Mushrooms Aren’t Here to Destroy Us — Or to Save Us

It’s grim, however in each post-apocalyptic story line, I await the second when the characters float their theories about how the world fell aside, hoping to glean one thing helpful.

In HBO’s sequence “The Final of Us,” survivors of a world pandemic dwell in harsh, government-controlled quarantine zones to evade a parasitic fungus that turns them into zombies. Joel, a smuggler in what stays of Boston, believes that the ophiocordyceps mutation was delivered by way of the meals system — contaminated batches of worldwide shipped flour or sugar unfold the illness too shortly and effectively for any form of recall. Over the course of a protracted weekend, humanity was wrecked.

The setup sounds fairly typical for the zombie-thriller style, however because the sequence premiered in January, the response has been a bit sweaty — panicked, even. Mycologists, fungal biologists and different mushroom-world specialists have been known as on, again and again, to guarantee us that whereas cordyceps species that zombify bugs are actual, a cordyceps mutation that thrives in people is pure fiction.

Paul Stamets, one of many nation’s best-known mycologists, loved the primary two episodes of the present, however posted afterward on Fb to emphasise the truth that no, cordyceps actually aren’t able to all that. “It’s pure for people to concern that which is highly effective, however mysterious and misunderstood,” he wrote, questioning if the present performed on our deep-seated concern of mushrooms.

There are about 1.5 million species of fungi, a kingdom that’s neither plant nor animal, they usually’re a number of the strangest and most marvelous life-forms on the planet, each feared and revered. However our relationship with mushrooms, notably within the West, might be fraught — and never simply because misidentifying one could be harmful.

In nature, mushrooms fortunately seem underneath the grossest and most fractious circumstances, when little else will. They will sign dying, thriving in damp, darkish rot, blooming in decomposition and nimbly decaying natural matter. By no means thoughts that this course of is significant and regenerative (and, witnessed in a time-lapse, weirdly lovely), it actually freaks us out.

When the artist Jae Rhim Lee questioned if it was potential for us to make a collective cultural shift, to strategy dying and its rituals in another way, and to make smaller environmental impacts once we die, she designed a burial go well with seeded with mushrooms. Nothing might be extra pure — or extra horrifyingly taboo — than, as a substitute of consuming mushrooms, inviting the mushrooms to eat us.

Mushrooms have a method of constructing us contemplate the issues we desire to keep away from. Although this hasn’t stopped us from consuming them — mushrooms are an historic meals supply.

The “stoned ape concept,” which imagines fungus as central to our evolution, was animated in Louie Schwartzberg’s terrifically pro-mushroom documentary, “Incredible Fungi.” One scene reveals how early people might need eaten mushrooms, together with psychedelic ones, off animal dung as they tracked prey throughout the savanna, then collectively tripped their method towards language, weaponry, music and extra.

Small, spherical buttons are probably the most cozy, acquainted and recognizable of our edible mushrooms now, however there are lots of of sorts we will eat (with out tripping). Within the pockets of wilderness round my dwelling in Los Angeles, you would possibly discover brownish-orange sweet caps; wild, yellowish frills of chanterelles; and clusters of long-gilled oyster mushrooms. After rain, within the shady nooks of my very own yard, I see shaggy parasols pop up every so often, as if by magic.

In “The Final of Us” a warming local weather weaponizes mushrooms in opposition to people — a world catastrophe of our personal making. However in actuality, in the event you scratch just under the floor of our concern, you’ll discover fairly the other: an nearly unreasonable expectation that mushrooms will rescue us, clear up our messes, do our soiled work and reverse the entire harm we’re doing to the earth. It’s true that there are species able to breaking down oils in saltwater, absorbing radiation and cleansing toxins from the soil, although it’s additionally true that they could have higher issues to do.

Mushrooms are the fruiting our bodies of the mycelium, rootlike threads that join underground in an enormous mycorrhizal matrix so advanced, clever and important, Mr. Stamets has known as it “the neurological community of nature.”

That materials, which additionally shops giant quantities of carbon underground and might help plants survive drought and different stress, is getting used to develop alternate options to leathers, plastics, packaging and constructing supplies. (Adidas made an idea shoe utilizing a mycelium-based materials final yr, which led the corporate to debate its “journey to create a extra sustainable world.”)

These days, we count on mushrooms to save lots of us, too. The zealous curiosity in adaptogenic mushrooms — fungi species used medicinally for hundreds of years in China and different components of Asia — has created a world marketplace for lion’s mane, reishi, chaga and cordyceps. We flip to mushrooms to ease our nervousness, to assist us focus, to make us happier and extra open-minded, to make us sexy, to make our pores and skin glow, to boost our reminiscence, to get us to sleep.

Mushrooms are magnificent. However possibly nervousness over a fictional fungus displays a flickering consciousness that we’re, in actual fact, asking a bit an excessive amount of of them.