Mushroom Foraging, Part 1

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
And a little notice here at the beginning that this
is an insert because Robert and I we started talking
about mushroom foraging and we ended up going on for
like more than two hours. So so we're splitting this
episode into two parts. And and here is your warning,
so be sure to not only listen to this one,
but come back next time. Welcome to About to Blow

(00:26):
Your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb,
and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going on the
Quiet Hunt. That's right, We're gonna be talking about mushroom foraging,

(00:46):
which we 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 noticed a
lot more more mushroom talk and a lot a lot
more mushroom activity this year. Uh. Part of it has
been social media, for sure. I've noticed, um, you know,

(01:09):
people I know taking photographs of interesting mushrooms that they've spotted,
sometimes correctly identifying them or even harvesting them. And uh,
I have to admit that my own family. We've gotten
into identifying mushrooms on hikes, and we've even done a
little bit of foraging ourselves, but only with rati mushrooms
and chanterelles. In a way, mushroom foraging is is an

(01:31):
ideal social distancing activity, right, is 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 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

(01:54):
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, like um, we we've harvested some some racial
mushrooms from just our immediate neighborhood environment just walking and

(02:15):
walking around spotting them and then ideing them, and then
also just ideing various other things that were not attempting
to collect. Um. It's a great it's a great way
to occupy your time to sort of how It's kind
of like the Pokemon go of the wild. It gives
you sort of um goals to achieve on your walks,
things to chronicle, and for most of us anyway, a

(02:37):
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
varieties uh 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 of

(02:57):
of the mushroom world. There are some delicious, edible wild
mushrooms that that have resisted cultivation. Yeah, totally. And there's
some interesting reasons for that too, like one of them
being that tying back to our recent like an episode,
some mushrooms that are delicious to eat exists in symbiotic
relationships with other organisms, specifically often like plants and trees

(03:20):
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, You're yield would be inconsistent. It's just
really difficult to do another thing, though, is It's funny
that we think of mushroom foraging a sort of the
the natural world version of Pokemon Go. It's it's a

(03:41):
sign of like how sort of mikerchief 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 edible plant matter and and other life.
It absolutely is and uh and and so that's why
I encourage everyone to to, you know, keep listening to

(04:03):
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 in a broader sense. And I
think that's something that that that certainly you can e
gauge in. Just so when you're on a walk and
you're looking for something be it birds or mushrooms or
uh non existent Pokemon lurking, you know somewhere in the

(04:27):
GPS domain. Uh. 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 up in so many different human activities, and
it captivates us. It it is, It latches into a
part of our neural hardware because it is it is

(04:48):
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 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

(05:12):
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 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

(05:32):
the search for the thing lost and the search for
the thing not yet obtained. Um, I'm not sure, but
I also have have noticed I think I've mentioned this
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.

(05:55):
So I would in the past, I found myself helping
to put together a jigsaw puzzle and not really like
I'm asking myself, 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

(06:17):
up with things that like are basically like they would
be work in the real world, but something about the
way they're framed just makes it a game instead. Yes,
so many of these games, especially you know, they 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

(06:38):
you know, sometimes you see players complaining about it um
and and rightfully so. But but also there's something kind
of addictive about it, like, Okay, 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 you can weirdly get into it. Yeah,
I gotta break rocks in my digital domain. And I

(07:00):
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 candy in there. M yeah, I mean, well,
sometimes there's like a random the reward is random, but
like sometimes like in follow Out seventy six, which um
which I know fans kind of go back and forth
on this particular game and the way it's designed and

(07:21):
all in the elements in it, but like a lot
of the sort of grocery list assignments you have, there's
not there's not really a random rewards. You know exactly
what you're gonna get, Like 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. Um. So in that regard, I feel like
it it kind of falls in line with foragre But
then again foraging is also an exercise in not necessarily

(07:46):
knowing what you're going to get or knowing what quantities
you're going to get. And we'll we'll get into that.
Well yeah, I mean what if one of these digital
rocks you broke could kill you? Yeah? Yeah, And that's
gonna be a huge part of of mushrooms here. But
but before we get in going further, I do want
to just shows a couple more things. First of all, yes,
photography is a tremendously fun activity, uh to engage in

(08:07):
with mushrooms when you're scavenging them and finding them and
charting them in the wild. Spore prints are also a
lot of fun. Now this is when you um, you
can look up guides send 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

(08:28):
print of the mushroom cap on the sheet of paper,
which you can then photograph and share online or even
you know, 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

