Mushroom Foraging, Part 1

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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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

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 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

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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, 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,

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.