The Mushroom Underground

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.

With a Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase.

And you get big purchasing power.

So your business can spend more and earn more.

Capital One, what's in your wallet?

Find out more at capital1.com/slash SparkCash Plus.

Terms apply.

Kathleen and I, my wife, went to art school.

Like, we were painters and printmakers, and I don't know why we started growing mushrooms, you know, like out of nowhere.

But it's just something that it's a rabbit hole, you know, you're like, oh my God.

And that's sort of what we've always been after is if you can keep going in a million directions, you'll never lose interest.

And mushrooms are like that.

So be warned, you know, it's sort of scary.

Buckle up because we're about to take you down the mushroom rabbit hole, so to speak.

This is Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley, and that was Eric Lohman, founder of Cap and Stem Mushrooms.

Today, we'll take you on a trip from Eric and his wife Kathleen's mushroom startup in Maine to the U.S.

National Fungus Collection in Maryland.

There is such a thing, and it's a national treasure.

I have two words for you: mushroom hats.

We generally divide the world into animal, vegetable, and mineral, but then there are the mushrooms, and what in the the world are they?

They have been a source of some confusion throughout history.

The name mushroom, I mean, no one knows exactly where that comes from, but the theory is it derives from words for slimy and yucca and swampy.

Lovely.

Basically, fungi are nature's nameless, oozing gunk.

They are the fruiting bodies of fungi, and they're a kingdom in and of themselves.

Eugenia Bone wrote a book about mushrooms called Mycophilia.

It's all about her personal foray into the crazy world of mushrooms.

They really are neither animal nor vegetable nor mineral.

They're eukaryotes like plants and animals, meaning they have a nucleus in their cells, but they live in a completely different way.

They have sex in a different way, they die in a different way,

but they also, and this is kingdom fungi of which mushrooms are the fruiting bodies, they also are very similar to us.

In fact, more similar to us, animals, than they are to plants.

You heard that right.

Both animals and fungi moved away from photosynthesis as a way to get energy.

And then recently, scientists figured out that there are proteins in fungal cells that are more similar to animal proteins than to plants.

It goes with the idea that we think they have the kind of meaty texture.

The cooks were ahead of the scientists in this one.

They've been calling mushrooms meaty for hundreds of years.

Science just caught up.

And yet, mushrooms are called fruit, just to make matters a little more confusing.

That's the first sort of level of biology or mycology to understand is that the fungus is like an underground apple tree and the mushroom is like an above-ground apple.

That underground part is usually where the main body of the fungus lives.

It's a whole network of threads tangled together into something called a mycelium.

Those underground fungal mycelia can be ridiculously huge.

I heard of one in the Pacific Northwest that stretches out thousands of acres underground and weighs about 35,000 tons.

I visited it.

It's called the humongous fungus, and it's the world's largest organism.

So, what in the world does that look like?

It's underground.

What can you actually see?

I will say that Jeff and I were the only tourists.

So, yeah, not much.

Basically, you're standing on top of it.

The main thing you see is all the trees that it's killed, which is a lot.

Eric told us mushrooms were scary.

Scary and just plain weird.

Another thing about fungi is that we have absolutely no idea how many there are.

Right.

I mean, it's so crazy.

There's somewhere between 1.5 and 5 million species.

So it's, you know, a field that it's in many ways in its infancy as folks figure out and start to tease out the different species that are out there.

They are

varied from single-celled organisms like yeasts to gigantic mushrooms that are as big as coffee tables.

The fungus themselves can be these giant unigenomic critters that can cover 2,400 acres.

That's the humongous fungus.

Or they can be so small that you don't even know they're on the lip of the glass that you're drinking from.

Yes, yeast is a kind of fungi, but it doesn't fruit into fleshy mushrooms.

It makes us beer instead, which is equally important.

In fact, fungi play a variety of different roles.

If we just talk about what they do in nature, that alone is awesome.

So, fungi have a fantastic relationship with plants.

It really falls into three major categories.

One, relationship is not fantastic, that being pathogens.

