From the Vault: Mushroom Foraging, Part 1

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 9/15/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you 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
of the show. This is part one of a series
we did on mushroom foraging. This was originally published September fifteenth,
twenty twenty. It's actually I feel like around this time
last year we were doing a lot of wandering in
the Woods related episodes. We were yeah, yeah, because we'd

(00:28):
done the Leshy, and then we were talking about mushroom
foraging as like a human behavior and a human cultural practice.
Pretty it's it's pretty fun. This is part one, and
our next Vault episode will be part two. And a
little notice here at the beginning, this is an insert

(00:50):
because Robert and I we started talking about mushroom foraging
and we ended up going on for like more than
two hours. So we're splitting this episode into two parts.
And here is your warnings, so be sure to not
only listen to this one, but come back next time.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio. Hey,

(01:18):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going
on the Quiet Time. That's right, we're gonna be talking
about mushroom foraging, which we kind of touched on very
briefly in our recent episode about liking, and then I
realized we just had to come back to it because
I guess the basic genesis for this is that I've

(01:40):
noticed a lot more mushroom talk and a lot a
lot more mushroom activity this year. Part of it has
been social media, for sure. I've noticed people I know
taking photographs of interesting mushrooms that they've spotted, sometimes correctly
identifying them or even harvesting them. And I have to
admit that my own family we've gotten into identifying mushrooms

(02:03):
on hikes, and we've even done a little bit of
foraging ourselves, but only with racie mushrooms and chanterelles. In
a way, mushroom foraging is an ideal social distancing activity, right.
It's something you can do that in a way feels
social because you take them home and you take pictures
of them and you put them on the internet and
everybody thinks it's beautiful and they comment on them, and

(02:26):
it's a way of interacting in a significant productive way
with the world outside your house, but you don't have
to get close to anybody. Yeah, yeah, it's I think
part of it has certainly been COVID nineteen restrictions on
our lives, because some of us are doing a lot
more walks through either parks or you know, or hiking
trails if we have access to them and we're able
to get to those, but even through our own neighborhoods,

(02:48):
Like we've harvested some raci mushrooms from just our immediate
neighborhood environment just walking walking around, spotting them and then
ideing them, and then also just ideing various other things
that were not attempting to collect. It's a great it's
a great way to occupy your time to sort of

(03:08):
have It's kind of like the Pokemon Go of the Wild.
It gives you sort of goals to achieve on your walks,
things to chronicle, and for most of us anyway, a
new topic to immerse ourselves in, you know, because prior
to the last couple of years or so, I really
didn't know much about mushrooms outside of like the few

(03:29):
varieties that I had previously consumed or that you can
find at the grocery store or order on a pizza.
But of course that's only a slim variety of the
mushroom whirld. There are some delicious, edible wild mushrooms that
have resisted cultivation. Yeah, totally, And there are some interesting
reasons for that too, like one of them being that,

(03:52):
tying back to our recent Lin episode, some mushrooms that
are delicious to eat exist in symbiotic relationships with other organisms,
specifically often like plants and trees that are difficult to
recreate in a controlled environment. So you can't just start
a chantrelle farm. Or maybe you could, but you know
your yield would be inconsistent. It's just really difficult to do. Absolutely.

(04:15):
Another thing, though, is it's funny that we think of
mushroom foraging as sort of the natural world version of
Pokemon Go. It's it's a sign of like how sort
of microchif tamed our brains are. That Isn't Pokemon Go
really a sort of substitute or surrogate for this ancient
instinct we have to scour the land for bits of

(04:36):
edible plant matter and other life. It absolutely is, and
and so that's why I encourage everyone to, you know,
keep listening to this episode even if you're you're not
that into mushrooms, you're not interested in mushroom foraging, because
we're going to discuss mushroom foraging, but we're also going
to discuss foraging behavior, uh in a broader sense. And
I think that's something that that that certainly you can

(04:59):
gauge into. So when you're on a walk and you're
looking for something, be it birds or mushrooms or non
existent Pokemon lurking, you know somewhere in the GPS domain.
And I think it also comes into play in shopping,
in sorting through a big box of unsorted legos to
find the pieces you're looking for. I mean, it pops

(05:20):
up in so many different human activities and it captivates us.
It is, it latches into a part of our neural
hardware because it is part of what we're supposed to do.
This is interesting. I wish I had thought about this
before we started talking, so I could research it a bit,
But it just occurred to me. What makes the difference

(05:41):
between search activities that are intensely pleasurable and search activities
that are maddening. Like I'm thinking about search activities such
as locating a specific item within your house or a
given room that is not fun, that feels awful, you know,
it's like where are my keys? You just you just
want it to end as soon as possible. But on

(06:03):
the other hand, of course, foraging for mushrooms, playing Pokemon Go,
or even sometimes digging through a container of legos that
can be very fun, or searching for a puzzle piece.
So what's the difference. I mean, it might be the
difference between the search for the thing lost and the
search for the thing not yet obtained. I'm not sure,
But I also have noticed, I think I've mentioned this

