Mycophilia Revelations from the weird world of mushrooms

HEDGEHOGS, fairy clubs, hawk's wings and candy caps: these are just a gladeful of the fungal eruptions that have captivated Eugenia Bone, the intrepid - when not encountering grizzly bears - author of one of the most beguiling books I've read this year. A generous sprinkling of amateur photos only adds to the charm of "Mycophilia." I was especially taken by a black-and-white snapshot of 30 sturdily dressed mycophiles trotting briskly en masse across a field, heading toward the day's quarry: delectable, hard-to-find morels. Some morelpickers, Bone informs us, carry extremely tiny baskets - because they don't want to alert the mushrooms to their intentions. Bone figures that a thousand or so of America's mushroom connoisseurs can be classified as pros: a wandering community of commercial pickers who hunt out harvests of porcini, matsutake and chanterelles from British Columbia to Northern California. (The West Coast comes out tops where North America's mushrooms are concerned.) The remainder - including bankers, surgeons, academics and off-the-gridders - are obsessed (and often pretty delightful) oddballs with whom Bone proves adept at building up a nonchalant rapport. Take the plaid-shirted mountain man she encounters during a mushroom-seeking flight to Montana, "mashed into his window seat like a raccoon stuffed into a too-small Havahart trap." Along the way, he tells Bone how to stuff morels with cream cheese, crab and shrimp, then "slow smoke 'em over mesquite and serve 'em with elk." But Bone isn't easily upstaged. A few pages later, she casually observes that morels on braised cabbage formed part of the last repast of the first-class passengers aboard the Titanic. Weird details, combined with a flair for startling analogies, brighten even the most rambling passages of Bone's book. She may not know precisely how to communicate why it's O.K. to chew, but never digest, a deadly Amanita phalloides, but set her on the hunt for fungi in the aftermath of a forest fire and Bone can make you shiver in the slovenly vacuum of a campsite she compares to a cold fireplace. Follow her, one misty morning, along the path to a forest pool and she'll paint the scene in one adroit phrase: "Fog hung like laundry over the trails." While not quite a match in pithy summary to Basho, the Japanese mycophile and haiku maker, Bone deploys the precise, uncommon vocabulary of the best naturalists. Still, why on earth would we novices, while happy to let Bone and her chums traipse the woods and mountaintops, want to read about what, for most of us, is best enjoyed on butter-drenched toast? Do we thrill to the news that eating a candy cap mushroom can cause every pore of the body to exude the scent of maple sugar? Do we really want to know that a single mushroom, three to four inches across, can produce 100 million spores in an hour - and that if all the 14 trillion spores of a basketball-size giant puffball bore fruit, the earth would be knocked out of its orbit? Does it intrigue us to learn that of the 1.5 million species of fungi that exist, only 5 percent have been identified? The answer, as I'm now persuaded, is yes. Bone's enthusiasm would prompt even the most languid armchair ecologist to take a new interest in the role played on our planet by mushrooms, which are the "fruiting body" of fungi, our evolutionary kin - of which the largest is an awesome living monster that covers 2,200 acres of forestland in eastern Oregon and weighs 6,286 tons. (Though I'd love to know how such an exact figure was ever gained.) Each and every fungus contains properties that, as described by Bone, sound almost magical. Growing up the toxic walls of the abandoned nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, fungi learned to fight its lethal radioactivity by the production of melanin. A network of tiny fungi, delicate as a baby's shawl, can play a crucial role in feeding a giant tree. In an inspired image, borrowed from the mycologist Paul Stamets, Bone draws an analogy between the Internet and a forest linked and nurtured by an underground tracery of fungi that "function as pathways for shuttling nutrients, water and organic compounds." More remarkably, the fungi can differentiate among all those trees and meet the unique requirements of each one. As Bone smartly states, "It's a couture service." I'm lodging only one complaint. While most authors overburden us with personal details, Bone doesn't offer enough. She mentions, in passing, a sister's circus connections. And she describes her father entreating two startled tourists in Florence to approach the pocket of his jacket and take a sniff: "Come on, SMELL IT!" (He'd been on a truffle walk that afternoon.) The paternal image is memorable, but tantalizingly slight. While eloquent on the subject of mushrooms, about its author Bone's book is frustratingly self-effacing. Three final trophy facts. For $299 (plus a yearly fee of $69), you can buy your very own French "truffle tree" and lay claim to any truffles found beneath it. Mushrooms are an extremely rich source of vitamin D. And any overweight mycophile (the mountain man plainly wasn't bothered by his size) can lose pounds almost painlessly by substituting mushrooms for meat. Remember, however, that the modernist composer and intrepid mycophile John Cage once economized by subsisting solely on wild mushrooms, a brief experiment that ended in the hospital, with Cage suffering from a case of malnutrition. Consider yourself warned against any such absolutist diet. But not against the nourishment on offer in Eugenia Bone's delicious, surprising and dizzyingly informative book. Miranda Seymour is the author, most recently, of "Chaplin's Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill" and of a memoir, "Thrumpton Hall."