But the two other categories, the saprobe lifestyle, where fungi break down plant material, is key to the life cycles on Earth.

I mean, if you think about it, if it weren't for fungi, we'd be buried under miles of plant debris.

The third category Eugenia mentioned is that fungi help plants access food and water and fight off diseases.

We did an entire episode on those kind of fungi last year called The Microbe Revolution.

If you haven't heard it, check it out.

To get a sense of this crazy mushroom diversity, we went to visit the world's largest collection of fungi in Beltsville, Maryland.

Well, we used to be able to claim that we were the largest in the world, and then two slightly smaller collections in the United Kingdom combined.

That was Lisa Castleberry, a research mycologist and the keeper of the keys to the USDA's National Fungus Collection.

It may only be the second largest in the world anymore, but it's still big.

They have a million specimens there.

But they aren't sure how many different species are in those million specimens.

Part of the problem is that scientists in the past screwed up the names.

One fungus can have five or six aliases at this point.

So why do people keep calling them the wrong thing?

Yeah, a lot of plant pathologists ask this that question.

They think, what's the big deal?

Why can't you identify these things better?

The short answer is that most of them are microscopic, the features are microscopic, and there's really not a lot of scope for difference.

You see small, round, or oblong spores of a certain size.

You know,

when they're closely related, they all look alike.

There are two almost contradictory problems here.

First of all, lots of mushrooms look kind of similar.

But then within the lifespan of one fungus, it can look radically, radically different depending on what stage it's in and what context you find it in.

So early scientists had no idea that they were looking at the same creature.

In the past,

they were named the asexual state was often given a name, and the sexual state was given a name because you didn't always know that they went together.

You might encounter the asexual state, you know, over here being very happy causing a disease on a plant, a living plant, and then you might find the sexual state, you know, very happily producing spores on something that's already dead.

And you wouldn't necessarily be able to connect the two.

You might see a white fuzz killing a leaf in one stage and a fleshy brown puffball in another stage.

But now with DNA, we can sequence them and see that they're the same fungus, they're the same organism.

So there's been a whole raft of changes required by that in how we name these.

Like Lisa says, fast cheap DNA sequencing changed everything, but it also revealed a whole load of what she calls cryptic species.

These are species that look completely identical.

We cannot tell them apart by looking at them.

But according to their DNA, they are completely different species.

So they have to rename everything, rewrite textbooks, rewrite websites.

They even have a special guide to all the possible pseudonyms a fungus in their collection might be using to help researchers find the specimen they want amidst the chaos.

Naming might seem like an academic problem because what I imagine many of you are wondering, or at least I know I was, how many of those million-plus specimens can we eat and how many will kill us?

The answer, as with most things to do with mushrooms, is that we don't really know.

But that hasn't stopped scientists from guessing.

There are about 10,000 species that produce mushrooms, and of those 10,000 species, about 30 regularly collected and eaten.

And then a smaller number, you know, it's like 20 of those 10,000 are known to be deadly.

You know, so the whole poisonous thing is actually, it's a spectrum, like so much in life.

So it goes from mushrooms that will give you a little bit of GI problem, and they're called poisonous, but they're not going to take out your liver to, you know, mushrooms that are delightfully tasty.

And then there's 10,000 species in between so so that's the way you kind of have to look at it people are still trying to figure this all out today in Eugene Oregon they had a mushroom festival last weekend and I was walking through these fabulous ID tables they've got a lot of mushrooms that they're picking a lot of species every card describes the species location you know what trees it grows under and then edibility Half of them nobody knew.

And these are people who know all about the species and and how it grows, but they cannot tell you if it's edible or not.

So then there's this whole group of people, mycophagists, you know, and of course, mycophagist just means like carnivore or vegetarian.

It just means you're a mushroom eater.

But there's this

community of people that are mushroom foragers, but are also really into trying a lot of different mushrooms.

It's almost like a macho thing.

But it's their bag to

understand mushrooms in that kind of way, you know, in that very intimate digestive way.

And

they are the only people I know who are actively adding to that data bank.

Back in the mother data bank, the vaults of the U.S.