(06:23):
on the show before. I have found that jigsaw puzzles
the process of looking for the correct piece. For me,
I feel it's both like it's both kind of mentally
exhausting and frustrating and yet at the same time completely enthralling.
So in the past I found myself helping to put
together a jigsaw puzzle and not really like, I'm asking myself,

(06:44):
Am I enjoying this? Am I having a good time?
I'm not sure, but I also cannot stop. I mean,
I guess one thing we're highlighting is the sometimes fuzzy
line between work and play a lot of you ever
notice how much video game time is taken up with
things that like are basically like they would be work
in the real world, but something about the way they're

(07:06):
framed just makes it a game instead. Yeah. So many
of these games, especially, you know, they want you to
play regularly. It's not just play through the story, it's
play every day. So they give you these little, basically
grocery lists of things to do, and you know, sometimes
you see players complaining about it, and rightfully so, but
but also there's something kind of addictive about it, like, Okay,

(07:29):
I need to go out. I need to you know,
find and scrap eight hats in this post apocalyptic world,
you know, something like that, and uh, and it's you
can weirdly get into it. Yeah, I gotta break rocks
in my digital domain. Though I guess that that sort
of introduces the slot machine element, because if it's exciting,
if there are variable, intermittent rewards, I think that's the

(07:51):
candy in there. Yeah, I mean it was. Sometimes there's
like a random the reward is random, but like sometimes
like in Fallout seventy six, which which I know fans
kind of go back and forth on this particular game
and the way it's designed and all in that elements
in it, But like a lot of the sort of
grocery list assignments you have, there's there's not really a
random rewards. You know exactly what you're gonna get, Like

(08:12):
you're gonna get so many like you know, atoms that
you can spend in the store or whatever. You know
exactly what you're working for with it. So in that regard,
I feel like it kind of falls in line with foraging.
But then again, foraging is also an exercise in not
necessarily knowing what you're going to get or knowing what
quantities you're going to get. And we'll get into that.
Well yeah, I mean what if one of these digital

(08:34):
rocks you broke could kill you? Yeah? Yeah, And that's
going to be a huge part of mushrooms here. But
before we get go any further, I do want to
just show us a couple more things. First of all, yes,
photography is a tremendously fun activity to engage in with
mushrooms when you're scavenging them and finding them and charting
them in the wild. Spore prints are also a lot

(08:56):
of fun. Now, this is when you you can look
up guides on how to do this online, but where
you collect like the cap of the mushroom, and then
you put it on a sheet of paper and then
cover it with like a glass container or a bowl
or something, and then the spores leave a print of
the mushroom cap on the sheet of paper, which you
can then photograph and share online or even you know.

(09:17):
I think they're ways to preserve it as well. Noting
the emission of spores is a great reminder of something
we've talked about before, which is that when you harvest
a mushroom, you are not harvesting the entire organism that
you know, the fungus is a web of things that
live under the ground, usually or in some kind of
decomposing matter or parasitic on another organism. The mushroom that

(09:38):
you collect is the fruiting body that's like an organ
of the overall fungus. It's almost, I mean, not exactly analogous,
but the closest analogy I think would be that it's
like you're breaking off the sexual organs of an animal
and walking away with them. Now that being said, I
want to stress something that mushroom foragers often stress regarding

(09:59):
the fruiting body, and that is that you're not going
to be hurting the organism by by harvesting the mushrooms themselves.
Now that being said before, first of all, before you
engage in any kind of mushroom foraging, be aware that
in some places it is prohibited some places or maybe

(10:20):
not going to be hipped to this idea that you're
not really hurting the organism. They're still saying, well, you're
taking away from this natural environment that is protected in
this space. The other huge thing we want to stress
before we go any further is that while we're going
to be discussing mushroom foraging for mushrooms that one would
then consume for culinary or medicinal purposes, do not engage

(10:42):
in this, you know, just based on anything we've told
you here. As we are going to outline shortly, there
are some risks involved there if you if you pick
the wrong mushroom, some dire consequences can occur, and you
just really need to know, you need to go down
that road with professionals who know what they're talking about

(11:03):
with mushroom foraging, and you know, don't just run off
into the wild. Based on listening to this episode. Yes,
do not choose to put any particular thing in your
mouth because of anything we say here today. Right, So,
speaking of this this danger factor, uh, yeah, I want
to stress that while while I myself have enjoyed engaging
in mushroom identification and the limited foraging, that my family

(11:26):
feels comfortable with, yeah, to really, you know, drive the
nail home here. If you eat the wrong mushroom that
you find in the wild, you will die, because you know,
most notoriously, there's a variety of mushroom known as destroying angels,
and and these will indeed destroy you should you make
make if you should mistake them for an edible mushroom.

