, uh and so that
they're able to get some nutrition from from tree roots.
And this is the reason that you will often find
them sort of in a ring of deadly fruiting bodies
around the roots of a central tree trunk. But their
spores don't naturally tend to spread very far, at least
(13:28):
under normal circumstances, and it has taken human intervention to
really set them spreading far and wide. Specifically, what's named
by Craig Child's in this article is that deathcap mushrooms
have been spreaded spreading rapidly throughout northwest North America, riding
along on the roots of imported European trees, like imported
(13:51):
sweet chestnut trees and beech trees. So you get this
fancy tree from Europe, it's got deathcap mushrooms in a
relationship with it. You bring the tree over here planted,
and it brings the poisonous mushrooms with it. But anyway,
the reason I brought this article up was that there's
this quick side note where Child's mentions that that squirrels
(14:11):
and rabbits have sometimes been observed to eat deathcap mushrooms
without being harmed at all, which sounds again like like
mits Kevich, like that, you know, the hairs don't really
mind the mushrooms that the humans find absolutely detestable. And
so I think that's interesting. It's another indication of what
you should not do. You should not watch what animals
(14:32):
eat in the forest to determine what would be okay
for you to eat, because they may be able to
digest and metabolize stuff just fine that would absolutely kill
you with just a few mouthfuls. And also in this
just another reason to respect the mighty squirrel. Yes, yeah,
I saw squirrels were thrown in there too, So I'm
sure our fans are gonna gonna go hog wild about that. Sure,
(14:55):
meme away, yeah me until you drop. But one last
thing I wanted to add about this was I saw
some mushroom enthusiasts online just in common sections and stuff,
saying that they kind of wish they had whatever resistance
these rabbits have to to the death cap toxicity is
because they would love to taste them. For one, since
(15:16):
you know, by all accounts, when people eat them, even
though it kills them, they are very tasty. Interesting. Um,
you know, in our previous episode we mentioned were mentioned
a few different mushroom foraging cultures, and I believe Scottish
culture came up. As luck would have it, was watching uh,
the the TV adaptation of Outlander last night. Watching that, yeah,
(15:40):
and in the second episode what happens they're forging for mushrooms,
talking about them, the medicinal use of mushrooms and which
ones are good to eat and which ones are poisonous.
I found it rather interesting. Also castle they used in
that show, same castle they used in Highlander and in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, So it's got that
going for it. So even in your ultimate kilt lift
(16:02):
or narrative. You cannot escape a good mushroom hunt, right,
I mean that's I mean you've got time travel in there,
so it's a it's it's a big part of the
plot apparently, at least as I can gather thus far. Well,
whether you're time traveling or not, whether you forge for
mushrooms or not, stay away from the death caps. Just
just don't even try it now. Of course, this is
this goes way back, this this basic um reality that
(16:25):
we're discussing here, and we've we've covered humanities hunter gatherer
past on the show before. I mean the basic is
you know, we're we're omnivores, and mushrooms have always been
on the table. Uh. Though, of course our ancestors had
to devise the expertise to avoid harmful species, as well
as figuring out which ones are beneficial, which ones can
(16:45):
be food, etcetera. Right. One of the resources we were
looking at for this section was Eric BoA's Wild Edible
Fun Guy. A Global Overview of their use and importance
to people. Yeah, it looks like this was a report
compiled for the Food MAgric Culture Organization of the u
N in two thousand four. Yeah, and uh and Boa
points out and mentioned a few different facts. He points
(17:07):
out here, first of all, wild edible fungi are collected
for food in more than eighty countries, and we're dealing
with more than one thousand, one hundred species. And interestingly enough,
some cultures may be viewed is microphobic being you know,
meaning there's a fear of mushrooms or a reluctance to
engage in mushroom consumption and foraging, while other cultures are
(17:32):
are microphilic meaning you know, the loving mushrooms, you know,
being open to those experiences in those quests, with English
culture standing interestingly enough as an example of of microphobic
UH culture, while Chinese culture, he mentions, is a strongly
micophilic culture. He points out that a lot of Chinese
writings on mushrooms have yet to be translated, but there's
(17:55):
a lot of material there. Now. I found this very
interesting because I've've certainly seen some documentaries um that really
focus in on on British and Scottish traditions regarding mushroom hunting. Yeah,
and of course that highlights that these designations. I've seen
these designations used by other people as well. Burtleson talks
about this, where you know, cultures that are predominantly microphobic
(18:16):
or microphilic, they're all gonna be relative, right Like, within
each of these broad cultures there will be subcultures and
individuals that sort of run against the grain. Um. But
on the note of of of Chinese culture being microphilic,
of course that comes through in in certain types of
ancient medical practices, but also in cuisine. And I just
(18:37):
think about one of my earliest memories of Chinese food.