National Fungus Collection, we were not eating anything.

Instead, Lisa was showing us some of the weirder corners of the fungal world, starting with a hat.

It comes from Eastern Europe and actually in Transylvania.

And so this is a

time art and craft that they practice there.

And we also have a purse somewhere.

It may be down in the actual collections in one of the cabinets down there.

But yeah,

it's amazing.

It's felted.

It's just mushroom tissue that's been basically felted like you would cloth or wool.

This hat is crazy.

It feels amazing.

It's very soft.

I want to pet that.

Pet the hat.

Gonna wear it around Brooklyn.

Fedoras are over.

We'll start a trend.

Fredoras are over.

It's all about mushroom hats.

It's all about the mushroom hats.

Hey, it's all about eco, right?

We left the hat behind and headed downstairs to see the collection.

Oh, well, you know, some of the most photogenic ones probably are the rust fungi.

Oh, well, then there's the puff balls too.

So, yeah, it's you just open the cabinet and there's all sorts of amazing things.

The fungi are all dried.

They're not alive anymore.

They're tucked into scrapbooks or little boxes and shelved in sort of a library stack system.

That's how they squeeze a million specimens into a space the size of a small apartment.

We went to visit one of our favorite fungi, huitlacoche.

So...

This is awesome.

So yeah, so huita la coche on the corn itself.

Can you describe it here?

Well, it's basically an enlargement of the corn kernel.

So it produces a gall on the corn kernel.

So it's this little balloon-shaped thing full of black powdery spores.

Now, when we'd eat it, it wouldn't look like this, because this is really not that attractive or appetizing.

It would be fresh, and it would still be white before all the spores are produced.

Huitlacoche, or corn smot, is a pretty common ingredient in Mexican cuisine.

It makes the best quesadilla filling in the world, in my opinion.

The Aztecs also loved this bizarre-sounding corn fungus.

It's sort of mushroomy with a hint of truffle flavor.

The Aztecs weren't alone.

People all over the world have been eating mushrooms for thousands of years.

The ancient Romans really loved them.

Emperor Nero called them the food of the gods, and Roman aristocrats used to have a special set of silver dishes for their mushrooms, called bolateria.

Native Americans have traditionally foraged for mushrooms.

Charles Darwin noted that indigenous Chileans ate a great deal of them.

And the first written book in Chinese that describes mushrooms appeared in 1245 and gave instructions for preparing 11 different kinds, including matsutaki.

Basically, they're hugely popular around the world.

In countries where religion called for a lot of fast days, they provide a hearty, meaty substitute.

And wild forage mushrooms have been really important for poor peasant families as a stopgap to ward off hunger.

In countries that are really mycophilic, like Eastern Europe and Russia, mushrooms play a big part of the diet.

There's a lot of forests, and people are out there foraging and eating those mushrooms.

Beyond that, certainly China, where it also plays a fungi play a really big medicinal role throughout the Orient.

It's really just, I'd say that most of the world is mycophilic.

Most of the world adores mushrooms, but some places?

It's funny, there's some countries have like a cultural inhibitions about mushrooms.

They're mycophobic.

And I'm not really sure why that's the case.

There's a lot of people who have different ideas about it, that it might be derived from some, you know, bad experiences in the past with various mushrooms.

Mostly, that's the Anglos, the British, and then the Americans.

But some Native Americans hated mushrooms, too.

The Inuit, or the Inupiat in northern Alaska, where I've worked as a physician,

they don't eat any mushrooms, though some good ones grow in their area, or at least traditionally they don't eat any mushrooms.

Nowadays, they do.

But the word for mushroom in Inupiat is it will make your fingers fall off.

Thumbtack presents project paralysis.

I was cornered.

Sweat gathered above my furrowed brow and my mind was racing.

I wondered who would be left standing when the droplets fell.

Me or the clogged sink.

Drain cleaner and pipe snake clenched in my weary fist.

I stepped toward the sink and then...

Wait, why am I stressing?

I have thumbtack.