(08:49):
that live under the ground, usually or in some kind
of decomposing matter or parasitic on another organism. The mushroom
that 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, now that

(09:13):
being said, I want to stress something that mushroom foragers
often UM stress regarding the fruiting body, and that is that, uh,
you're not going to be hurting the organism by by
harvesting the mushrooms themselves. Um. Now that being said there before,
first of all, before you engage in any kind of
mushroom foraging, UM, be aware that in some places it

(09:36):
is prohibited, uh some places or maybe not gonna 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

(09:57):
medicinal purposes, do not engage 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, Um, some
dire consequences can occur and you just really need to um,
you know, you need to go down that road, uh

(10:19):
with with professionals who know what they're talking about 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

(10:40):
mushroom identification and the limited foraging that that my family
feels comfortable with, yet 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 the most Notoriously, there's a variety of mushroom known
as destroying angels, and and these will indeed destroy you

(11:03):
should you make make if you should mistake them for
an edible mushroom. Um. The deadly webcap mushroom is 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

(11:25):
that of English author Nicholas Evans. Yeah, they're actually a
number of historically notable alleged mushroom poisonings that I've been
reading about, specifically in a book by Cynthia D. Burtlesson
called Mushroom, a Global History from Reaction Books in I
think it was also distributed by the University of Chicago Press,

(11:47):
but Burtlesson at one point writes about how the French
philosopher Voltaire, who lives sixteen nine to seventeen seventy eight,
once wrote, quote, a dish of mushrooms changed the destiny
of Europe. How 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

(12:09):
sixth of Austria. UH to pick up with what Bertelson writes,
quote who ate deathcap mushrooms, Amanita Fellow itties the subsequent
War 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

(12:30):
the process the War of jenkins Ear between the British
and Spanish and the Caribbean, affected people as far away
as India, all because of mushrooms. Those quote toad stools,
And here she's referring to the fact that it was
allegedly common among especially English speakers, to to take a
very indiscriminating attitude toward mushrooms. You know, a lot of

(12:52):
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 poisoned with mushrooms though
this is disputed. The earliest accounts indicate that on October,
at the age of sixty four, the emperor started to

(13:15):
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 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 muscarine were

(13:39):
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 to clear the way for her son Nero
to ascend to the throne. And we all know good
old Nero. Now, the conclusion that that Claudius died by
some form of poisoning does appear to at least usually

(14:01):
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
two by Marmion and Widerman, and they wrote, quote, we
see no reason to believe that Claudius was murdered. All
the features are consistent with sudden death from cerebral vascular disease,

(14:22):
which was common in Roman times. And they also note that, uh.
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, you know,
consistent with the symptoms of this disease that they think
would also explain what people saw when he died. Um. So,

(14:42):
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, I mean that does one could certainly
interpret that is Nero being a very it being a

(15:05):
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 saying, like, I love mushrooms. I've been cooking with
a lot of them recently that we've been getting from
a local CSA that has been supplying us with with

(15:26):
chottaki 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,
uh we're pesketarians, but we don't even eat fish that often.

(15:47):
So it's it's it's wonderful to to have mushrooms in
a dish to create that that that neaty texture and
that meaty flavor. Yeah, so good. All right, we're gonna
take a quick break, but we'll be right back now.
Now we've been discussing these like terribly poisonous mushrooms, we

(16:09):
should of course stress that it's not just uh, 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, Uh,
if you eat by accident, you're not going to die,

(16:30):
You'll just get violently ill. You know. Um, 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. Uh. And and then there there's also something
to be said for just everyone's particular um digestive system
is going to react differently to different things. So there,

(16:50):
you know, the mushroom that one person finds delicious and
fulfilling might give someone else an upset stomach. Yeah. Absolutely,
And in a way, the idea of mushroom foraging 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 f d A and widespread food inspection

(17:11):
and a very organized streamline process for supplying food stuffs
to grocery 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 you were kind
of you always just had to wonder, is like, is
what I'm eating right now safe? Yeah? Indeed, but particularly

(17:32):
I guess. The thing about mushroom foraging is, especially in
the modern connotation, it does uh really highlight that that risk,
that inherent risk of of foraging for your food and
it And certainly if if you look at some of
these worst case scenarios and these horror stories of people
consuming just deadly poison, uh thinking that they found an
edible mushroom or psychedelic mushroom. Um, you know it, it

(17:55):
may raise the question why do this at all? You
know we is the reward truly worth the risk? And
I totally get this question. You know, when when my
wife became interested in wild mushroom foraging, my initial thought was, Okay,
chantrelle sound delicious. I think I I had had them previously,
maybe once before. But are they really so good that

