September 17, 2020 • 41 mins
Are more people identifying and even foraging wild mushrooms than in previous years? If so, why is this? In this episode 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the 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
(00:24):
we had to 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 it's 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
(00:44):
couldn't find their way home. But 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 Mitskevitch, who lived from seven to eighteen fifty five,
wrote famously about mushroom foraging in his epic poem Panta Days.
(01:07):
And so I was looking at 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 basic drama
(01:30):
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 next to
(01:51):
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 no insect
(02:13):
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 the 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 and less famous in song,
(02:36):
is still the most delicious, whether fresh or salted, whether
in autumn or in winter. But the sineschal gathered the toadstool, flybane,
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
(02:57):
are an 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 cos lac like the bulging bottom of
an upturned cup, the funnels like slender champagne glasses, the
(03:22):
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 hairs
or wolves by men. They have not been christened, but
they are innumerable. No one deigns to touch the wolf
(03:45):
or hair varieties, but whenever a person bends down to them,
he straight away 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 there it gets a little bit offended
on behalf of the grass. I guess I'm not sure
(04:05):
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 micophilic in some terminology
that will address a little bit later in the episode, uh,
this doesn't, of course manifest as a love for all
(04:29):
mushrooms unqualified. Instead, it seems to me that the mushroom
loving culture actually has a highly discriminating eye from mushrooms
noticing much more the important and perhaps life saving differences
between varieties. So like a mushroom culture doesn't just love mushrooms.
It's more like they really love the good ones and
(04:50):
really hate the bad ones. But of course, plenty of
mushroom hunting and accidental mushroom poisoning happens even in the
modern era. In Poland, was looking at a scientific report
compiling cases of mushroom poisoning in Poland from the year's
nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty seven by an author
named Eliza Lewandowska. And this was called Mushroom Poisoning in
(05:13):
Poland in the years in 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 amanda felloids or the death cap mushroom.
We we've talked about this already, right, yes, now, this
one was responsible for at least four hundred and sixty
(05:35):
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
nine of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide. So so they're the
real bad boy in terms of accidental accidental mushroom poisoning. UM.
But I was also reading about how the specific way
(05:57):
that Amanda philoids 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, when somebody eats the
Amanda floid e is it doesn't necessarily cause any immediate
(06:19):
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 I've read
that this can make it easy to mistake the poisoning
(06:40):
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.
The entire time, I'm the amine to toxins are in
(07:01):
the background, just massacreing 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,
I'm actually feeling a little bit better than i was earlier,
(07:23):
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 various
mushrooms and and other organisms in one's environment, you know,
because this is clearly something where you you would have
(07:45):
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 are kind of precision,
but with a different difficulty I don't think we've talked
about this one yet. The second place in the Polish
(08:07):
survey for for most poisoning in death was gyrometra esculenta
or the false moral mushroom. Uh, that's moral like m
O R e L moral mushrooms not morals as you know,
doing good. Yeah, and so in this survey, the false
moral was responsible for a hundred and sixty four cases
(08:27):
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
(08:48):
kind of looks like what you have mushroom but ground chuck.
You know. It of appearance, 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 you know, that's fine, um.
(09:12):
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.
(09:32):
In North America, most exposures occur in Michigan, although a
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
Amanda filoids, which occur more commonly in the fall. So
(09:53):
there's this geographical distribution. I've read about how there are
different rates of poisoning from the false morale to ending
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
(10:13):
with you know, with the body 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,
(10:35):
because even though 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
(10:58):
reportedly does not 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
(11:20):
six hours later, 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. Uh. They're said
to smell sweet like honey and taste absolutely delightful, sauteed
and buttered. Don't do this, don't It's not worth it.
It will kill you. Do not take the death cap
challenge if you see something like that on YouTube. No,
(11:42):
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
he calls the wolves or the hairs, you know, the
language of wolves or rabbits. Now, you might think that
(12:05):
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 fungi to humans, it is not necessarily deadly
to everything in the forest all of the time. It
came across one statement about this when I was reading
an article about the spread of the deathcap mushroom throughout
(12:28):
North America, and this was by Craig Childs in the Atlantic.
It's a very interesting article. It's worth reading. A Child's
talks about how deathcap mushrooms naturally live in a symbiotic
relationship with host trees. And we've talked about how several
mushroom species are like this. They attached themselves to the
roots of trees and they sort of trade resources between them,
(12:50):
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 under normal circumstances, and it has
taken human intervention to really set them spreading far and wide. Specifically,
(13:14):
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 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,
(13:36):
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
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
(13:59):
mind in 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 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
(14:21):
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.