(11:49):
The deadly webcap mushroom as another example. This one has
been mistaken for edible chantrelle mushrooms. It's even been mistaken
for psilocybin mushrooms before, and it has a horrifying reputation
for causing irreversible kidney failure in those who consume it,
including some very notable cases such as that of English
author Nicholas Adams. Yeah, there are actually a number of

(12:12):
historically notable alleged mushroom poisonings that I've been reading about,
specifically in a book by Cynthia D. Burtleson called Mushroom
a Global History from Reaction Books in twenty thirteen. I
think it was also distributed by the University of Chicago Press.
But Burtleson at one point writes about how the French
philosopher Voltaire, who lives sixteen ninety four to seventeen seventy eight,

(12:36):
once wrote, quote a dish of mushrooms changed the destiny
of Europe. Now, how could that possibly be true? Well,
he was talking about the poisoning of a specific king
of the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg King, Charles the
sixth of Austria. To pick up with what Burtleson writes,
quote who ate deathcap mushrooms? Amanita falloitties the subsequent War

(13:01):
of the Austrian Succession from seventeen forty to seventeen forty eight,
which developed into a global war. In the American colonies,
it was called King George's War, absorbing in the process
the War of Jenkin's Ear between the British and Spanish
and the Caribbean affected people as far away as India,
all because of mushrooms. Those quote toadstools, And here she's

(13:24):
referring to the fact that it was allegedly common among
especially English speakers, to take a very indiscriminating attitude toward mushrooms.
You know a lot of English speakers would just look
at all kinds of mushrooms and say, well, they're all
just toad stools. In terms of other political consequences. In history,
it's also been alleged that the Roman emperor Claudius was

(13:46):
poisoned with mushrooms, though this is disputed. The earliest accounts
indicate that on October thirteenth, fifty four CE, at the
age of sixty four, the emperor started to complain of
extreme stomach pain. He had diarrhea and vomiting. He had
trouble breathing, low blood pressure, and excessive salivation. And I
was reading a report in Scientific American from two thousand

(14:09):
and one about a conference presentation by a doctor named
William Valente from the University of Maryland School of Medicine,
and Valente argued that mushrooms containing musquarine were the cause
of his death according to the symptoms reported, and one
of the traditional explanations for what happened to Claudius was
that he was poisoned by his wife Agrippina in order

(14:31):
to clear the way for her son Nero to ascend
to the throne, and we all know good old Nero. Now,
the conclusion that Claudius died by some form of poisoning
does appear to at least usually have been the historical consensus,
but other experts doubt this one. We should note I
found a paper published by the Journal of the Royal
Society of Medicine in two thousand and two by Marmion

(14:54):
and Wiederman, and they wrote, quote, we see no reason
to believe that Claudius was murdered. All the features are
consistent with sudden death from cerebro vascular disease, which was
common in Roman times. And they also note that one
of the forms of evidence they cite is that physical
depictions of Claudius in the couple of years before he
died show visibly declining health that would be consistent with

(15:18):
the symptoms of this disease that they think would also
explain what people saw when he died. So we don't
know for sure. But as a strange note, apparently Emperor
Nero declared that mushrooms were the food of the gods.
And it's also kind of interesting because Claudius was deified,
meaning made into a god, basically immediately after his death. Well,

(15:41):
I mean that does one could certainly interpret that as
nero being a very it being a very dastardly sneaky
thing to say, huh, or it could be a coincidence
because hey, I mean, mushrooms are kind of the food
of the gods. Mushrooms are delicious. We've gotten this far
into a podcast about mushrooms without me just like I
love mushrooms. I've been cooking with a lot of them

(16:03):
recently that we've been getting from a local CSA that
has been supplying us with shattaki mushrooms and oyster mushrooms,
which are so delicious if you just like roast them
lightly in the oven until they get a little bit
dried out and browned, and you can use them in anything.
They're they're like they're meatier than meat. They are certainly
like my family we are we're pescatarians, but we don't

(16:28):
even eat fish that often. So it's it's it's wonderful
to have mushrooms in a dish to create that that
that meaty texture and that meaty flavor. Yeah, so good,
all right, We're going to take a quick break, but
we'll be right back. And we're back. Now. Now we've
discussing these like terribly poisonous mushrooms, we should of course

(16:52):
stress that it's not just a you know, good versus
evil situation here. It's not just this mushroom will will
be delicious or have some sort of curative properties to it,
and this one will destroy you. There's a wide variety
of mushrooms out there, some of which if you eat
by accident, you're not going to die, You'll just get

(17:12):
violently ill. You know, there's a whole world of light
mushroom poisoning. Yes, there are certainly mushrooms out there that
are technically edible but not good to eat. And then
there's also something to be said for just everyone's particular
digestive system is going to react differently to different things.
So there, you know, the mushroom that one person finds

(17:34):
delicious and fulfilling might give someone else an upset stomach. Yeah. Absolutely,
And in a way, the idea of mushroom foraging kind
of reminds us of something that would have been much
more common throughout history at times before, say, I don't know,
having like an FDA and widespread food inspection and a
very organized streamline process for supplying food stuffs to grocery