I can easily search for a top-rated plumber in the Bay Area, read reviews, and compare prices, all on the app.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

You're basking on a beach in the Bahamas.

Now you're journeying through the jade forests of Japan.

Now you're there for your alma mater's epic win.

And now you're awake.

Womp, womp.

Which means it was all a dream.

But with millions of incredible deals on Priceline, those travel dreams can be a reality.

Download the Priceline app today and you can save up to 60% off hotels and up to 50% off flights.

So don't just dream about that trip.

Book it with Priceline.

Priceline.

Jonathan Reisman is a physician and a skilled mushroom forager.

And a gastropod gastropod fan.

Yes, he is.

I went foraging with him in a suburban forested park right near Boston.

One thing I like about mushroom, looking for mushrooms, is it gets you out into nature in a very practical way, and it gets you interacting with nature in a way that is much older than simply taking a leisurely stroll or hike.

When you hike, you're just walking through nature, but when you're looking for mushrooms, you're actually interacting with the natural world around you, investigating it, and looking for something.

When the leaves start to change colors, it can be a little tricky because we're often looking for brightly colored things

and all the orange and red and yellow leaves all of a sudden really trick you.

So the chicken of the woods that we were just looking for is bright orange and yellow.

And now that it's fall, there's a lot of bright orange and yellow everywhere.

So it can drive you a bit mad because you end up

wondering what it is and approaching and it's a leaf over and over again.

But de dead wood is a great place for mushrooms to grow on.

Why?

Why?

Well, mushrooms are decomposers, so

their food source is often decomposing matter, whether that's a stump, a down tree, or probably a dead person too.

They'll grow on anything decomposing.

I don't see anything on this stump, but stumps and down trees and standing dead trees are great places.

You always want to look for mushrooms.

You never know with fun dry.

You might look all day and find nothing, get disappointed, and then stumble on a huge fine that fills all your bags.

When you go out, how long do you usually go out for?

A few hours.

Until I get bored or frustrated.

It took a while, but we did eventually find some.

Some colorful ones.

Yeah.

These are almost like a dark reddish-brown chestnut color.

Well, it's certainly a gilled mushroom.

You can see the gills underneath.

I'm trying to cut some out.

These are hard to get at.

Nothing to take home for dinner, unfortunately.

I have to say, I was always curious about foraging because it kind of scares me.

Mushrooms can kill you, right?

It's not just like, well, this one doesn't taste good and this one tastes better.

They can kill you.

Does that ever make you nervous?

How do you deal with that?

So it is true some mushrooms can kill you.

The large majority...

of mushrooms that are, quote, poisonous, the most that they will do is give you an upset stomach, which can, it's true, lead to vomiting and abdominal pain.

And you may even require intravenous fluids if you can't hydrate yourself because of that.

There's only a few, one, two, or three in this area at least that will actually kill you.

Okay, good, only three.

Yeah.

MBD.

I don't know what you're getting your knickers in a twist about since exactly only two or three could have killed me.

You know, it's interesting.

It was actually a mushroom-related death that led to the proliferation of amateur mushroom foraging clubs in the U.S.

Excuse me.

I know.

It makes no sense.

But what happened was an Italian count living in Washington, D.C.

died from one of those, you know, the red and white spotted cap mushrooms in 1897.

And in response, the USDA put out all these publications about how to identify mushrooms to try to keep people safe.

And that gave people the information they needed to get started.

And today, foraging is hugely popular.

There are nearly 100 amateur mushroom clubs in the United States.

But Eugenia says things really exploded here a few decades ago.

We didn't have a real market for wild mushrooms in this country until first the back to earth, the sort of hippie movement, the first incarnation of the foraging movement of the 60s and 70s.

And people started to get interested in mushrooms.

And of course, you had a lot of French chefs and Italian chefs.

They were always very interested in wild mushrooms.

And with the maturing of the American food scene, which I think has really happened in a big way since the 70s, the 80s and 90s, and now in the 2000s, we're seeing

American food.

More and more people are

sophisticated about food, and they're open to wild foods, and they're excited about products that are indigenous to our country.

