Chanterelle Dreams, Amanita Nightmares

by Greg Marley

  CHANTERELLE DREAMS,

  AMANITA NIGHTMARES

  CHANTERELLE DREAMS,

  AMANITA NIGHTMARES

  The Love, Lore, and Mystique of Mushrooms

  GREG A. MARLEY

  CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING

  WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, VERMONT

  Copyright © 2010 by Greg A. Marley

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Project Manager: Patricia Stone

  Developmental Editor: Brianne Goodspeed

  Copy Editor: Helen Walden

  Proofreader: Ellen Brownstein

  Designer: Peter Holm, Sterling Hill Productions

  Printed in the United States of America

  First printing August, 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10 11 12 13 14

  Our Commitment to Green Publishing

  Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because we use recycled paper, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Marley, Greg A., 1955-

  Chanterelle dreams, amanita nightmares : the love, lore, and mystique of mushrooms / Greg A. Marley.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-60358-280-3

  1. Mushrooms. 2. Mushrooms--Identification. 3. Cookery (Mushrooms) I. Title.

  QK617.M397 2010

  579.6’16--dc22

  2010021496

  Chelsea Green Publishing Company

  Post Office Box 428

  White River Junction, VT 05001

  (802) 295-6300

  www.chelseagreen.com

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to the concept that we are all connected in our world. Just as mushrooms are intertwined in a web of relationships with plants, animals, and other fungi in the forest, my work has progressed within a web of connection and support. The keystone support in my life comes from my wife Valli and our son Dashiell. It is to them I dedicate my work—for helping me believe in myself, for helping create the time and space to focus, and for providing the most consistent (and valued) distraction from the lonely work of writing. Oh, and for making sure I don’t get the big head.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Tales from the Forest Floor

  Part I. Mushrooms and Culture

  1. Passionate about Mushrooms: The Russian and Slavic Experience

  2. Overcoming Distrust: Mushrooming in America

  Part II. Mushrooms as Food

  Introduction: Leading with Our Stomachs

  3. The Foolproof Four: Updated for a New Millennium

  4. Chanterelles

  5. Boletus edulis

  6. The Agaricus Brothers

  Part III. Dangerously Toxic, Deadly Interesting

  Introduction: Poisonous Mushrooms: Not as Bad as You Fear

  7. Mushroom Poisoning: The Potential Risks and Ways to Avoid Them

  8. Amanita Nightmares: The Death Cap and Destroying Angel

  9. False Morels: The Finnish Fugu

  10. A Fallen Angel

  11. The Poison Pax: A Deadly Mystery

  Part IV. Mushrooms and the Mind: The Origin of Religion and the Pathway to Enlightenment

  Introduction: Entheogens: A New Way to View Hallucinogenic Mushrooms

  12. Amanita muscaria: Soma, Religion, and Santa

  13. Psilocybin: Gateway to the Soul or Just a Good High?

  Part V. Mushrooms within Living Ecosystems

  14. Honey Mushrooms: The Race for the World’s Largest Fungus

  15. Fairy Rings and Fairy Tales

  16. Fungal Bioluminescence: Mushroom Nightlights

  17. Who’s Eating the Truffles?

  18. Woodpeckers, Wood Decay Fungi, and Forest Health

  VI. Tools for a New World

  19. Growing Mushrooms in the Garden: A How-to Story

  Appendix of Recommended and Supplemental Reading

  Endnotes

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My goal in writing this book was to bring an appreciation for the pursuit of mushrooms and knowledge of them to a broader audience, including people for whom mushrooms remain a mysterious and suspect subject. The lore and stories of great mushrooms that constitute my vehicle are built upon the words and experiences of our mushroom-loving ancestors and living mushroomers around the world. My work rests upon the research and explorations of generations of naturalists and scientists and the knowledge base they have created. And, of course, I owe a debt of gratitude to the experiences, both good and bad, of the countless people who collect and eat wild mushrooms and have done so for many generations. How have people learned what can and should not be eaten, other than through trial and error?