(17:58):
stores and all that. I think if you go back
in history, you'd find that eating was more it was
a little bit more a game of roulette than it
is today. You know that, Yeah, you were kind of
you always just had to wonder, is like, is what
I'm eating right now safe? Yeah? Indeed, But particularly I
guess the thing about mushroom foraging is, especially in the
modern connotation, it does really highlight that that risk, that

(18:22):
inherent risk of foraging for your food and it and
certainly if you look at some of these worst case
scenarios and these horror stories of people consuming just deadly
poison thinking that they found an edible mushroom or psychedelic mushroom,
you know, it may raise the question why do this
at all? You know, he is the reward truly worth

(18:44):
the risk? And I totally get this question. When my
wife became interested in wild mushroom foraging, my initial thought was, Okay,
chanterelle sound delicious. I think I had had them previously,
maybe once before, But are they really so good that
it's worth and thinking about the possibility of getting it
wrong or getting it deadly wrong, you know, even casting

(19:05):
aside the more serious risk of death and oregan damage.
Do I really just want to spend say an afternoon
or an evening, you know, violently ill in my stomach
because I wanted to have this, this experience. I mean,
I would guess that part of it, Like you can
sort of calculate your risks. You can't be one hundred
percent sure, but you can say, like, Okay, I'm plucking

(19:28):
a mushroom that looks like this. I think it's this species.
How close in appearance and in habitat and stuff like that,
Is it two things that are known to be poisonous? Yeah, yeah, certainly,
Like in our case, you know, the mushrooms that we
tend to gravitate towards are ones where at least in
our area. There are only so many things you could

(19:49):
mistake it for. And if you you can educate yourself
on what details to precisely look for. And then one
of the beauties of social media, one of the benefits
I point too, is that you can then take your
photograph of this specimen and share it with other enthusiasts
and even experts and say, what do I have here?

(20:09):
Help me identify this, etc. There are a lot of
resources at hand. Yeah, that is kind of wonderful. And
in the same way that the Internet can, of course
be the source of collective delusions and things like that,
it can also be the source of collective wisdom. And
one of the ways in which I've seen it best
used for collective wisdom is species identification. There's a whole

(20:30):
part of Twitter that's just people posting species identification photos
for snakes, for spiders, for wild mushrooms and things like that.
That's awesome. Yeah. Now, now, particularly with mushrooms, I was
looking around for people's thoughts on this, and I found
an article on the website for Ian magazine by the
author Cal Flynn, and the author writes, this whole whole

(20:52):
piece is just about mushroom foraging and the risk rewards
of it. And they write, quote, if the risk is
so huge and the payoffs so small, why do it?
The identification process is interesting, of course, and mushrooms are
pleasant enough to eat, but perhaps the real intrigue arises
from the risk itself and the skill required to sidestep it. Yeah.
This ties in with something I've often wondered about in

(21:14):
two categories, both dogs and human children, And the question is,
why do so many dogs and human children just put
basically anything they find on the ground into their mouths?
You know, like, chances are not good that this is food,
but by god, I'm going to give it a go.

(21:35):
You know, this has always struck me as a as
a really maladaptive behavior. Why would we instinctually air on
putting things into the mouth instead of keeping them out
of the mouth. Wouldn't you think that we would instinctually
air more on the side of caution. It seems like
there's more risk in putting random, potentially poisonous or inedible
things into your mouth than there is reward in whatever

(21:57):
forsaken food energy you'd be missing out on if you
didn't put it in your mouth. But I don't know
who knows. I mean, maybe one thing is that the
conditions of modern life somehow encourage behaviors that wouldn't occur
very much in nature. I guess that's a possibility. Or
maybe maybe nibbling on all kinds of nutritionally ambiguous material

(22:18):
is just a lot less risky than it would seem
less risky than we assume. Maybe you can actually put
all kinds of stuff in your mouth and in your
body and most of the time you'll be fine. Well,
I want to stress that we are not advocating anyone
do this. No, no, no, no no no. But I am
told that experienced mushroom foragers sometimes perform a quick taste test,

(22:39):
tasting but not consuming a mushroom to help determine the variety.
And it's my understanding that it's it's done with potentially
toxic mushrooms as well. Again, do not try this because
we mentioned it. But but but but this, this would
make sense that you would be able to just taste

(23:01):
some of these specimens to see, I don't know, to detect,
say a bitterness, to help in the identification process. I
was also thinking about, okay, what has actually been observed
in wild animals in terms of just like tasting everything,
trying everything in their environment when there are so many
toxic plants and mushrooms in the world. And one thing

(23:23):
I came across that was kind of interesting was an
older article in the Alaska Fish and Wildlife News by
Riley Woodford called how Deer Eat Poisonous Plants, and it
cites an Alaska Wildlife biologists named Tom Hanley who talks
about how actually in the wild, deer eat toxic poisonous
plants just all the time. And Hanley says, quote, deer