I've loved Chinese food as long as I can remember,
but one of my earliest memories is of the unidentifiable
fungus within the Chinese soup I was eating, and how
much I loved it, and how how it was like
there was nothing else like this in my diet. I
guess it was probably a type of black fungus in
(18:57):
a hot and sour soup, and I is just like,
what is this? I have no idea. It's like something
from another planet, and it's delicious. But as to microphobia,
Burdleston mentions evidence of strains of microphobic thinking in many
of the historic common names for mushrooms and some European cultures,
for example, though today we think of French cuisine as
(19:19):
being very very pro mushroom. Historically, there was some French
aversion to mushrooms, like calling mushrooms things like eggs of
the devil or the devil's paint brush, or toads bread.
Of course, there's the English expression toad stool. In Danish
and Norwegian you have variations on PoTA hot toad's hat,
(19:42):
and in Germanic and Celtic cultures. Burtleson writes that you
sometimes see an association between mushrooms and witchcraft, and this
association may have played a role in keeping the British
aisles relatively microphobic for for many centuries. You know, I
can't help be reminded. I'm sure I've brought this up
up on the show before. Um, but there's that that
(20:02):
wonderful um a little bit in uh burd of Echos
the Name of the Rose, where there's the story of
of one monk. You know, it's like a multi multi cultural,
multi linguistic community of monks there, and one is talking
about having this pig that will accompany them into the
woods to search for truffles, and the the other monk
(20:24):
that's hearing this story is I believe German, and he
thinks that he's not saying truffle but to full, which
is a German for devil. So he thinks this is
a horrific story of this weird pig that will accompany
uh you into the woods so that you can seek
out the devil. I remember that moment, and that's oh man,
that's so emblematic of everything I love about Name of
(20:45):
the Rose. Now, in terms of the ancient uh uh
foraging for mushrooms and the use of mushrooms by by
human beings, you know, there's there's apparently evidence in what
is now Chile of mushroom consumption by humans thirteen thousand
years ago. Um Obsouly the iceman who we've mentioned on
the show before, who lived between thirty four UM hundred
(21:07):
and thirty bc uh somewhere in that area, was found
with two varieties of fungia on his person, one of
which we've discussed on our other show or previous other show.
Invention was likely a dried fungi used to help start fires,
but the other was a birch fungus that was likely
consumed for medicinal reasons, and so that the consumption of
mushrooms for culinary and or medicinal purposes dates back in
(21:30):
a number of ancient cultures. They're they're more examples of
this than we could easily cover on the show here. Uh.
And with the agricultural revolution came the eventuality of mushroom
cultivation as well. Though, as we previously touched on, there
are so many varieties that are resistant to cultivation. Yeah.
I think specifically a lot of the ones that you
think of that are most commonly used in food that
(21:52):
are the hardest to cultivate, or are the ones that are,
for my corpsal reasons, unable to be cultivated because they
exist in these symbiotic relationships with other plants, trees, and
forest atmospheres. And so the truffle is a common example,
but of course Sean trells are like this as well.
