The scene couldn’t be more British. There are picnic blankets, dogs and hungover-looking men shouting at their children. Thanks to recent rain, mushrooms shaped like huge white breasts have sprouted from the tussocks. Naturally, everyone ignores them, except for an inquisitive toddler, who reaches out a pudgy hand, before it is quickly snatched away. “Don’t touch,” an adult hisses. “Those things kill.”
In the UK, mushrooms are the vegetable we love to hate. But in recent years, they’ve been hard to avoid. They’ve sprouted from our bookshelves (Merlin Sheldrake’s bestselling Entangled Life) and have popped from our screens (Fantastic Fungi; The Last of Us); it seems no hip restaurant is complete without an in-house mushroom lab (Fallow; The Pig); and in September they even had their very own festival, All Things Fungi, the first of its kind.
Here in this Sussex park, however, it’s only the deer that seem interested in the fungi – the deer, and me. With the toddler safely out of the way, I creep through the grass towards the supposedly deadly mushroom. It stands tall and proud on its snakeskin-patterned stem, beautiful and strange – dangerous, too? I tug at its root and it comes free from the earth with a satisfying crunch of snapping rhizomorphs. Its gills are yellowy-white, a hue my own cautious parents once taught me to believe means death. I toy with its annulus and it slides up and down the stem like a runner on a parasol. I’m not a pervert: this is a key identification feature. It is, in fact, a giant parasol – Macrolepiota procura – an exquisite delicacy that hundreds must have passed by.
Why are so many of us still fearful of fungi? It’s true what the man said: some of them kill, and in terrible ways. If you were to dine on a death cap – like the recent tragic lunch party in Australia – then you would probably remark on the flavour: it is, according to those who have tasted it and survived, delicious, until multiple organ failure sets in. Even some of the edible species are tricksy. The false morel – a prized delicacy in Finland – is deadly raw and, when boiled, emits a toxic cloud of monomethylhydrazine, aka rocket fuel, while the blusher, with its delicate flesh, flaky and tender as fish, will liquefy your red blood cells if cooked incorrectly. But these are a few dodgy apples. According to Greg Marley’s book Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares, of the 10,000 known mushrooms, only 3% are toxic and just a handful of these are responsible for the majority of poisonings.
I take my mushroom home, along with a few of its friends, and fry them up for my family. My wife and her sister, both born in Ukraine, dig in; but my sister-in-law’s boyfriend, as English as they come, demurs. We all survive, but only some of us get lunch.
“Fungophobia,” wrote British naturalist William Delisle Hay in 1887, “is very curious. If it were human – that is, universal – one would be inclined to set it down as an instinct and to reverence it accordingly. But it is not human – it is merely British.” Seemingly, we’ve been this way for hundreds of years. To the Victorians, fungi were “vegetable vermin, only made to be destroyed”; to the Elizabethans they were “earthie excrescences” which “suffocate and strangle the eater”; and medieval folk seasoned their distaste with antisemitism, scorning mushrooms as “Jew’s meat”. Is it that Brits prefer their food tame? We are Europe’s biggest consumers of ready meals, after all. Or do fungi, with their upstart habits and rude forms, offend British decency? Famously, Henrietta Darwin, Charles’s eldest, used to gather the most phallic of the forest fungi and burn them behind closed doors.
“One theory,” says Dr Andy Letcher, ecologist and author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, “is that the roots of mycophobia are to be found in an ancient magic mushroom cult. Only the priests were allowed to use them. For ordinary people they were taboo and that taboo ended up becoming mycophobia.” It’s a seductive theory and no concrete evidence exists to prove it wrong – or right. The truth, says Letcher, is that people simply had little reliable information to work with and so, fatally, they turned to classical scholars for advice. According to Pliny, all red mushrooms could be eaten, while Nicander said that only those growing on fig trees were safe. Dioscorides, conversely, suggested all mushrooms were edible, unless they had grown above rusty iron or near a serpent’s den.
Disasters were inevitable. Letcher’s favourite mushroom mishap occurred in 1830, when an out-of-work labourer called Frederick Bickerton picked a large quantity of unknown mushrooms in London’s Hyde Park, which he ended up feeding to his family. They began to giggle and dance, symptoms we now know as magic mushroom intoxication, but believing themselves poisoned they rushed to the doctor, who applied emetics, a stomach pump and leeches to the forehead. Little wonder people avoided them. “There’s another side to the story,” says Letcher. “We were the first to industrialise and there was a mass movement to the cities. You take people off the land and they lose what oral knowledge they have. All it takes is one break in the link.”
Today, that link remains broken. One-third of people in England cannot access green spaces and even where they can, mushrooms are often off-limits. In the New Forest, picking fungi is officially discouraged, while in Epping Forest and the Royal Parks, it’s been banned. “The parks are here for the public to enjoy,” the Met sniffed. “They are not anyone’s personal larder.”