And I think all of that has just broken up.

opened the scene.

That in combination with the fact that the Europeans and the Japanese realized they could get American wild mushrooms at a great price.

And so that really started to get mushrooms out and about.

People were going into woods, into the woods to pick them because they could sell them for a good price in Europe, like morels, porcini, chanterelles, and matsutake in Japan.

The Japanese love matsutake.

But once those mushrooms started to surface, That's when they started to appear more and more on the American food scene.

And there is another aspect to it.

When logging started to be controlled,

right, so there's all these logging roads in the Pacific Northwest, but because of problems that started with spotted owl and its habitat diminishment, logging was sort of tamped down.

And all those loggers knew where the mushrooms were.

So there was a connection between the closing down of the logging industry to an extent, the logging roads that gave access to deep forest, and then knowledge of where the mushrooms were growing.

So all these things kind of, you know, it's like everything in life.

There's multiple pieces that fit together.

Like John said, foraging is a great way to connect to nature, and it seems like a super eco-way to source your dinner.

But some of these mushrooms, like morels and matsutake, they're so valuable that you hear about them being overpicked.

Well, the main thing that's important, you know, people say, oh, we've got to stop picking all the mushrooms, you know, or they won't be able to procreate and make more mushrooms.

And that's kind of, of, first of all, it's like saying, well,

you know, if we pick all the apples on the apple tree, the apple tree won't produce apples anymore, which is not true.

The apple tree will keep producing apples.

You just won't get more apple trees.

The main threat, well, there's a few threats to

fungal diversity and fungal

health, well-being.

And they are

habitat loss.

Mushrooms, fungi will grow if they have habitat.

And once you start paving over, I mean, we don't find as many mushrooms here on the East Coast as you find in the Pacific Northwest, where they've got tons of forest.

That's mainly what it boils down to.

I think that worrying about overpicking, if you have enough habitat, it's just not a problem.

I mean, the deer are going to be eating more mushrooms than we're going to be able to pick.

Cynthia, you may have gone mushroom foraging, and believe me, I was jealous.

But I got to visit a real-life mushroom farm, fruit rooms, shiitake inoculation, and all.

That's where we're heading next.

But first, we have another sponsor to tell you about.

This episode is also brought to you by Texture.

Texture is the app that gives you an all-access pass to the world's best magazines right on your phone or tablet.

You can browse hundreds of magazines and cherry-pick the articles that interest you most.

I can only imagine what Johan Rist would have said.

What?

Johan Rist, the German theologian and poet who is usually credited with creating the very first magazine back in 1663.

It was called Edifying Monthly Discussions, which is not a very grabby title, even in German, but it was wildly popular among the European elite and led to a wave of copycat publications.

But they were all print and they took forever to arrive in the mail and you had to subscribe to each one individually.

Whereas today's cultured intellectuals, like our lovely listeners, can sign up for Texture right now and in mere seconds gain insider access to all the very best best reads plus exclusive content.

That's right.

Texture gives you access to dozens of magazines from Smithsonian and National Geographic to GQ and Cosmopolitan plus many more.

You can try texture for free right now when you go to texture.com slash gastropod.

That's texture.com slash gastropod for a free trial.

And now, back to the mushroom farming business.

The Chinese were first on this.

The first recorded mention of mushroom cultivation shows up around 600 AD.

That was the Woodir.

And then they started growing shiitake shiitake by 1000 AD.

The French were the first to make it a real commercial venture.

They grew white button mushrooms in caves and abandoned quarries around Paris starting in about the 1600s.

The problem was that the dried pieces of mycelium, that's the body of the fungus that someone can use to grow more mushrooms, they'd sell those to another grower, and they were contaminated with all sorts of other fungi or bacteria, which made them unreliable.

Sometimes they'd fruit new mushrooms, sometimes they wouldn't.

And that was the status quo until the Americans had the next big breakthrough.

In the United States, we started cultivating white button mushrooms in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

It was in the 1800s, but I can't remember the exact name, 1880s maybe.