I believe also porcini mushrooms, uh, that it's just really
(22:14):
hard to recreate the conditions in which they arise. Yeah.
So even as as humanity inevitably be you know, began
to shift uh this revolution in neolithic times, uh, shifting
away from the hunter gather existence to one dependent on
intensive agriculture, there's kind of this you know, this tendency
to sort of think of that as Okay, well, you know,
(22:36):
you're just changing the way you live entirely, you're just
stopping where you are and now you're gonna grow plants,
and maybe mushroom foraging is one of those things that
remains outside of that tradition for these very reasons we've
been discussing. Um. However, this was quite interesting. I was
looking around for resources on this and I ran across
a paper published in the Royal Society b by Curtis w.
(22:57):
Uh Marine titled the Transition to Foraging for Dense and
Predictable Resources and It's Impact on the Evolution of modern humans.
And in this uh the the author um is discussing,
you know, this basic shift, but he points out, they
point out that there's another shift to consider. Quote the
foraging shift to dense and predictable resources is another key
(23:18):
milestone that had consequential impacts on the later part of
human evolution. Now, the basic idea here is that there
wasn't just this sudden shift from hunting and gathering to cultivation.
And there are many hypothesized explanations for this, but Marine
argues that hunting and gathering would have seen an increased
focus on dense and predictable resources. As such, this also
(23:41):
means that a given area becomes increasingly worth defending and
staking a claim to. Oh this is interesting. So this
could be the transition point between um between people who
just roam about following resources and consuming them wherever they
can be found. That and then on the other hand,
having far land in between. You could have places where
(24:02):
there are naturally high density resources that can be exploited
over and over that you might not be quite farming yet,
but might be worth defending as a stable territory. Yeah. Yeah,
And I have to admit I hadn't really thought about
this before. I without giving it a lot of thought.
I always just kind of, you know, had this this
inaccurate picture in my mind that was again like, okay,
(24:24):
we're not hundred gathers anymore, let's start growing this corn.
Why don't we? You know, like I don't. I didn't
really think about some of the potential, you know, for
for areas in between. This would be very interesting to explore.
Paired with something that came up in our Invention episodes
on Bread and Toast, where we talked about the studies
indicating that bread and may actually have been invented before
(24:45):
grain was was an agricultural product like people may have
been making and I think the archaeological evidence is that
people were making bread from wild grains and wild grasses
before they had farms and wheat. Yeah. Absolutely, It makes
me wonder if they were getting these grains from some
kind of like a location where there were a lot
of them growing together and could be exploited over and
(25:07):
over again. Yeah, exactly, Now marine rights to some all
this up quote. I hypothesize that the origin population for
modern humans made this shift to dense and predictable resources,
and thus was subject to high levels of territoriality and
intergroup conflict, which provided the selection regime for high levels
of cooperation with unrelated individuals within one's group. The downstream
(25:30):
effect was that all modern humans inherited these hyper pro
social provoclivities that are unique to our species. Now, to
bring this back to mushroom foraging, it is interesting to
process one's thoughts about the predictable times and places one
will find, say Chantrelle's or into the woods, and the
competitive feelings that they may force we may be forced
(25:53):
to confront during this. In fact, I understand that more
serious mushroom foragers are, you know, their loath to reveal
the secrets, uh, their secret places, their quote unquote honey spots,
the places where they can dependently find the best patches
of mushroom. Do you remember the story in Michael Pollen's
book where he's going hunting for psilocybin mushrooms with Paul Statements,
(26:15):
and he's going to great pains to try to tell
you what he's doing without revealing the site of Paul
statements mushroom psh Oh yeah, yeah, because Paul really doesn't
want people to know where he gets him that's his
honey spot. Now, I think though that, yeah, you can
certainly see that with plants, especially, how this could be
(26:35):
this intermediary zone between hunting and gathering and cultivation where
you realize, oh, well, the the wheat that we can
make into bread, it grows really well here. Uh, this
is a place that we need to keep secret or
even protect from other other individuals. This is our spot,
this is our sacred spot that we return to. It's
a very interesting possibility. I wonder what what would be
(26:57):
the evidence that you could find to back that up.