Meme away, Yeah, meme until you drop. But one last
thing I wanted to add about this was I saw
some mushroom enthusiasts online just in comments sections and stuff,
(14:44):
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
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 we mentioned
(15:05):
a few different mushroom foraging cultures, and I believe Scottish
culture came up. As luck would have it, was watching
hum the the TV adaptation of Outlander last night. Start
watching that, yeah, 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
(15:26):
which ones are poisonous. I found it rather interesting. Also
castle they used in that show, same castle they used
in Highlander, uh and in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
So it's got that going for it. So even in
your ultimate kilt lift 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 uh, it's it's
(15:47):
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 forage 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 we're discussing here, and
we've we've covered humanities hunter gatherer past on the show before.
(16:08):
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 be food, etcetera. One of
the resources we were looking at for this section was
Eric BoA's Wild Edible Fungi a Global Overview of their
(16:32):
Use and Importance to People. Yeah, it looks like this
was a report compiled for the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the u N in two thousand four. Yeah, and uh,
and Boa points out, I'm gonna mention a few different
facts that points 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
(16:53):
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 are microphilic meaning you know, the
loving mushrooms, you know, being open to those experiences in
(17:15):
those quests, with English culture standing interestingly enough as an
example 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 a lot of material there. Now. I found
this very interesting because I've certainly seen some documentaries um
(17:38):
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. Burtleston talks about this, where you know, cultures
that are predominantly microphobic or microphilic, they're all gonna be relative,
right Like, within each of these broad cultures, there will
(17:58):
be subcultures and then 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 think about one of my earliest memories
of Chinese food. I've loved Chinese food as long as
(18:19):
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 a hot and sour soup, and I was just like,
what is this? I have no idea. It's like something
(18:40):
from another planet, and it's delicious. But as to microphobia,
Birtleson mentions evidence of strains of microphobic thinking in many
of the historic common names for mushrooms in some European cultures.
For example, though today we think of French cuisine as
being very very pro mushroom, historically there was some French
(19:01):
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 poda hot toad's hat,
and in Germanic and Celtic cultures. Burtleson writes that you
(19:22):
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 me be reminded. I'm sure I've brought this
up on the show before. Um, but there's that that
wonderful um a little bit in uh Burt of Eccos
(19:43):
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 other monk that's
hearing this story is I believe German, and he thinks
(20:05):
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
the Rose. Now, in terms of the ancient uh uh
(20:27):
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 Obso, the iceman who we've mentioned on
the show before, who lived between thirty four UM hundred
and thirty one b c uh somewhere in that area,
(20:48):
was found with two varieties of fun guy 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 bird
fungus that was likely consumed for medicinal reasons. And so
the consumption of mushrooms for culinary and or medicinal purposes
dates back in a number of ancient cultures. They're they're
(21:09):
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've
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 are the hardest to cultivate, or
(21:31):
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 shan trells
are like this as well. I believe also porcini mushrooms, uh,
that it's just really hard to recreate the conditions in
(21:54):
which they arise. Yeah. So even as as humanity inevitably
be you know that began this shift, uh, this revolution
in neolithic times, uh, shifting away from the hunter gathering
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, you're just changing the way
(22:14):
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 interested. I was looking around for resources on
this and I ran across a paper published in the
Royal Society b by Curtis w. Uh Marine titled the
(22:36):
Transition to foraging for Dense and Predictable Resources and It's
Impact on the Evolution of modern humans. And in this
the uh the the author, UM, it's 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 milestone that
(22:57):
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 means that
(23:18):
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 farmland in between,
you could have places where there are naturally high density
(23:42):
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, and that was again like, Okay, we're not
hunter gathers anymore, let's start growing this corn. Why don't
(24:04):
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 grain
was was an agricultural product like people may have been
(24:26):
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 location where there were a lot of them
growing together and could be exploited over and over again. Yeah, exactly.
(24:46):
Now marine rights to just some all this up quote.