(23:46):
will eat a little bit of almost everything out there,
including a few bites of various toxic plants. There seem
to be threshold levels for the toxicity of different plants,
and as long as deer eat below the threshold, they're okay.
So that's interesting. It's like, maybe you just eat toxic
things in moderation, nibble on a little bit of this

(24:06):
here and a little bit of that there, and over
time you can sort of build up some nutrition for
your body without reaching toxic levels on any one particular poison. Yeah.
I mean, it's also worth worth remembering that, you know,
it's going to vary from species to species. For instance,
with humans, poison ivy is generally no fun. But goats

(24:26):
goats are like, let me add it, I'm just gonna
eat it all. Goats eat poison ivy. Yeah, yeah, goats
will eat it up. Yeah. Now that that means you
need to not have goat milk from those goats, but yeah,
goats goats have no problem with it. Another outstanding example
of this sort of thing. Are box turtles. Box turtles

(24:46):
are all about eating up some some some poisonous mushrooms,
for example, and you know it doesn't doesn't bother them
at all. But for a similar reason, don't go out
harvesting box turtles think thinking you're gonna make su about them. Yeah,
And the fact that different species are tolerant of different
toxins is of course something that's mentioned in this article

(25:07):
as well, Like it talks about how mule deer, for example,
are more tolerant of something called locoweed than pronghorn antelopear,
and it says that elk are more tolerant of Ponderosa
pine than bison are. And I think this would probably
have to do with what their natural habitats are, what
the evolved relationships they are with different plants, and probably

(25:29):
also their nutritional needs. But there was a quote that
Burtleson has in her book that I really liked. It
was from the American food writer John Thorne, who wrote, quote,
all hunters put life at risk, but for mushroomers, the
amount of danger comes well after the quarry has been
run to ground. Finding the mushroom is the initiation, but

(25:51):
eating it is the test. I think that's interesting comparing
it with hunting like that, you know, hunting is a
dislocation of where the lens could set in, and this
connects to some Russian traditions that I'll talk about in
a minute. But there's also a folk adage. I think
we may have mentioned it when we did our episodes
about psilocybin and psychedelics, But the folks saying is there

(26:14):
are old mushroom hunters, and there are bold mushroom hunters,
but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters, which hammering
home the idea that mushroom foraging, while a highly rewarding
activity to millions of people around the world, is something
that's best practiced with a kind of conservative mindset, like
you do need to be cautious to understand what you're

(26:38):
doing before you dive in head first. Yeah, I think
I've heard Paul's fame. It's echo this same nugget of wisdom.
And speaking of wisdom concerning that, you know, the consumption
of mushrooms and also plants, this brings to mind this
mythological figure from Chinese mythology that have brought it before,

(26:58):
and that's up Chinong, the divine farmer. It's also the
Chinese father of agriculture, and he's you know, he's credited
with inventing various important agricultural technologies, but also was said
to have consumed basically that the myth is he looked
around and he saw that the people were starving, they

(27:19):
were they were sickly, they needed medicine, they needed more food.
So what he did is he's set to work, consuming
hundreds of plants per day and as many as seventy
poisons a day in order to chart the medicinal properties
of the natural world in order to alleviate sickness and
starvation and disease. And you'll often find illustrations of him

(27:41):
kind of like chewing on the end of some sort
of vegetation. And he's a really interesting character in the
artistic depictions as well, because he has these kind of
bovine features and even these kind of horn like protusions
on his head, which apparently we see in some other
Chinese mythological figures as well. Well. This is great because
even though there may be there could be mythological elements

(28:02):
to the specific story of Shinong, it highlights the fact
that at some point there had to be a lot
of trial and error going into our knowledge about mushrooms, right,
you couldn't just like look at them and reason from
that knowledge. And like, people were making decisions about what
mushrooms were safe to eat long before we had laboratory
testing procedures and all that. So there are just years

(28:23):
and years and many historical recapitulations of painful, horrifying trial
and error in mushroom foraging. In fact, Bertilson writes about this,
she talks about specifically what was going on in the
literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In the medical literature,
she says, quote, it is full of accounts of unsuspecting

(28:45):
foragers coming home with their prizes, only to find themselves
hours or even minutes later, laughing hysterically or bent over
with intestinal pains, unable to move from chair to bed.
So serious were cases of poisonings in France that in
Paris in seventeen fifty four, the city fathers passed an
ordinance prohibiting the sale of any mushrooms in the markets. So, like,

(29:09):
there's so much mushroom poisoning. People just trying to like
figure out what you're supposed to eat and not or
or maybe disregarding what was already known by other people.
Uh that they were they were, they were just like, okay,
we're saying nix on the mushrooms, no mushrooms at all.
Oh yeah, indeed indeed what was known and perhaps forgotten.
Uh Yeah. It's it's interesting too to think of, like

(29:31):
just the very early days of humanity. As the human
expansion spreads out of our our you know, our ancient
places of origin, the human these humans and and and
and pre humans would have encountered just new environments that
means new species, new substances that they would then have
to test out and figure out again like what is