I don't know, I have to keep thinking about that.
All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll
be right back. Thank and we're back. Now. Another interesting
topic to to consider in all of this is that
that there is essentially a foraging gene uh So the
(27:19):
key gene of note in most studies, especially with fruit
flies and fruit flies, it's p r KG one uh
and uh this is um this is something that we
see presented in a wide variety of animals, from fruit
flies to even humans. But p r KG one is
president fruit flies and has previously been shown to influence
(27:39):
foraging behaviors. Researchers and studies that I think date back
to at least night have looked at this, and multiple
researchers found that one variant of the gene and fruit
flies induces what is called sitter behavior and in the
other's rover behavior. Now, the difference here is that when
a sitter enters an area can taining fruit, the they
(28:02):
scalut the perimeter of the area and then they move inward.
They sort of you know, they scouted out, they make
a perimeter, and then they move in. Rovers instead move
right in and go for the first fruit they encounter. Interesting, Now,
the human form of The gene is apparently a nucleotide
polymorphism genotype called r S one, and in two thousand
(28:25):
and nineteen, researchers from Canada, the US, and the UK
this would be struck at all um. They experimented with
it in a paper published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science. The title is self regulation and
the foraging gene p r KG one in humans UH.
Here's how the study went down. So, the authors analyzed
the genotypes of rs and four thirty seven undergraduate students
(28:50):
who performed two virtual foraging tasks. So this was a
touch screen situation in which subjects search for and collected
as many red bear areas as possible within five minutes.
And then so they compared the subjects with C A
or CC genotypes of rs UH. Individuals with the A
A genotype were more likely to hug the boundary of
(29:13):
the search environment, pick smaller berries, and stop to pick
berries and patches with fewer visible berries a k A
sitter behavior. The findings suggests that the A A genotype
is associated with a search strategy that restricts exploration and
exploits the local environment extensively. In other words, distinct patterns
(29:33):
of goal pursuit for foraging are associated with particular genotypes
of pr k G one. That's very interesting. Now, as
we've talked about on the show before, you always have
to remember when you're drawing correlations between particular gene variants
and a behavior, it's it's almost never going to be
like an on off switch that like, if you have
a certain gene variant, you show X behavior and if
(29:56):
you don't have it, you don't. But instead you you'd
be charting sort of like you know, percentages of influence.
Can can you see correlations between gene variants and a
and a tendency or a certain proclivity to a certain
type of behavior and uh and so yeah, this would
say that somehow foraging behaviors or downstream from things that
this gene does to the brain that make you more
(30:19):
likely to kind of like go out on a long
search of versus try to exploit all of the resources
you can in your nearest immediate environment. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, Now,
and of course we also have to keep in mind
that the scope in the size of the study here,
but um, and also I should point that the authors
mentioned that the human foraging behavior is ultimately far more
(30:40):
complex than the the foraging behavior fruit flies, and instead
they're just being two distinct foraging strategies. It seems like
they are three. So you have siderin rover, but then
you have a mixed uh disposition as well, the combines
elements of both. But on top of that, they point
out that this would go beyond mere foraging and humans,
(31:01):
that that it that it would instead impact human behavior
regulation across multiple domains. And I think we can imagine how, yeah,
that would involve various things that are like foraging, but
also potentially impact just sort of risk assessment, etcetera. Oh yeah,
I mean, I think it's easy to see how complex
modern behaviors are in a way kind of probably uh
(31:23):
minor reconfigurations of traditional instinctual behaviors like foraging, like hunting
and that kind of thing. Uh, So you can see
how whatever we're most instinctually inclined to do in terms
of foraging could manifest in the way you accomplish work
around the house, in the way that you know, go
shopping or whatever. I mean again, you you have to
(31:43):
be careful about drawing too direct and inference about anything
like that, but the fact that there's some kind of influences.