I hypothesized 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 con fleet,
which provided the selection regime for high levels of cooperation
with unrelated individuals within one's group. The downstream effect was
(25:08):
that all modern humans inherited these hyper pro social productivities
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 to confront
(25:31):
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, uh, 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, and
(25:53):
he's going to great pains to try to tell you
what he's doing without revealing the site of Paul statements
mushroom hash. Oh yeah, yeah, because Paul really doesn't want
people to know where he gets them. That's his honey spot. Now.
I think though, that you can certainly see that with plants, especially,
how this could be this intermediary zone between hunting and
(26:15):
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 the evidence that you could find
(26:36):
to back that up. I don't know. I have to
keep thinking about that. All right, we're going to take
a quick break, but we'll be right back. 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 key gene of note in most studies,
(26:58):
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 foraging behaviors. Researchers and studies that I think
(27:20):
date back to at least 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 containing fruit, the they
scalut the perimeter of the area and then they move inward.
(27:43):
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 three four, and in
two thousand and nineteen, researchers from Canada, the US, and
(28:06):
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. UH. 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
(28:26):
seven undergraduate students who performed two virtual foraging tasks. So
this was a touch screen situation in which subjects search
for and collected as many red berries as possible within
five minutes. And then so they compared the subjects with
C A or CC genotypes of rs UH. Individuals with
(28:47):
the A A genotype were more likely to hug the
boundary of 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,
(29:10):
distinct patterns of goal pursuit for foraging are associated with
particular genotypes of pr KG 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
(29:30):
have a certain gene variant, you show X behavior and
if 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 are downstream from things that
(29:53):
this gene does to the brain that makes you more
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
(30:14):
mentioned that the human foraging behavior is ultimately far more
complex than the the the foraging behavior fruit flies. And
instead of they're just being two distinct foraging strategies, it
seems like they are three. So you have sidderin rover,
but then you have a mixed uh disposition as well
the combines elements of both. But on top of that
that they point out that this would go beyond mere
(30:36):
foraging and humans, 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
(30:57):
a way kind of probably 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, you know, go shopping or whatever. I mean again,
(31:20):
you you have to be careful about drawing too direct
an inference about anything like that, but the fact that
there's some kind of influences seems pretty clear. Alright, 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
(31:42):
use spatial abilities 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 and this is a subject that has received
a lot of study over the years, especially of studies
that look at extent hunter gatherer populations in the world.
(32:02):
And there are varying hypotheses for the evolutionary origins of
this divide. Now for our purposes here, I was looking
at a study by Lewis Pacheco, Cobas, Marcos Rosetti, Cecilia Quanti, Equoyees,
and Robin Hudson titled sex differences in mushroom gathering Men
(32:24):
expend more 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 to gathering immobile plant
resources while men excel on tasks appropriate to hunting mobile,
unpredictable prey. And this would be due so the thinking
(32:46):
goes to 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
(33:06):
not touch screen um practices, not some sort of touch
screen experiment, 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 tux
(33:29):
Cola while foraging for mushrooms in the wild. So the
researchers are 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 analyze them.
(33:54):
The resulting foraging patterns showed that while males and females
collected similar quantities of mushroom rooms. 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,
(34:15):
and in addition, they 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,
(34:36):
it seemed to know where to go and they foraged
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 womington to remember
(34:57):
landmarks and 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
(35:18):
million years ago, 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 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
(35:40):
remember where 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
(36:01):
to take these and really 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
(36:22):
sex and like what 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
(36:44):
is correct because that's me. 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
(37:05):
it printed on a T shirt or anything, 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
(37:27):
of foraging strategies and birds, you know, and 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 large leaps
(37:50):
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 in when
(38:12):
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
(38:32):
given area? Like there it seems like a rich domain
for you know, AI research and 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? No, no,
(38:53):
absolutely that there are some pretty direct analogies actually having
to do with energy is expended an efficiency in different
ways of searching through randomly organized material. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean in the same way that you could imagine
someone in desiring an AI program that will find you
a good deal on something. There are also plenty of
(39:15):
humans out there like that's their thing, like let me,
let me help you find a good deal on that,
because I love looking for them. 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.
(39:35):
So who knows, perhaps we'll have some additional foraging episodes
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. Likewise, we weren't able to touch on
everything regarding mushroom foraging and foraging related topics here, but
(39:58):
we certainly would love to hear for rememberyone out there, Um,
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
(40:20):
or or beliefs and strategies tied up with the foraging
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 to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello. You can email us at
(40:41):
Contact Stuff to Blow your Mind, Stuff to Blow your Mind.