“What I want to do,” says Max Mudie, 38, co-organiser of the All Things Fungi festival, “is to get people to see what’s beneath their feet. You can’t go a day without crossing paths with fungi. We need to get people inspired to look. Then they’ll want to protect.” Mudie, a photographer who lives in East Sussex, became obsessed with fungi in his early 30s and began using macro-photography to document his finds. His images – showing the minuscule cities of mushrooms that might grow from a single rotting leaf – often attract hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of likes on TikTok. The weekend-long festival brought together all facets of the mushroom world: foragers, mycologists, ecologists and citizen scientists. There were workshops on home cultivation and DNA sequencing, and nocturnal mushroom safaris, using special UV torches that cause wild fungi to glow in the dark.
“The best thing about the festival,” Mudie says, “is being able to connect. Mushroom people are solitary creatures.” In spite of their solitary nature, mushroom people are multiplying. On iNaturalist, the grassroots biodiversity map, the number of people in the UK making records of fungal finds has increased tenfold since 2018. In the past year, there were more than 100,000 individual observations. And there has been an upswing of interest in the once geeky territory of mushroom cultivation, too.
Elliot Webb, 29, never imagined mushrooms would be his bread and butter. “My profession was fish,” he says. “I ran the freshwater arm of one of the oldest fish farms in Scotland, then travelled around Asia and Australia working in the industry.” In 2019, he returned to the UK to found a fishery business of his own. “But then lockdown happened and I realised we had to look for something else.” That something else was mushroom cultivation. Webb’s company, Urban Farm-It, provides ready-to-fruit kits suitable for total beginners, as well as the bags of grain spawn used by professional growers, who can choose from hundreds of varieties, from the humble button mushroom to more exotic species, such as reishi, the so-called mushroom of immortality. “Interest is growing faster than businesses can supply,” he says. “From year one to year two we grew by 400%.” That could, he says, have been due to the natural growth that comes when a business is born and a more reliable marker might be the fact that many of the customers who began by buying one of his beginner kits are now professional growers, selling at markets every weekend.
“It’s all about food sovereignty,” says Webb. “That’s how we reduce our impact on the planet and secure our own personal wellbeing. People are learning to value the simple things again: being able to grow food, being self-sufficient.”
Nappies were what led to my personal obsession with fungi. I had just become a father for the first time and was wading through our own mini-landfill, when I came across an experiment conducted by scientists in Mexico, who discovered that the Pleurotus ostreatus fungus – the oyster mushroom – would colonise used nappies, reducing their mass by 80%. Even better, the mushrooms that grew from them were safe to eat. I had a vision: we would feed the baby; the baby would feed us. It was a perfect closed system. I was very tired, but I read more.
For every problem on this planet, it seems there is a mushroom with an answer. Nasty old cigarette butts? A fungus will eat those. Bees suffering from colony collapse disorder? Mushroom medicines boost bee immunity, helping hive health. Land poisoned by chemical weapons? Fungi can be trained to consume even the infamous VX nerve agent; also petrochemicals; also nuclear contamination. Fungi have survived the last five mass-extinction events. They grow at the centre of Chornobyl and on the inside of fuel tanks. If we wish to survive on this planet, there is much they can teach us.
If our fear of fungi comes from having been locked out of the land, then perhaps fungi can be the key that lets us back in. Fergus Drennan, 51, is a mushroom evangelist. He is the author of a book about mushrooms, created using mushroom ink and mushroom paper – currently limited to a single edition – and, as a former chef, he uses his skills to turn mushrooms into Marmite, “mangos” and meringues for those who attend his foraging courses. “Fungi,” he says, “give you a reason to go to the woods, and they open the door to all the magical things happening there. If you’re looking for mushrooms, you’re observing the natural world. Lying on moss. Looking up at the tree canopy.”
The first time Drennan saw people foraging for mushrooms he was 17 and he reacted with instinctive horror. The first time he ate a wild mushroom, he felt very ill. “It was a Boletus edulis – porcini – and I got this horrific stomachache.” It was, he says, a case of “psychosomatic poisoning”. Despite the cramps, which stayed with him for several years, he persisted, and now pushes against the mycophobia that he believes made him ill.
“There’s so much we’re missing out on,” he says. One example is the fly agaric, instantly recognisable with its red cap and white spots as the archetypal poisonous mushroom. Drennan has used it to make hummus, sushi rolls and risotto. He’s whipped them into ice-cream and baked them in wild pear syrup. And nobody he has fed them to has died. The fly agaric is, it turns out, quite safe to consume, when prepared in a specific way, with a history of culinary use in Japan, Siberia and southern France. “It is,” says Drennan, “delicious.”
I never quite got around to growing mushrooms from my daughter’s nappies, but I did start growing them. Winecap mushrooms from pots filled with shredded cardboard and straw; shiitakes from a tree surgeon’s trimmings; oysters from spent coffee grounds. Watching the silent white threads of mycelium advance, branching and fusing to form a dense, sweet-smelling network, transforming waste into food, was like watching alchemy.
And when my daughter’s nursery asked if any parents wanted to come and talk to the children about food, my daughter volunteered me. In the classroom, the toddlers gathered round a table heaped with living mushrooms, and a bold little boy reached out a hand: “Can I touch?”
Never eat a wild mushroom unless you are certain it’s safe. Always consult a reliable field guide, such as Geoff Dann’s Edible Mushrooms.
Featherhood by Charlie Gilmore is published by Orion. Buy it for £8.69 at guardianbookshop.com