Seems pretty clear. All right, we're going to take a
quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank and we're
back now. Another aspect of early human foraging tactics, and
indeed the way these these early humans use spatial abilities
(32:06):
to gather resources, is that there was seemingly a division
of labor between males and females. This is the sexual
division of labor, sometimes abbreviated as sdl UM. And this
is a subject that has received a lot of study
over the years, especially of studies that look at extant
hunter gatherer populations in the world. And there are varying
(32:26):
hypotheses for the evolutionary origins of this divide. Now, for
our purposes here, I was looking at a study by
Louis Pacheco, Cobas, Marcos Rosetti, Cecilia Quanti Emquoees, and Robin
Hudson titled sex differences in mushroom gathering Men expend more
(32:47):
energy to obtain equivalent benefits and this was published in
Evolution and Human Behavior back in so the authors here
pointed out that the evidence was accumulating quote that women
excel on tasks appropriate it to gathering immobile plant resources
while men excel on task appropriate to hunting mobile, unpredictable prey.
And this would be due So the thinking goes to
(33:09):
this ancient labor divide in human societies. But it also
means that intrinsic foraging abilities and tactics would differ from
males to females. So the researchers here decided to put
this to the test with a mushroom foraging experiment, which
is the other key reason to discuss it here, because
people are are This is an experiment that includes not
touch screen um practices, not some sort of touch screen experiment,
(33:33):
but an actual foraging for mushrooms, let's forage. So in
their study they use GPS and heart rate monitors that
had been affixed to the researchers themselves, and then these
researchers would follow twenty one pairs of men and women
from an indigenous Mexican community in uh Tlex Cola while
foraging for mushrooms in the wild. So the researchers are
(33:56):
the ones where in the gear they're following the actual foragers,
but in doing so, they're going to be able to
chart where the foragers went and how much energy seems
to be expended in the silent hunt, so they ultimately
measured the costs, the benefits, and the general search efficiency
of everyone's movements, and then they analyzed them. The resulting
(34:17):
foraging patterns showed that while males and females collected similar
quantities of mushrooms, males achieved this at a significantly higher cost.
So the males they traveled farther. The males climbed to
greater altitudes. They had higher mean heart rates and energy
expenditures while partaking in the foraging, and in addition, they
(34:38):
also collected fewer mushroom species and visited fewer collection sites.
And this is interesting. They seemed to focus on large
patches of mushrooms, even if these were harder to come by,
so they were like bypassing or not even looking for
those smaller patches they wanted wanted to get the big
game mushroom patches. The females, meanwhile, it seemed to know
(35:00):
where to go and they foraged of from many small
patches as opposed to seeking out those greater patches of
fun guy. This was also compared by the way to
previous research on the way males and females navigate, which
indicated that males tend to create mental maps and then
superimpose their position, while women tend to remember landmarks and
(35:20):
memorize the routes quote. These findings are consistent with arguments
in the literature that differences in spatial ability between the
sexes are domain dependent, with women performing better and more
readily adopting search strategies appropriate to a gathering lifestyle than men.
So basically, the idea is that if you were primarily
charged with hunting prey two point five million years ago,
(35:42):
it made sense to travel far, to take widening paths
in pursuit of that big payoff prey, and then take
the shortest, most direct path back home so as to
make for up for all that time you spent wandering
and pursuing the prey. Meanwhile, if you were tasked with
gathering fungi or plants, it would serve to remember where
(36:03):
the most productive plant food sources were found, you know,
those honey spots, and then retrace your steps exactly so
as to take advantage of them in the future. And like, no,
making a bee line back for camp. That's very interesting. Uh. Now,
one thing that we always got to say whenever you
talk about studies that explore sex differences, is that people
a lot of people like to take these and really
(36:25):
run with them and say like, oh, this means that
men are like this and women are like that. I
think we always try to caution people not to not
to over interpret findings of sex differences in in particular studies.