(29:53):
what is beneficial, what is dangerous? You know, what is food?
And what is the potential medicine as they continue to
spread out in the world. Yeah, and I think this
is something you see throughout the history of mushroom literature
is a gradual process of ruling things in So in
the eighteenth century French example, I mentioned in seventeen fifty four,

(30:15):
they said, okay, no mushrooms at all in the markets,
but you know, mushrooms are good. So this was eventually amended,
and Burtleston mentions that in eighteen O eight, they changed
the law to allow seven species, in particular in markets
in Paris, and the mushrooms had to pass inspection by
police appointed experts in order to be sold. Now, that

(30:36):
would make for a good historical television show, the Mushroom Police.
All right, we're going to take a quick break, but
we'll be right back. All right, we're back. You know,
there's something I've sometimes gonna wondered about when people really
enjoy meat, you know, people who are big carnivores like
I just love a good steak, if part of the

(30:58):
enjoyment is a sort of sublimated, implied sense of violence
or struggle in the idea of eating the meat, because
you know, if you're eating meat, there was some violence
that happened at some point. Something is a little bit
dangerous about your food. And it makes me wonder if maybe,
in the back of our minds, there's something slightly psychologically
similar going on with mushrooms. I mean, probably not, because

(31:21):
not if you're buying button mushrooms from the store or something.
I mean, that's just like any other crop at this point.
But maybe with forage to mushrooms, there's a similar danger
running underneath the skin. Oh, maybe so yeah. Yeah. Now
to come back to to cal Flynn's piece in Ian,
the author there also compared it to the consumption of

(31:42):
a particular meat, the Japanese delicacy of fugu, you know,
in which the risk and the skill is part of it.
You know, It's like, is the is the is the
chef in this case? Are they skilled enough to pull
this off, to remove the dangerous parts and serve only
the delicious parts? And so so that author ties this
in to the uh to our relationship with mushroom foraging. Now,

(32:07):
now to come back just briefly to just the idea
of there there's seeming to be an uptick in mushroom enthusiasm,
you know, especially what we see online and all, I
just wanted to share a few more thoughts about it.
First of all, I do think there is probably a
connection here to the increased mainstream interest in psychedelic mushrooms
and the increased and promising clinical research, which we outlined

(32:28):
what was it last year in a several parts series
on psychedelics. I feel like that, I feel I feel
like that is part of the scenario, at least with
some people. Also, we should always drive home that humans
have always been fascinated with mushrooms, So there's nothing new
about mushroom fascination. We see it in ancient art, we

(32:48):
see it in Super Mario games. So it's it's it's
just part of who we are. And if you want
to read more about this last point, it was touched
on in a New York magazine article by Sydney Gore
with the wonderful title why are my streams taking over
my social media feed, my medicine cabinet and my closet,
referring to like fashions I believe there, Oh, like those
fungus hats, you know, like Paul Stamens squares. Oh yes, yes,

(33:11):
Paul Stament's fashions. I also found an interesting article about
a huge uptick in Scottish mushroom foraging steep rise in
Scot's Enjoying Fruits of Foraging by Maggie Ritchie. And this
article put it this way, quoting Terry Carmichael, resident forager
for Wild Tastes at the Carmichael Estate and in Lancashire quote.

(33:33):
More people were trying to get back to their roots
and to nature since the pandemics started, and we reconnect
with nature. There are so many foods that are right
on our doorstep that we see every day and can
bring into our kitchens. They're all packed with nutrients far
more than any sold in supermarkets. And it's also worth
noting that articles speak. You find articles speaking to the

(33:55):
rising quote hipness of mushroom foraging in twenty nineteen and earlier,
so a lot of this was already in motion. For instance,
there was the Guardian article titled the Gospel of Mushrooms,
How foraging became Hip, and that was from October of
twenty nineteen. And for my own part, I have to
point out that my family took a guided foraging exercise,

(34:15):
like a guided hike through an area where they were
known to be some meedable mushrooms in earlier in twenty nineteen,
I think summer of twenty nineteen as well. There's apparently
been just overall kind of a demographic shift on top
of this, where mushroom foraging was previously the kind of
hobby that you would often see older individuals engaged in,
and that has shifted a bit younger in recent years.