It's production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for
my heart Radio with the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. The four
(41:12):
start
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, the 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
(00:24):
we had to 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 it's 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
(00:44):
couldn't find their way home. But 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 Mitskevitch, who lived from seven to eighteen fifty five,
wrote famously about mushroom foraging in his epic poem Panta Days.
(01:07):
And so I was looking at 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 basic drama
(01:30):
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 next to
(01:51):
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 no insect
(02:13):
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 the 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 and less famous in song,
(02:36):
is still the most delicious, whether fresh or salted, whether
in autumn or in winter. But the sineschal gathered the toadstool, flybane,
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
(02:57):
are an 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 cos lac like the bulging bottom of
an upturned cup, the funnels like slender champagne glasses, the
(03:22):
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 hairs
or wolves by men. They have not been christened, but
they are innumerable. No one deigns to touch the wolf
(03:45):
or hair varieties, but whenever a person bends down to them,
he straight away 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 there it gets a little bit offended
on behalf of the grass. I guess I'm not sure
(04:05):
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 micophilic in some terminology
that will address a little bit later in the episode, uh,
this doesn't, of course manifest as a love for all
(04:29):
mushrooms unqualified. Instead, it seems to me that the mushroom
loving culture actually has a highly discriminating eye from mushrooms
noticing much more the important and perhaps life saving differences
between varieties. So like a mushroom culture doesn't just love mushrooms.
It's more like they really love the good ones and
(04:50):
really hate the bad ones. But of course, plenty of
mushroom hunting and accidental mushroom poisoning happens even in the
modern era. In Poland, was looking at a scientific report
compiling cases of mushroom poisoning in Poland from the year's
nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty seven by an author
named Eliza Lewandowska. And this was called Mushroom Poisoning in
(05:13):
Poland in the years in 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 amanda felloids or the death cap mushroom.
We we've talked about this already, right, yes, now, this
one was responsible for at least four hundred and sixty
(05:35):
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
nine of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide. So so they're the
real bad boy in terms of accidental accidental mushroom poisoning. UM.
But I was also reading about how the specific way
(05:57):
that Amanda philoids 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, when somebody eats the
Amanda floid e is it doesn't necessarily cause any immediate
(06:19):
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 I've read
that this can make it easy to mistake the poisoning
(06:40):
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.
The entire time, I'm the amine to toxins are in
(07:01):
the background, just massacreing 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,
I'm actually feeling a little bit better than i was earlier,
(07:23):
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 various
mushrooms and and other organisms in one's environment, you know,
because this is clearly something where you you would have
(07:45):
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 are kind of precision,
but with a different difficulty I don't think we've talked
about this one yet. The second place in the Polish
(08:07):
survey for for most poisoning in death was gyrometra esculenta
or the false moral mushroom. Uh, that's moral like m
O R e L moral mushrooms not morals as you know,
doing good. Yeah, and so in this survey, the false
moral was responsible for a hundred and sixty four cases
(08:27):
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
(08:48):
kind of looks like what you have mushroom but ground chuck.
You know. It of appearance, 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 you know, that's fine, um.
(09:12):
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.
(09:32):
In North America, most exposures occur in Michigan, although a
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
Amanda filoids, which occur more commonly in the fall. So
(09:53):
there's this geographical distribution. I've read about how there are
different rates of poisoning from the false morale to ending
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
(10:13):
with you know, with the body 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,
(10:35):
because even though 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
(10:58):
reportedly does not 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
(11:20):
six hours later, 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. Uh. They're said
to smell sweet like honey and taste absolutely delightful, sauteed
and buttered. Don't do this, don't It's not worth it.
It will kill you. Do not take the death cap
challenge if you see something like that on YouTube. No,
(11:42):
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
he calls the wolves or the hairs, you know, the
language of wolves or rabbits. Now, you might think that
(12:05):
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 fungi to humans, it is not necessarily deadly
to everything in the forest all of the time. It
came across one statement about this when I was reading
an article about the spread of the deathcap mushroom throughout
(12:28):
North America, and this was by Craig Childs in the Atlantic.
It's a very interesting article. It's worth reading. A Child's
talks about how deathcap mushrooms naturally live in a symbiotic
relationship with host trees. And we've talked about how several
mushroom species are like this. They attached themselves to the
roots of trees and they sort of trade resources between them,
(12:50):
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 under normal circumstances, and it has
taken human intervention to really set them spreading far and wide. Specifically,
(13:14):
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 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,
(13:36):
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
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
(13:59):
mind in 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 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
(14:21):
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.