(18:17):
it's worth even thinking about the possibility of getting it
wrong or getting it deadly wrong? You know, even casting
aside the more serious risk of death and oregon damage.
Do I really just want to spend say an afternoon
or an evening, uh, 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

(18:39):
sort of calculate your risks. You can't be a percent sure,
but you can say, like, Okay, I'm plucking 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,

(18:59):
Like in our case, you know that the mushrooms that
we tend to gravitate towards our ones, where at least
in our area. There there are only so many things
you could 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, well, one
of the benefits I can point to is that you
can then take your photograph of this specimen and share

(19:22):
it with other enthusiasts and even experts and say, what
do I have here? Help me identify this, etcetera. Like
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 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

(19:46):
is species identification. There's a whole 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,
and now, particularly with mushrooms. I was looking around for
for people's thoughts on this, and I found an article
on the website for Ian Magazine by the author Cal Flynn,

(20:07):
and the author writes this, this whole whole 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 decide step it. Yeah.

(20:29):
This ties in with something I've often wondered about in
in 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, uh, chances are not good

(20:49):
that this is food, but by god, I'm going to
give it a go. 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

(21:10):
poisonous or inedible things into your mouth than there is
reward in whatever 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 encouraged behaviors
that wouldn't occur very much in nature. I guess that's
a possibility. Or maybe maybe nibbling on all kinds of

(21:33):
nutritionally ambiguous material is just a lot less risky than
it would seem, maybe 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,
But I am told that experienced mushroom foragers sometimes perform

(21:55):
a quick taste test, 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, um that that

(22:15):
you would be able to um to to just taste
some of these, uh these specimens, uh to see, I
don't know, to detect say a bitterness, uh, 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

(22:36):
when there are so many toxic plants and mushrooms in
the world. And one thing 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 sites an Alaska wildlife biologist
named Tom Hanley who talks about how actually in the wild,

(22:57):
deer eat toxic poisonous plants just all the time. And
Hanley says, quote, deer 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,

(23:19):
maybe you just eat toxic things in moderation, nibble on
a little bit of this 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

(23:42):
ivy is generally no fun, but goats 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 a example of this sort
of thing are box turtles. Um. Box turtles are all

(24:05):
about eating up some some some poisonous mushrooms, for example, um,
and you know it doesn't doesn't bother bother them at all.
But for a similar reason, don't go out harvest in
box turtles think thinking you're gonna make soup out of them. Yeah.
And and the fact that different species are tolerant of
different toxins is of course something that's mentioned in this
article as well. Like it talks about how mule deer,

(24:28):
for example, are more tolerant of something called local weed
than pronghorn antelopear. And it says that elk or 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 have are with
different plants, and and and probably also their nutritional needs.

(24:49):
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 eating it is the test.

(25:11):
I think that's interesting comparing it with hunting like that,
you know, hunting is a dislocation of where the violence
could set in. And uh, 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 are old mushroom hunters,

(25:34):
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 people
around the world, is something that's best practiced with a
kind of conservative mindset. Like you, you do need to
be cautious to to understand what you're doing before you

(25:57):
dive in head first. Yeah, I think I've heard paulse
aim it's um echo this this same nugget of wisdom
and speaking of of of of wisdom concerning that, you know,
the consumption of of mushrooms and also plants. This brings
to mind this mythological figure from Chinese mythology that have
brought up before, and that's Uh Shinong, the Divine farmer. Um.

(26:21):
It's also that the Chinese father of agriculture, and Uh
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 were they were sickly. Uh, they
needed medicine, they needed more food. So what he did

(26:42):
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 um.
And you'll often find illustrations of him kind of like
chewinging on the end of some sort of vegetation. And

(27:02):
he's a really interesting character in the artistic depictions as well,
because he he has these kind of bovine features and
even uh, 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 to the specific
story of Shinng, it highlights the fact that at some

(27:24):
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 him 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 there are just years and
years and and many historical recapitulations of painful, horrifying trial

(27:48):
and error in mushroom foraging. In fact, Bertleson 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 quoted, is full of accounts of unsuspecting foragers
coming home with their prizes only to find themselves hours
or even minutes later, laughing hysterically or bent over with

(28:11):
intestinal pains, unable to move from chair to bed. So
serious were cases of poisonings in France that in Paaris
in seventeen fifty four, the city fathers passed an ordinance
prohibiting the sale of any mushrooms in the markets. So like,
there's so much mushroom poisoning. People just trying to like
figure out what you're supposed to eat and not or

(28:33):
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 in need what was known and perhaps forgotten.
Um uh yeah. It's it's interesting too to think of,
like just the very early days of humanity. As the
human expansion spreads out of our our you know, our

(28:55):
ancient places of origin, the human these humans and uh
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 what is beneficial, what is dangerous? You know,
what is food? And what is the potential medicine as

(29:18):
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 in the eighteenth century French example,
I mentioned in seventeen fifty four they said, okay, no
mushrooms at all in the markets, but you know, mushrooms
are good. So this was eventually amended. And Burtleson mentions

(29:40):
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 would make for
a good historical television show, The Mushroom Police. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back.