And

Quaker florists started to grow white button mushrooms in bins underneath their carnation beds.

It was in the U.S.

that we developed the pure culture cultivation of mushrooms.

So that's where you start the cultivation with a spore and then grow out that spore in a little piece of barley or something and the mycelium could then be dried and sold and you knew you had pure culture.

With that innovation it blew open the white button industry and so now I mean a piece of that mycelium the size of a watch battery and the weight of a house fly will produce 100,000 pounds of white button mushrooms.

I mean it's awesome.

Kennett Square still leads the U.S.

in mushroom production today.

Half of all America's mushrooms are grown there.

And the reason is that those white button mushrooms are grown on manure.

Sterilized manure, naturally.

But still, you need tons and tons of horse shit.

And that part of Pennsylvania has a ton of horse farms.

My sister-in-law is a horse fed there.

While Kennett Square is the mushroom capital of the U.S., the largest mushroom-growing city in the world is, perhaps not surprisingly, in China.

Mudanjiang.

They grow 1.6 million tons of mushrooms a year.

Everything's bigger in China.

By contrast, the farm I went to was kind of a boutique operation.

They produce under 100,000 pounds a year.

The Chinese would not be impressed.

Well, they may not be massive, but they are pretty innovative.

Eric walked me through their process.

So my name is Eric Lohman, and we're at Cap and Stem Mushroom Company in Westbrook, Maine.

Eric and his wife Kathleen and their business partners, they don't grow button mushrooms at all.

They grow things like king oysters and lion's mane, rishi, and matsutake.

Not common on your grocery store shelf.

Right.

And even though these kinds of mushrooms are grown in various small farms around America and the world, it is still a long way from an exact science.

There's a lot of experimentation required.

I don't know how familiar you are with mushroom cultivation.

It's something that nobody's got a stronghold on.

It's so new in terms of America.

So it's still being figured out.

No farm looks the same.

You can go to any farm and you're like, oh my god, this is drastically different than the last one.

So, and it's all to what degree you want to grow.

But for the recipes, yeah, it takes a lot of time to figure out.

You know, it depends on your sterilization method, your inoculation method, like this is the business of variables.

Yeah, I mean, the ones we grow are saparitic mushrooms.

So saprophytic mushrooms in nature grow on like dead logs or dying trees or anything like that.

So it's experimental, like species-wise, but also strain-wise.

And within one species, there's, you know, infinite amount of strains because one mushroom cap that forms will create like a billion spores and then a billion spores only takes like two to four to germinate to create hypha and then create its own mycelial like sub you know thing.

So it's it's the possibilities are endless.

So we're always picking new strains, finding new ones, trading them and experimenting with them just to see if they produce better, you know.

So what does a mushroom farm even look like?

I picture all these mushrooms sprouting up fake logs in a dark, damp environment.

Yeah, so from the outside, it was super underwhelming.

It's a warehouse and a business bar.

Okay, that's a little less cool.

But inside, they have your fake logs for sure.

It's main red oak sawdust mixed with some gypsum and bran and rye berries, which sounds like granola for mushrooms.

But they pack it into these little Tyvek bags, they cook it to make it sterile, and then they inoculate it with the mycelium.

Then what happens?

The fake log bags just hang out on racks and the mycelium grows.

And it burps out a lot of carbon dioxide.

So if you get all lightheaded in here it's because it's higher CO2 than anywhere else.

So I think they evacuate schools at like a thousand parts per million and in this building in the wintertime because most of the ducting and stuff is a little closed off because of the cold air it's about 1500 to 2000.

I did not pass out but I was glad to get inside the fruit rooms.

Kathleen was in there harvesting shiitake.

So I when I come in I feel like I'm in Maine forest in like late summer summer which is ideal for them you know you want high humidity and you want it to be like 70 75 degrees but if if you go into the king's room which I'll take you in it's much cooler because they like the cooler temperature so that feels more like going into late fall and it smells great oh I don't even notice it anymore it did smell really mushroomy but in a good way it's pretty cool little business they sell mostly at farmers markets and high-end restaurants because these kind of mushrooms are hard to store and ship They just don't have the shelf life for big grocery stores to carry them.