Meme away, Yeah, meme until you drop. But one last
thing I wanted to add about this was I saw
some mushroom enthusiasts online just in comments sections and stuff,
(14:44):
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
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 we mentioned
(15:05):
a few different mushroom foraging cultures, and I believe Scottish
culture came up. As luck would have it, was watching
hum the the TV adaptation of Outlander last night. Start
watching that, yeah, 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
(15:26):
which ones are poisonous. I found it rather interesting. Also
castle they used in that show, same castle they used
in Highlander, uh and in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
So it's got that going for it. So even in
your ultimate kilt lift 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 uh, it's it's
(15:47):
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 forage 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 we're discussing here, and
we've we've covered humanities hunter gatherer past on the show before.
(16:08):
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 be food, etcetera. One of
the resources we were looking at for this section was
Eric BoA's Wild Edible Fungi a Global Overview of their
(16:32):
Use and Importance to People. Yeah, it looks like this
was a report compiled for the Food and Agriculture Organization
of the u N in two thousand four. Yeah, and uh,
and Boa points out, I'm gonna mention a few different
facts that points 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
(16:53):
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 are microphilic meaning you know, the
loving mushrooms, you know, being open to those experiences in
(17:15):
those quests, with English culture standing interestingly enough as an
example 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 a lot of material there. Now. I found
this very interesting because I've certainly seen some documentaries um
(17:38):
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. Burtleston talks about this, where you know, cultures
that are predominantly microphobic or microphilic, they're all gonna be relative,
right Like, within each of these broad cultures, there will
(17:58):
be subcultures and then 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 think about one of my earliest memories
of Chinese food. I've loved Chinese food as long as
(18:19):
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 a hot and sour soup, and I was just like,
what is this? I have no idea. It's like something
(18:40):
from another planet, and it's delicious. But as to microphobia,
Birtleson mentions evidence of strains of microphobic thinking in many
of the historic common names for mushrooms in some European cultures.
For example, though today we think of French cuisine as
being very very pro mushroom, historically there was some French
(19:01):
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 poda hot toad's hat,
and in Germanic and Celtic cultures. Burtleson writes that you
(19:22):
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 me be reminded. I'm sure I've brought this
up on the show before. Um, but there's that that
wonderful um a little bit in uh Burt of Eccos
(19:43):
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 other monk that's
hearing this story is I believe German, and he thinks
(20:05):
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
the Rose. Now, in terms of the ancient uh uh
(20:27):
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 Obso, the iceman who we've mentioned on
the show before, who lived between thirty four UM hundred
and thirty one b c uh somewhere in that area,
(20:48):
was found with two varieties of fun guy 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 bird
fungus that was likely consumed for medicinal reasons. And so
the consumption of mushrooms for culinary and or medicinal purposes
dates back in a number of ancient cultures. They're they're
(21:09):
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've
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 are the hardest to cultivate, or
(21:31):
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 shan trells
are like this as well. I believe also porcini mushrooms, uh,
that it's just really hard to recreate the conditions in
(21:54):
which they arise. Yeah. So even as as humanity inevitably
be you know that began this shift, uh, this revolution
in neolithic times, uh, shifting away from the hunter gathering
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, you're just changing the way
(22:14):
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 interested. I was looking around for resources on
this and I ran across a paper published in the
Royal Society b by Curtis w. Uh Marine titled the
(22:36):
Transition to foraging for Dense and Predictable Resources and It's
Impact on the Evolution of modern humans. And in this
the uh the the author, UM, it's 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 milestone that
(22:57):
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 means that
(23:18):
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 farmland in between,
you could have places where there are naturally high density
(23:42):
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, and that was again like, Okay, we're not
hunter gathers anymore, let's start growing this corn. Why don't
(24:04):
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 grain
was was an agricultural product like people may have been
(24:26):
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 location where there were a lot of them
growing together and could be exploited over and over again. Yeah, exactly.
(24:46):
Now marine rights to just some all this up quote.
I hypothesized 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 con fleet,
which provided the selection regime for high levels of cooperation
with unrelated individuals within one's group. The downstream effect was
(25:08):
that all modern humans inherited these hyper pro social productivities
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 to confront
(25:31):
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, uh, 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, and
(25:53):
he's going to great pains to try to tell you
what he's doing without revealing the site of Paul statements
mushroom hash. Oh yeah, yeah, because Paul really doesn't want
people to know where he gets them. That's his honey spot. Now.