(30:03):
Thank thank alright, 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 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

(30:24):
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 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

(30:46):
foraged mushrooms there there's a similar danger running underneath the skin.
Oh maybe so yeah, yeah. Um. Now to come back
to to cal Flynn's piece and Ian the author, they're
also compared it to the can ssumption of a particular
meat uh, the Japanese delicacy of fugu um, you know,
in which the risk and the skill is part of it.

(31:08):
You know, It's like, is the uh 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? Uh? And so so that author
ties this into the uh to to our relationship with
mushroom foraging. Now, now to come back just briefly to
just the idea of there there seeming to be an

(31:28):
uptick in mushroom enthusiasm um, 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 we outlined what was it last
year in a several parts series on psychedelics. UM. I

(31:51):
feel like that, I feel I feel like that is
part of the scenario, at least with some people. UM. Also,
we should always drive home that humans have always been
fascinated with mushrooms. UH. So there's nothing new about mushroom fascination.
We see it in ancient art, we 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

(32:12):
about this last point, it was touched on in a
New York magazine article by Sydney Gore with the wonderful
title why are mushrooms 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 Oh, yes, yes, Paul statements fashions. Um. I
also found an interesting article about a huge uptick in

(32:35):
Scottish mushroom foraging uh steep rise in Scott'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 uh in Lancashire uh quote
more people were trying to get back to their roots
and to nature since the pandemic started, and we reconnect

(32:56):
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 UM that articles speak. You find articles speaking to
the rising quote hipness of mushroom foraging in twenty nineteen

(33:17):
and earlier, so a lot of this was already in motion. UM.
For instance, there was the Guardian article titled the Gospel
of Mushrooms, How foraging became Hip and that was from
October of twenty nineteen. Uh. And for my own part,
I have to point out that my family took a
guided foraging exercise, UM, like a guided hike through an
area where they were known to be sementable mushrooms in

(33:37):
earlier in two thousand nineteen, I think summer of two
thousand nineteen as well. Uh. 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 UM in recent years. So
part of this goes back to pre pandemic times, to

(33:59):
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 uh self sufficiency
and production of food stuffs in the home or around
the home. Uh the same way there was sort of
a craze for like people making sour dough bread, people

(34:20):
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, I also want to mention that, um,
that that foraging course that my family took, that high

(34:42):
guided hike. UM, 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 who was
like straight up survivalist like he was, you know, he
was there to 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 that was like, Yep,
it's coming and I'm gonna I'm gonna be the one
that know the mushrooms are when the Y two K

(35:02):
bug hits, I'm gonna be here with my gun mushroom hunting. Yeah,
and I think we can all relate late to that.
You know, we do a little um 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, um, especially as we previously mentioned, you know,
fun guys are gonna gonna presumably do do all right

(35:24):
if the sun gets blocked out, right, This is a
great point. I didn't think about this. So the in
in Coral 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, was a volcanic eruptions or an impact from
space or um? I always lean more towards nuclear war

(35:49):
just because they have those. He had those really, um.
I mean, the whole book is beautiful and dark, and
so has those richly, but has these deposits of just
exceedingly rich language. And there are a few they're describing,
like what it's like in the cities, where like the
city seemed to be a very toxic place, to be,
and he talks about like people rummaging through the rubble

(36:10):
to get uh 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, something has 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,

(36:34):
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 are hanging out and they're like, whoa, guys,
there are mushrooms everywhere. We shouldn't have to eat babies anymore?
Is Sean trell season? Yeah? Hand of the woods? So anyway,

(36:54):
Um so, so there's the survival aspect of it, certainly,
but uh, you know, there's just fascination with nature. But
I would say that another huge part of this, and
something we're gonna continue 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

(37:15):
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 grocery store can be an an
act of foraging. It can sort of engage some of
those same circuits. I feel like it certainly varies from

(37:36):
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. 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,