(34:38):
So part of this goes back to pre pandemic times
to twenty nineteen, and these trends but I definitely also
to come back to what you were saying before, that
would connect it to trends we've seen in self sufficiency
and production of food stuffs in the home or around
the home. The same way there was sort of a

(34:58):
craze for like people making sour dough bread, people growing
herb gardens and things like that. This year when I think,
I think suddenly a lot of people realize that it
might be much easier than they had previously thought to
acquire food items from places other than the grocery store. Yeah. Yeah,

(35:19):
I also want to mention that that that foraging course
that my family took, that the high guided hike, it
was kind of a varied group. You know. You had
some people who are just kind of nature enthusiasts, but
then there's one guy that was like straight up survivalist, like, yeah,
he was there to learn. I mean, he was there
I think for a little socialization as well, you know,
but he was also one of these guys who was like, Yep,

(35:39):
it's coming and I'm gonna I'm gonna be the one
to know where the mushrooms are when the Y two
K bug hits. I'm gonna be here with my gun
mushroom hunting. Yeah, and I think we could all relate
late to that. You know, we do a little uh,
you know, doom fantasizing, and we're like, oh man, if
it's suddenly Corny McCarthy's The Road, I want to know
what's up, you know, especially as we previously mentioned, you know,

(36:02):
fungi are gonna gonna presumably do do all right if
the sun gets blocked out right, This is a great point.
I didn't think about this. So the in Corian McCarthy's
The Road, the earth is kind of dead. The sky
appears to have been, I don't know, clouded by some
kind of particulate matter. Did you ever have a personal
theory as to what the event was in the road.

(36:23):
Was it volcanic eruptions or an impact from space? Or
I always lean more towards nuclear war just because they
have those He had those, really, I mean, the whole
book is beautiful and dark, and so has those richly,
But those they has these deposits of just exceedingly rich language,
and there are a few they are describing, like what

(36:44):
it's like in the cities, where like the cities seem
to be a very toxic place to be, and he
talks about like people rummaging through the rubble to get
you know, probably radioactive foods that they can eat, that
sort of thing. So I kind of I would tend
to lean towards that, but he does keep it vague
as to what exactly happened. Right well, whatever it is,

(37:04):
something has darkened the skies and this of course has
killed all the plant life, so nobody can grow any
food to eat. But yeah, I would be thinking, you
shouldn't mushrooms be doing awesome? Yeah, yeah, there's no. I
don't think there's any mention of them growing anywhere, but
one would hope. So it would be. It would be
almost kind of a comical scene right where the cannibals

(37:25):
are hanging out and they're like, whoa, guys, there are
mushrooms everywhere. We'll have to eat babies anymore? Is Sean
trell season, Yeah, hand of the woods. So anyway, so
there's the survival aspect of it, certainly, but you know,
there's just fascination with nature. But I would say that
another huge part of this, and something we're gonna continue

(37:47):
to discuss here, is that foraging would seem to be
an innate part of the human experience, and we engage
in it in various ways. Mushroom hunting stands out as
a as a thoroughly authentic example of this sort of
foraging behavior. But again, we can we can all identify
with activities that are like foraging, that are oddly satisfying. Again,
like jigsaw puzzles, lego pieces. Shopping, even going to the

(38:10):
grocery store can be an act of foraging. It can
sort of engage some of those same circuits. I feel
like it certainly varies from person to person. For example,
I've been fascinated by the way that some people really
enjoy shopping, you know, they enjoy like shopping for clothes
or whatever. And that's always been very mysterious to me.

(38:31):
I don't enjoy that at all. It seems like a
really irritating, tedious activity that I don't do unless I
absolutely have to. But then I realized, actually I can
relate to it, because I really enjoy under at least
like less stressful circumstances. I really enjoy shopping for food.
I like going out to find like nice produce, you know,

(38:51):
going to the farmers markets, you know, finding a really
good looking cucumber or a bunch of mushrooms or something. So,
so I think I do actually relate to that foraging
shopping instinct is just with different kinds of items, and
I guess that probably works out differently from for different people.
I know some people who love going to the hardware store.
I don't really get that either. But you know that's
like a very classically like dad, things like oh yeah,

(39:14):
the hardware store. Well, I know you and I back
when we could actually physically go in there. Going to
the last video store in Atlanta, video drome, you go
in there and forage for particular you know, movies we're
interested in. Saying like that, that is is I think,
very comparable to foraging. Very interesting. Why Yeah, so I

(39:34):
love the videodrome and the produce aisle, but I do
not love the hardware store or the clothes aisle. I
don't know. Yeah, maybe it comes back to again this idea,
is there a reward? Is there something that I'm working
towards getting that is meaningful to me sustenance, either in
a food sense or in a B movie sense. But
clearly for many people there is a lot of pleasure

(39:57):
in mushroom foraging that is not related to the reward.
It is related to the activity itself, and this is
something that kept coming up for me when I was
reading about the Russian traditions of mushroom foraging. This is
what I referenced at the beginning of the episode. But
the term the quiet hunt. Apparently, mushroom foraging is very
popular in Russia, and it's often been called this the

(40:18):
quiet hunt. I like that Burtleson mentions this tradition in
her book when she's quoting a passage from Vladimir Nabakov's
memoir Speak Memory, which he published in nineteen fifty one,
and in this book he writes about his own mother's
obsession with mushroom foraging. Quote. One of her greatest pleasures
in summer was the very Russian sport of hodi pogribi,

(40:43):
looking for mushrooms fried in butter and thickened with sour cream.
Her delicious fines appeared regularly on the dinner table. Not
that the gustatory moment mattered much. Her main delight was
in the quest. Burtleson also quotes the Russian American p
the Attrician Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, who of course was married