  On a more immediate basis, I am thankful for the mushrooming teachers in my life for sharing their information and passion for things fungal. The late Sam Ristich, the mushroom guru of Sligo Road, was ever generous with his knowledge and passion, and if I did not spend as much time as I wanted with him, I live with that loss. I am regularly grateful for the friendship and support of my friend Michaeline and her non-judgmental guidance and ready ear. I realize as I push the limits of the formal writing style of my biology education and my social work graduate education that I need to acknowledge David Arora and thank him for the refreshing combination of good science and irreverent whimsy with which he writes.

  Finally, to the good folks at Chelsea Green, thanks. Thank you, Joni, for believing this material would become a dynamic book. I also appreciate the gentle and dogged determination with which Brianne worked to keep my language clean and my sentences in the active tense.

  Introduction

  TALES FROM THE FOREST FLOOR

  Nature alone is antique and the oldest art a mushroom.

  THOMAS CARLYLE

  Mushrooms—in their many colors, shapes, and sizes and with their complex life histories and growing habitats—are a fascination to everyone who possesses a love of nature. The deeper secrets and the tales of their lives offer an intriguing glimpse into a hidden world of complex relationships, powerful chemistry, mind-expanding potentials, and deep religious and magical associations. On a practical level, people are most interested in questions of edibility, toxicity, and health promotion, and in these areas, mushrooms touch our lives on a regular basis. When you expand the sphere of mushrooms to include all members of the kingdom Fungi, then their beneficial, neutral, or malignant influence touches us many times each day. As we eat our morning yeast-leavened bagel, lunch on blue cheese or Brie, take an antibiotic or antifungal for an infection, or unwind with a glass of wine or beer, fungi are an often unseen and underappreciated part of the picture. Fungi, and the mushrooms that represent a tiny but visible portion of this kingdom, are loved, worshipped, feared, and reviled, but most of all, they are ignored as they intersect our busy lives. Our relationship with the world of fungi is defined by a vast gulf of ignorance and lack of awareness. We don’t see what lies before us, and we know little about what we do see.<
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  Who knows, for example, that as we walk on the needles and leaves carpeting the forest floor, that with each step we tread upon many miles of fungal hyphae, the microscopically thin threads that comprise the vegetative body of mushrooms? Collectively these hyphal threads combine to form an unimaginably vast network of mycelium growing just beneath the surface of the ground and connecting to the roots of the majority of green plants. This network of interconnected fungal mycelium and plant roots carries nutrients, water, and chemical messages throughout the forest ecosystem. Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running, refers to this system as “Earth’s natural Internet.”1

  We know so little about fungi, and yet within our collective sphere of knowledge lies an ever-growing number of fascinating tales about mushrooms and their role in our lives and in our world. As I edge closer to my fortieth year of an ongoing love affair with the world of mushrooms, it is my intention to share a few of the many compelling stories I have learned. My goal is to help each reader take another step in transforming our culture from mycophobic (mushroom fearing) to mycophilic (mushroom loving). This can happen only when we gain a better understanding and appreciation of the mushrooms around us. The steps toward embracing mushrooms are built upon growing awareness of, and intimacy with, the lives of the fungi intertwined in our world.

  The terms “mycophilic” and "mycophobic” were coined in 1957 by an international banker and famed amateur mycologist, R. Gordon Wasson, to describe differences between ethnic groups with regard to their attitudes, beliefs, and use of wild mushrooms. Wasson first realized these differences in 1927, while he was on honeymoon in the Catskills with his new bride, Russian-born pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna. Many years later the well-known ethnomycologist would recall the initial experience that started him down the path from mycophobe to mycophile.