It's very easy, I think, just because people want to
have strong intuitions about gender and sex and like what
(36:46):
men are like and what women are like and stuff
that they want to say like, oh, this explains why
my husband does this or why my girlfriend says that
kind of thing. You can you can easily go way
overboard with with looking for explanations in that way. Yeah.
I mean it also it comes down to what is
the Barnum effect that we've discussed before, where we say, oh, well,
that's me, this this study is correct because that's me.
(37:09):
I totally am like that when I go to the
to the grocery store and my my partner is like this, etcetera.
But but yeah, like you're saying, like, we're talking about
general perceived trends in the sexual division of labor and
as reflected here in particular studies. Uh so, yeah, I
don't don't have it printed on a T shirt or anything,
(37:29):
but but it is interesting research and and certainly it
was neat to find a study that was that was
actually involving mushroom foraging, like the scientific study of mushroom
foraging behavior totally, and it highlights how there can be
different types of foraging strategies that are effective in different ways.
I was looking at some other studies that were about
different types of foraging strategies and birds, you know, and
(37:52):
how this is kind of interesting, like some birds tend
to forage by moving in little random types of motions
around a central locust, uh in a way that's very
comparable actually to the movement of tiny particles on the
atomic scale that's known as Brownie in motion and physics.
Whereas other birds tended to forage by sort of taking
(38:12):
large leaps at a time. And that these, uh, these
different strategies could be differentially effective depending on what types
of things you're looking for while foraging, what the surrounding
landscape is, and things like that. Yeah, it's such a
foraging itself is just such a fascinating thing to think
about because it's easy to just sort of dismiss it
as this kind of primal thing that we sometimes engage
(38:34):
in when we decided to go into the woods and
look for mushrooms, etcetera. But it is again something basic
like neural activity that we're continually engaging in and and
something that also comes down to this kind of like
like this the basic mathematics of it, like how do
you go about looking for resources in a given area?
And then how are you how do you deal with
spatial awareness in that given area? Like there it seems
(38:57):
like a rich domain for you know, AI research in
the like totally because strangely enough, I feel like search
activities are one of the ways in which human behavior
can be most closely compared to what computer programs do.
Does that make sense? Yeah, that there are some pretty
(39:17):
direct analogies actually having to do with energy is expended
and efficiency in different ways of searching through randomly organized material. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean in the same way that you can imagine
someone in desiring an AI program that will find you
a good deal on something. There are also plenty of
humans out there like that's their thing, like let me,
(39:40):
let me help you find a good deal on that.
Because I love looking for him, So, yeah, I mean
a lot of it does come back to foraging. I
mean I would be interested in studies looking at foraging
behaviors in humans and animals compared to what search engines
do to get you your results. That would be interesting.
So who knows, perhaps will have some additional foraging episodes
(40:02):
in the future, as as you and I go out
into the wilds seeking out fruitful papers on these topics.
Bring it on home, all right, We're gonna have to
call it there. Uh. Likewise, we weren't able to touch
on everything regarding mushroom foraging and foraging related topics here,
but we certainly would love to hear from everyone out there. Um,
(40:24):
you know, are you involved in in mushroom foraging? Are
you an active forager? Or let us know your experiences.
We'd love to hear your insight on all of this. Likewise,
if you were, if your culture of origin, or you're
you know, if you're immersed in a particular cultural uh
take on mushroom foraging, be it you know, the activities
or or beliefs and strategies tied up with the foraging
(40:47):
uh activity, let us know. We'd love to be enlightened
on those topics, huge things. As always to our excellent
audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to
get in touch with us with feedback on this episode
or any other, suggest a topic for the future, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Stuff to Blow Your
(41:15):
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