I think though, that you can certainly see that with plants, especially,
how this could be this intermediary zone between hunting and
(26:15):
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 the evidence that you could find
(26:36):
to back that up. I don't know. I have to
keep thinking about that. All right, we're going to take
a quick break, but we'll be right back. 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 key gene of note in most studies,
(26:58):
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 foraging behaviors. Researchers and studies that I think
(27:20):
date back to at least 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 containing fruit, the they
scalut the perimeter of the area and then they move inward.
(27:43):
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 three four, and in
two thousand and nineteen, researchers from Canada, the US, and
(28:06):
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. UH. 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
(28:26):
seven undergraduate students who performed two virtual foraging tasks. So
this was a touch screen situation in which subjects search
for and collected as many red berries as possible within
five minutes. And then so they compared the subjects with
C A or CC genotypes of rs UH. Individuals with
(28:47):
the A A genotype were more likely to hug the
boundary of 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,
(29:10):
distinct patterns of goal pursuit for foraging are associated with
particular genotypes of pr KG 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
(29:30):
have a certain gene variant, you show X behavior and
if 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 are downstream from things that
(29:53):
this gene does to the brain that makes you more
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
(30:14):
mentioned that the human foraging behavior is ultimately far more
complex than the the the foraging behavior fruit flies. And
instead of they're just being two distinct foraging strategies, it
seems like they are three. So you have sidderin rover,
but then you have a mixed uh disposition as well
the combines elements of both. But on top of that
that they point out that this would go beyond mere
(30:36):
foraging and humans, 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
(30:57):
a way kind of probably 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, you know, go shopping or whatever. I mean again,
(31:20):
you you have to be careful about drawing too direct
an inference about anything like that, but the fact that
there's some kind of influences seems pretty clear. Alright, 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
(31:42):
use spatial abilities 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 and this is a subject that has received
a lot of study over the years, especially of studies
that look at extent hunter gatherer populations in the world.
(32:02):
And there are varying hypotheses for the evolutionary origins of
this divide. Now for our purposes here, I was looking
at a study by Lewis Pacheco, Cobas, Marcos Rosetti, Cecilia Quanti, Equoyees,
and Robin Hudson titled sex differences in mushroom gathering Men
(32:24):
expend more 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 to gathering immobile plant
resources while men excel on tasks appropriate to hunting mobile,
unpredictable prey. And this would be due so the thinking
(32:46):
goes to 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
(33:06):
not touch screen um practices, not some sort of touch
screen experiment, 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 tux
(33:29):
Cola while foraging for mushrooms in the wild. So the
researchers are 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 analyze them.
(33:54):
The resulting foraging patterns showed that while males and females
collected similar quantities of mushroom rooms. 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,
(34:15):
and in addition, they 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,
(34:36):
it seemed to know where to go and they foraged
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 womington to remember
(34:57):
landmarks and 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
(35:18):
million years ago, 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 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
(35:40):
remember where 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
(36:01):
to take these and really 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
(36:22):
sex and like what 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
(36:44):
is correct because that's me. 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
(37:05):
it printed on a T shirt or anything, 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
(37:27):
of foraging strategies and birds, you know, and 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 large leaps
(37:50):
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 in when
(38:12):
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
(38:32):
given area? Like there it seems like a rich domain
for you know, AI research and 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? No, no,
(38:53):
absolutely that there are some pretty direct analogies actually having
to do with energy is expended an efficiency in different
ways of searching through randomly organized material. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I mean in the same way that you could imagine
someone in desiring an AI program that will find you
a good deal on something. There are also plenty of
(39:15):
humans out there like that's their thing, like let me,
let me help you find a good deal on that,
because I love looking for them. 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.
(39:35):
So who knows, perhaps we'll have some additional foraging episodes
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. Likewise, we weren't able to touch on
everything regarding mushroom foraging and foraging related topics here, but
(39:58):
we certainly would love to hear for rememberyone out there, Um,
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
(40:20):
or or beliefs and strategies tied up with the foraging
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 to suggest a topic for the future,
or just to say hello. You can email us at
(40:41):
Contact Stuff to Blow your Mind, Stuff to Blow your Mind.
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