That's for now.

But Eric has big plans.

The inevitable reach for

mushroom farmers is, you know, anything that is not already cultivated.

The uncultivatable mushrooms, so to speak.

Some of the ones you'd really like to grow are like parasitic mushrooms, like honey mushrooms, they're interesting.

I don't know that they've been cultivated too much indoors.

Chicken of the Woods is another one that would be sort of people have had good luck growing them inside.

It's sort of less of a demand since it's not, you know, already kind of known.

I saw honey mushrooms with John and we tried to find some chicken of the woods, but Eric's right, I've never seen them in the stores.

So, the interesting part is figuring out what mushrooms people know and then growing based on the demand.

So, it's still so new to a lot of people.

They're like, what the hell is that when they walk up to a farmer's market?

The other big area that they see room for growth is medicinal mushrooms.

They already dry rishi for people to make tea with.

I take rishi every day and never get sick, but by telling somebody that, you feel weird about it?

You're like, ugh.

So.

No need to feel so weird.

Mushrooms have had a long history of medicinal use.

The Ice Man, he was that mummified man found in the Alps who lived more than 5,000 years ago.

He had a puffball mushroom with him.

Those are used traditionally to stop bleeding.

A lot of these medicinal mushroom uses are in traditional or folk healing.

They may well work, but they haven't been tested by Western science necessarily.

That said, there are some trials looking at the therapeutic use of mushrooms as an immune support for cancer patients.

What continues to be the most used is in Korea, in the Korea, South Korea, Russia, Japan, and China, I believe, they use a shiitake mycelium extract.

or whatever.

It's a medicine made from shiitake mycelium that's used as a co-therapy when you're going through chemo.

So when you're going through chemotherapy, your body's immune system gets really suppressed and the idea you could potentially have secondary infections.

So this shiitake mycelium medicine is given to the patient in order to mitigate the possibilities of getting a secondary infection.

It kind of boosts the immune system and it's a regular part of chemotherapy protocols there.

And should the trials be completed here, it'd be wonderful if it indeed worked.

It seems to sue for those patients.

When I was in the woods with John, he pointed out another species that's being studied for its use in medicine.

This is called turkey tail.

It sort of has these striations on it.

It kind of looks like a turkey tail.

Yeah.

So these are not edible.

They're sort of thin and papery.

I've heard of people making a tea with them.

I've once did a search on PubMed for the species, and there is some, you know, investigations of anti-I forget antimicrobial or anti-cancer properties though if you do a search on almost any plant or fungi it seems there are some compounds in them that have some you know microbe killing or cancer killing properties but so it's hard to know what to make of that basically the jury is still out but mushroom people are convinced that mushrooms have amazing superpowers and are gonna save the world people claim they can clean nuclear waste sites or oil spills all this could be possible Mushrooms can break down all sorts of materials.

Yeah, scientists recently found a fungus that can even break down toxic heavy metals like manganese to help clean up abandoned coal mines.

But most of the practical applications for this research are in the future.

We did find one mushroom farmer and expert in South Carolina named Trad Cotter.

He owns Mushroom Mountain Farm, and he came up with a practical application that could be useful now, mushroom-infused cutting boards.

The mycelium of the mushrooms kills any food-borne bacteria on the board.

We were experimenting experimenting with shiitake cultures in the lab, and we were noticing that some of them were antimicrobial, and so I just had this kind of light bulb go off, and I ran inside into the lab, and I grabbed our cutting board out of the kitchen, soaked it overnight, and I just spread spawn that you can buy from a company all over the surface and let the fungus drill its way into the cutting board.

And it inhibits pathogenic bacteria such as E.

coli and salmonella.

The mycelium just lives inside the wooden cutting board, taking a little drink whenever you wash it up.

And the fungus actually makes the board stronger, not weaker.

I have to say I kind of want one.

Of course we can't buy them yet, but if you want to make your own, Trad published the instructions.

We'll link to that online.