  We had been married less than a year and we were off on our first holiday, at Big Indian in the Catskills. On that first day, as the sun was declining in the west, we set out on a stroll, the forest on our left and a clearing on the right. Though we had known each other for years we had never discussed mushrooms together. All of a sudden she darted from my side, with cries of ecstasy she flew to the forest glade, where she had discovered mushrooms of various kinds carpeting the ground. Since Russia she had seen nothing like it. Left planted on a mountain trail, I called to her to take care, to come back. They were toadstools she was gathering, poisonous, putrid, disgusting. She only laughed the more: I can hear her now. She knelt in poses of adoration. She spoke to them with endearing Russian diminutives.2

  For a mycophile like Valentina, each mushroom species had a personality and a spirit, and it made little difference whether they were eminently edible or dangerously poisonous. She knew and loved each for what it was and for the story it held in her world. Wasson refused to touch them. He had been raised to ignore and distrust all mushrooms. “I, of Anglo-Saxon origin, had known nothing of mushrooms. By inheritance, I ignored them all; I rejected those repugnant fungal growths, expressions of parasitism and decay. Before my marriage, I had not once fixed my gaze on a mushroom; not once looked at a mushroom with a discriminating eye.”3 The recognition of the impact of their polar-opposite cultural attitudes and fount of knowledge regarding mushrooms was striking for the Wassons. Over the next several years, they devoted their spare time to exploring multiple aspects of mushrooming in different cultures around the world. They identified and labeled mushroom-loving and mushroom-fearing cultures and more closely examined how attitudes, beliefs, and practices related to mushrooms were woven into people’s lives in mushroom-loving cultures. Their studies took them across Europe and into Asia and finally to Mexico and Central America, where their pursuit of reports on the use of mind-altering mushrooms in rituals led to the discovery of the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. Wasson’s participation in a ceremony where he ate “magic mushrooms” was described in a famous 1957 article in Life. “Seeking the Magic Mushrooms” introduced hallucinogenic mushrooms to the western world for the first time. In the end, the Wassons coined the terms mycophilia and mycophobia to describe the cultural rift regarding mushrooms, and their work continues to strongly influence the study of mushrooms in culture today.

  Strongly mycophilic cultures exist in Russia, Siberia, the Czech Republic, and many other Eastern European, Scandinavian, and Baltic countries. Mushrooms are also interwoven into the fabric of daily life as food, medicine, fable, and folklore in China, Japan, and Korea. Wasson described these regions and their cultures using, perhaps, overly optimistic language. According to Wasson, “These are the areas where mushrooms are considered friends, where children gather them for fun before they can read and write, where no adult feels the need for a mushroom manual” and described these lands as places where mushroom-poisoning “accidents are unknown.” We know that a lot of people are poisoned by mushrooms in mushroom-loving lands (see Chapter 1), but Wasson had a point to make. He summed it up by saying that in a mycophilic land, “all the references are friendly, favorable, and wholesome.”4

  By contrast, in America wild mushrooms are widely looked upon with distrust and disfavor. Coming from dominant cultural roots entwined in Anglo-Saxon norms, Americans mistrust and fear the mushrooms springing up in the lawn, garden, and forest following a rain. If it does not come cooked on a pizza or aseptically wrapped in a clear layer of plastic from the store, a mushroom is not to be trusted. When I ask participants in talks I give on wild mushrooms what their parents told them about mushrooms as they were growing up, they say: “Don’t touch that. It’s a toadstool. It could kill you! Quick, go wash your hands!” For the most part, Americans’ questions about the mushrooms growing on our lawns are not about beauty, but about ugliness; not about potential edibility, but about the risk of toxicity and how to make them go away, permanently. Our beliefs have deep roots in British culture. In the words of British mycologist William Delisle Hay in his 1887 book British Fungi, “The individual who desires to engage in the study [of wild mushrooms] must face a good deal of scorn. He is laughed at for his strange taste among the better classes, and is actually regarded as a sort of idiot among the lower orders. No fad or hobby is esteemed so contemptible as that of the ‘fungus-hunter’ or ‘toadstool-eater.’” In referring to British culture, Hay went on to state, “This popular sentiment, which we may coin the word ‘fungophobia’ to express, is very curious. If it were human—that is, universal—one would be inclined to set it down as instinct and to reverence it accordingly. But it is not human—it is merely British.”5 No culture has colored our American viewpoint on mushrooms more than the British.