(37:58):
actually I can relate to it, because I really enjoy
under under at least like less stressful circumstances. I really
enjoy shopping for food. I like going out to find
like nice produce, you know, 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. It's just

(38:19):
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 thing is like, oh yeah, the
hardware store. Well, I know you and I back when
we could actually physically go in there, going to uh
the last video store in Atlanta, video Drome there, and

(38:42):
Forage for particular. Uh, you know, movies were interested in
saying like that. That is uh, is I think very
comparable to foraging? Very interesting? Why Yeah, So I love
the video drome and and the produce sile, but I
do not love the hardware store or the clothes aisle.
I don't know. Maybe it comes back to again this idea,
is there a reward? Is there something that I'm working

(39:04):
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
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

(39:27):
what I referenced at the beginning of the episode. But
the term the quiet hunt, apparently, you know, mushroom foraging
is very popular in Russia, and it's often been called
this the quiet hunt. I like that Bertelson mentions this
tradition in her book when she's quoting a passage from
Vladimir Nabakov's memoir Speak Memory, which he published in nineteen

(39:48):
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 Greeby looking for mushrooms fried in butter and thickened
with sour cream. Her delicious fines appeared regularly on the

(40:08):
dinner table. Not that the gustatory moment mattered much. Her
main delight was in the quest. Burtleson also quotes the
Russian American pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, who of course was
married to the famed microphile our Gordon Wasson. There were
sort of a a amateur mushroom expert team in in

(40:28):
the mid nineteen hundreds. I think that they were also
heavily involved in UH spreading the word about psilocybin mushrooms
to the world. But speaking of her childhood, you know
she came from a Russian family. Valentina Pavlovna wrote that quote,
when we were naughty, our mother would punish us by
forbidding us to go mushrooming. Great. You know, it's like

(40:52):
it's like a video game. And Burtleson 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 Orthodox Church, which would specifically UH. It would imply
that Christians were expected not to eat meat on these days,

(41:15):
and mushrooms would provide a luxurious meeting nous 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 culinary preferences. I was reading an article by
Ellen Barry in The New York Times for the Moscow
Journal called a hypnotizing hunt leaves Russians bewildered. This is

(41:40):
from two thousand nine, and Barry writes that practitioners of
the quiet hunt quote routinely becomes so hypnotized that they
get hopelessly lost. 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,

(42:00):
a sodden and unshaven man emerged from the woods near
the southern Russian village of Gorriachi, telling rescuers that he
spent three nights perched in trees to get away from jackals.
A similar tale came from the Tiger near Bratsk in Siberia,
where a twenty two year old man wandered for five days,

(42:20):
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 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.

(42:43):
Berry 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 does seem to be consistent with
what a lot of people have written about the Quiet Hunt.
And it's interesting that there there's a kind of disconnect because,
of course, ancient mushroom foraging practices would have been established

(43:06):
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 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,

(43:27):
and they get lost. And the article quotes a rescue
worker named alexander's Manovski who calls the people who get
lost quote the children of asphalt. Now, 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,

(43:48):
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
reminded of the fact that if you go on a
nature walk, uh, you you you, you, you may get
lucky and find some from Chanterelle's or whatnot growing close

(44:10):
to the trail, but in all likelihood you're gonna you're
gonna spot that that tell tale yellow patch a little
further off from the trail, and then you you may
wander off the trail to go and get them. Uh.
And of course leaving the trail can is one way
to get a little closer to becoming lost in the forest. Um,
I mean this is how isn't there there's a part

(44:31):
in the Hobbit I think where basically the same thing happens,
except the ferries 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 about say, the density of
rewards in certain areas, like probably the closer you stay

(44:52):
to the occupied area, the more picked over the stores
are gonna be. So you might need to make a
little bit of a journey to go to place is
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, and then then the
next thing you know, you've got the head of a bear.
So the little mushroom man, it's it's transformed you. All right,

(45:14):
We're gonna have to interrupt the conversation right there again.
We had to split this conversation into two episodes. Uh
So expect the second half on the next publication day
for stuff to blow your mind. But in the meantime,
feel free to write in we'd love to hear from
everybody on the topic of mushroom foraging, your experiences with
mushroom foraging, etcetera. I should also point out that if

(45:37):
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 UM I think if you go to
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, it'll still refer
you to this I heart listing for our show. And
there should be a store UM selection that you can

(45:57):
you can click on store and it will take you
to that store. So if you're interested in that sort
of thing, uh, 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
topic for the future, just to say hello, you can
email us at contact at Stuff to Blow your Mind.

(46:26):
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