But TRAD has a mushroom plan that's even crazier than a cutting board, personalized mushroom therapies.

It starts with a block of mushroom mycelium.

It's a little block and then you can introduce the pathogen into this block and you don't even have to be a doctor or know what it is.

If you inject what appears to be the pathogen or get a biopsy from a patient or even like a sputum from a patient with tuberculosis and you inject it into the bag.

The fungus makes a cocktail of active chemicals in order to fight off the pathogen and those chemicals kill the bad guys and keep the fungus happy.

So Trad's idea is that that fungal cocktail must be a pretty potent brew.

What if a sick human took it?

You know, if you have a patient that has a bacteria that could possibly be drug resistant, this could sweat out a solution solution within 24 to 48 hours.

It's really early days, but there's some interesting science there.

Trad is testing these theories with researchers at Clemson University.

And there's another cool mushroom and health study going on these days, but for bees.

Mushroom expert Paul Stamet saw bees sipping liquid produced by mushrooms in his backyard.

And the mushrooms are known to have antiviral properties.

So Stametz got in touch with bee expert Steve Shepard at the University of Washington.

Steve was studying why honeybees die of a viral infection.

So far, their research shows that these liquid mushroom supplements can kill the bee viruses and help honeybees live longer.

And honeybee die-offs are a huge problem today, so this is pretty exciting.

Well, my thought is better be safe than sorry and eat lots of mushrooms.

Captain Stem sent me home with a big box and my new favorite fungus is the lion's mane.

It was this weird furry thing that looked like a white mouse with its fur gelled into spikes.

I was a little afraid of it, to be honest.

But it is meltingly tender and savory and good.

If you spot it at the market, try it.

Eugenia loves all sorts of different mushrooms.

But when we pressed her for a favorite.

But I think that if I was, you know, in jail for stealing mushrooms and I could only have one mushroom dish before they

put me away and lock the the door, I'd say I'd want

I'd want to have morels.

And I think my favorite way to do them is okay, ready for this?

In a big pot, you're going to put chicken parts and a bunch of butter.

You're going to brown that chicken.

And then you're going to add a bottle of sherry

and a stick of butter.

And then you're going to cook it, poach that chicken until it's really soft.

And then you're going to add as many morels as you have and a bunch of chopped tarragon.

It's really good.

I'd have that.

as a last meal in a sec.

Can we come over?

We want that.

We want to join.

Thanks this episode to Lisa Castleberry for showing us the U.S.

National Fungus Collection.

It is not as famous as the gems at the Smithsonian, but it's just as much of a national treasure.

Thanks to Eugenia Bone, author of Mycophilia, Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms.

Which my awesome husband Jeff gave me as a Christmas present, and he was also the one who introduced me to Cap and Stem and came with me to Maine to visit Eric and Kathleen.

Don't worry, I thanked him with a gigantic lion's mane risotto.

Thanks to Jonathan Reisman, physician and mushroom hunter who took me out foraging.

He wrote a lovely op-ed in the New York Times called Learning from Fungi of Medicine and Mushrooms.

Links to all of these and more online.

Including Trad Cutter's book with instructions to make your own mycelio cutting board.

Thanks to Trad of Mushroom Mountain Farm in South Carolina for talking with us.

Finally, we know this is only the tip of the fungal iceberg.

We promise to come back to other topics from the weird world of mushrooms in the future.

Obviously, your book is called Mycophilia.

You love mushrooms.

Is there anything you're you're not a fan of in the mushroom universe?

No, not really.

I mean,

there's all these sort of quirky sides of mushroomers.

I mean, you know, I love everything

from

the kitschy.

Well, I'll have to say.

Yeah, there's something I don't like.

I don't like the mushroom jokes.

The fun guy jokes, please, ladies, don't do it on this broadcast.

Please.

I'm so sick of it.

And it happens constantly.

And everyone thinks it's fresh.

I don't know how you could possibly think that.

We promise right now.

No fun guy jokes on our broadcast.

That's good.

I would say that's my only problem in the mushroom world is the like bad mushroom jokes by people who think they're funny.

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.