  My family was as typical as the one next door. As a child growing up in New Mexico, we ate no mushrooms, at least not in any recognizable form. This was true in spite of the fact that my mother and her French and German parents collected and ate several wild mushrooms from around their ranch in Montana when she was a child. My fourth-generation Anglo-Saxon Irish father was able to thwart any of my mother’s dangerous tendencies toward mushroom experimentation. His beliefs and attitudes were perfectly in line with the norm for his background and generation (i.e., one does not eat those damp putrid evil fruits of the earth). Raised as a second-generation Irish Catholic living off the ranch in the town of Bozeman, Montana, his parents and grandparents had no family history of using wild mushrooms. He then raised his family in a city at a time when American food production was becoming increasingly mechanized, processed, and corporate. I grew up with Velveeta cheese, Swanson TV dinners, Wonder Bread, and tuna noodle casserole. The closest we came to anything resembling a mushroom was using Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup in the casserole. The very idea of collecting the puffballs off our lawn (which I did as an adolescent) and transforming them into sauce for the egg noodles or elbow macaroni was as foreign and suspect as eating tofu became to many older adults in the next generation.

  Yet many Americans have ancestral roots in rural agrarian Europe and Asia, where collecting and eating wild
mushrooms was a seasonal, much-loved, and relied-upon part of the diet. In every mushroom class I teach, in every talk or walk I offer, there invariably is someone who offers the reason for attending as an effort to recapture the connection to mushrooms present in his or her childhood. They talk fondly of collecting mushrooms with an aunt, uncle, grandparent, or some other beloved person. The elders retained the connection with mushrooms from “the old country” and shared their passion with the children in their lives. The students tell of the mysterious, unshakable certainty with which their guides would distinguish edible from non-edible mushrooms. They recall the pleasurable experience of collecting in damp woods and wet fields, the transformation from basket to pan, and the shared pleasure of eating their mushroom treasure. Invariably they speak emotionally of their regret over the loss of knowledge about mushrooms, the loss of the tradition of mushrooming in their families. Then they talk about their desire to reconnect to the mushrooms in their world, to reconnect with a deep, nurturing set of family and archetypal roots symbolized in the generational relationship with mushrooms. They seek a return to their roots of mycophilia.

  Why did the elders not bless the following generations with the gift of mushrooms? Did they drop the ball or did the emerging generations, flung hell-bent into the race to make their mark in America, turn their backs on their forest roots and family traditions? It may be a blend of both. Immigrants to America over the past 150 years have entered a process called acculturation by which they are immersed into the values and norms of the dominant culture and, over time, become integrated. This process often has involved a sense of isolation from ethnic roots coupled with a devaluation of traditional practices of the homeland and an idealization of the new culture of the melting pot. In late nineteenth and early twentieth century America it also often included general movement from a European rural agrarian life to one that was urban and industrial. Many new immigrants settled first in the cities. New foods, unfamiliar land and forest, and a new language probably furthered their movement away from integrating local mushrooms and other wild foods into their diets. The accommodation of diet and food was rapidly accelerated in the 1950s and 1960s with the increase in processed foods and the idealization of “instant” food, pushing people further away from their own rich dietary traditions. As immigrant families turned away from historic roots related to food and lifestyle, America as a whole was turning away from our farm-based food roots. The mass exodus from farms and ranches into towns and cities was accompanied by a vocational shift to factory and office work and a trend toward buying food rather than growing, foraging, or raising it. “Mushroom” began to refer to one species of bland, pale, supermarket origin most often seen canned or as a minor ingredient in the ubiquitous casserole. Or, as in my middle-class suburban family during the 1960s and 1970s, generally not seen at all.