(41:03):
to the famed microphile our Gordon Wasson. There were sort
of amateur mushroom expert team in the mid nineteen hundreds.
I think that they were also heavily involved in spreading
the word about psilocybin mushrooms to much of the world.
But speaking of her childhood, you know she came from
a Russian family. Valentina Pavlovna wrote that quote, when we

(41:26):
were naughty, our mother would punish us by forbidding us
to go mushrooming. Great. You know, it's like it's like
a video game. Yea. And Bertleson in her chapter identifies
a couple of possible factors influencing the widespread passion for
mushroom foraging in Russia. One of them that she highlights
is the number of fast days mandated under the Russian

(41:49):
Orthodox Church, which would specifically, it would imply that Christians
were expected not to eat meat on these days, and
mushrooms would provide a luxurious meatiness to a plate that
you know, when you can't eat meat itself. But also
just general poverty leading to that same lack of meat.
But there's also a thing that appears to go beyond

(42:11):
culinary preferences. I was reading an article by Ellen Berry
in The New York Times for the Moscow Journal called
a hypnotizing hunt leaves Russians bewildered. This is from two
thousand and nine, and Berry writes that practitioners of the
quiet hunt quote routinely becomes so hypnotized that they get

(42:31):
hopelessly lost. H Yeah, apparently Russian media is full of
stories like this. She cites a couple I'm just I'm
going to read from her article here quote. Earlier this month,
a sodden and unshaven man emerged from the woods near
the southern Russian village of Gorriacchi Kliuch, telling rescuers that
he spent three nights perched in trees to get away

(42:53):
from jackals. A similar tale came from the Taiga near
Bratsk in Siberia, where a twenty two year old man
wandered for five days, covering himself with pine boughs at
night to ward off frost bite. Eleven time zones to
the west, near the Baltic Sea, a search and rescue
team found an elderly couple in a swamp where they

(43:14):
had spent the night. The wife in what officials described
as a state of panic. It happens every mushroom season,
and so yeah, very interesting. Barry writes that for a
lot of mushroom hunters in Russia, the foraging activity induces
a kind of trance state. I don't know how literally
to take that, but that's what she says, and it

(43:36):
does seem to be consistent with what a lot of
people have written about the Quiet Hunt. And it's interesting
that there's a kind of disconnect because, of course, ancient
mushroom foraging practices would have been established by people who
were probably better at navigating the wild landscape and finding
their way home following the angle of the sun, for instance,
while in modern times we have lost a lot of

(43:58):
these wayfinding skills because we don't need them very often,
and instead we rely on technology, which is not always reliable.
So autumn comes and people go in, they go to
the woods, they trance up, and they get lost. And
the article quotes a rescue worker named Alexanders Manovski who
calls the people who get lost quote the children of asphalt. No,

(44:21):
of course, with stories like this you also just have to,
you know, wonder with some of these stories, people might
just be doing other things and then later they say, oh, yeah,
I got lost while mushroom foraging. There are some there
are allegations in the article of some people's particular stories
where people are like, well, they were just on a
bender or something. But but clearly it does seem to
happen fairly often. Well. I mean, one is of course

(44:43):
reminded of the fact that if you go on a
nature walk, you you you may get lucky and find
some from chanterells or whatnot growing close to the trail,
but in all likelihood you're gonna you're gonna spot that
tell tale yellow patch a little further off the trail,
and then you may wander off the trail to go
and get them. And of course leaving the trail can

(45:06):
is one way to get a little closer to becoming
lost in the forest. I mean, this is how isn't
there there's a part in the Hobbit I think where
basically the same thing happens, except it's the series camp Fire,
which of course has parallels to patches of mushrooms in
the wood well, and it specifically highlights things about forging
strategies that we observe in humans and in other animals,

(45:28):
about say the density of rewards in certain areas, like
probably the closer you stay to the occupied area, the
more picked over the stores are going to be. So
you might need to make a little bit of a
journey to go to places that haven't been picked over
by other people already. And the farther you get away,
the more the risks multiply, the more energy you expend. Yeah,

(45:51):
and then the next thing you know, you got the
head of a bear. The little mushroom man has transformed you.
All right, We're gonna have to interrupt the conversation right there. Again.
We had to split this conversation into two episodes, so
expect the second half on the next publication day for
Stuff to Bowl Your Mind. But in the meantime, feel
free to write in we'd love to hear from everybody

(46:12):
on the topic of mushroom foraging, your experiences with mushroom foraging, etc.
I should also point out that if you if you're
interested in merchandise for the show, we actually have a
mushroom theme Stuff to Blow your Mind logo T shirt.
It's kind of black light themed. If you go to
I think if you go to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com, it'll still refer you to this iHeart

(46:34):
listing for our show, and there should be a store,
a selection that you can You can click on store
and it'll take you to that store. So if you're
interested in that sort of thing, that's where you'll find it.
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, just to say hello,

(46:56):
you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow
your Mind. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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