Among the most primitive of organisms, mushrooms occur almost everywhere on earth; yet only a few of them are edible, and some are downright toxic. As Bone points out, there are fewer deaths annually from mushrooms than from shark bites. Despite the dangers, mushrooms offer a spectrum of valuable nutrients. Deeply fascinated by all sorts of fungi, Bone sets out across the country to link up with fellow mushroom hunters. She hunts in Midwest forests for the springtime appearance of the morel, trooping through the underbrush with armies of equally obsessed foragers. She checks out the nation's first truffle farms, admiring the patient fortitude of growers struggling to farm commercially a most elusive fungus prized for its inimitable aroma and intense flavor. Only now are nutritionists unlocking some mushrooms' heretofore hidden health benefits, but the counterculture has always revered some species' psychedelic characteristics. Bone excels at revealing her many interviewees' unique personalities.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist

Chapter 1 FORAYS AND FESTIVALS My journey into the realm of fungi started with basic venality. I love to eat wild mushrooms, but I don't love paying for them. They're hellaciously expensive in Manhattan where I live. The problem was: How to find them? And then I learned about the New York Mycological Society (NYMS) and their promises of guided mushroom hunts. It sounded good. Plus, the price of membership was right: $20 a year. The NYMS offers lectures on fungal biology, slideshows of mushroom photography (Taylor Lockwood's show packed the room), a banquet featuring mushrooms during the winter (a Roman Feast, a Cantonese Banquet), many small guided walks, and a few big forays every year, the most popular being the Morel Breakfast. When I first joined the club, I tried to mask my true motivation. At the winter lectures, I pretended to be interested in all mushrooms, nodding with phony delight at the slides of inedible molds or polypores or whatever. The truth is, I was embarrassed to admit I was participating in a scientific club mainly in anticipation of spring, when the morels came up and the hunting would begin. But shortly after the announcements for the Morel Breakfast went out, I realized I was not alone in my greed. Everyone in the club was horny for morels. Free, fresh, fat morels. Morels are probably the most fetishized of all wild edible mushrooms. There are numerous Web sites devoted to hunting morels, replete with near pornographic close-ups of the wrinkly capped fungus, or shots of copious morel blooms or children happily posing with gargantuan specimens. Morel Web sites boast breathless postings of morel flushes throughout the country. (I am particularly fond of the online morel sighting maps, which are updated daily during the season, like tornados on a midwestern weather map.) There are around 10 regional festivals throughout the midwestern states, at least one anthropological study on rural community morel hunts, and morel paraphernalia of all sorts for sale. Theories abound as to why morels are so culty, but Tom Nauman of www.morelmania.com says it's because morels are well-known in the general population. I think Nauman is right. The morel is the American wild mushroom. The Morel Breakfast--held the first weekend in May, when the morels are generally, hopefully up--is always prefaced by a flurry of e-mails, first the very hush-hush directions to our spot, an abandoned apple orchard in New York west of the Hudson River, then the admonitions not to hunt the orchard and pick all the mushrooms prior to the breakfast, and finally people looking for rides to the hunting grounds. I have a car and so drove a handful of ladies and their baskets and walking sticks, their tick spray and suntan lotion and water bottles, to the home of an amiable couple who live on the way to the orchard and who put out a bagel and lox spread for the club at their own expense. At the breakfast, our foray leader, Dennis Aita, explained that morels are the fruiting bodies of a fungus. The fungus is the organism and the mushroom is the organ of sexual reproduction, like a fruit or a flower. There are many types of fungi (which can be pronounced as either fun-ghee, fun-gee, or fun-jai, though most mycophiles say fun-jai), and not all produce mushrooms, but the fungus Morchella does. There are quite a few species of morels--no one is sure how many--but we were hunting Morchella esculenta (esculenta is Latin for succulent and delicious). Dennis told us to look for M. esculenta, aka the gray or yellow morel, under dying apple trees. The fungus that produces morels lives in association with the roots of the apple tree. When the tree fails, the fungus fruits in order to spread its spore--and subsequently find a new host. In essence, to find the morel, you have to find the tree. Which is not such an easy thing. The club hunts an abandoned apple orchard surrounded by residential developments, and the place is overgrown with pricker bushes, but we hunt there for two reasons: The morels have been fruiting there for 25 years, and it is in nearby Rockland County, an undemanding commute for New Yorkers who tend to be infrequent drivers. Eighty people showed up that year, about a third of our membership. They were mostly older, retired people, but also young parents herding children, holding their wiggly kids' arms while they smeared on the tick repellent, plus a few French people. I'd only hunted in Colorado prior to this, and where we go, in the West Elk Mountains, there are about 10 billion acres of wilderness per person. It is rare to see anyone else in the woods. It is common to get lost. Not so at the NYMS morel hunt. As soon as we were parked and assembled, Dennis gave the word, and in an arthritic charge, dozens of people crashed into the woods, most following those who seemed to know where they were going. It felt a little like the stampede that occurs when they first open the doors of a Black Friday warehouse sale. I struck out in the opposite direction. The NYMS, whose logo is inspired by The New Yorker magazine's mascot Eustace Tilley (the dandy in the top hat) looking through his monocle at a mushroom, had a couple of starts and stops during its 100-plus-year history, but the avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992) and a few friends resuscitated it in the late '50s. Cage's belief that music is meant "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences" also describes the mushroom hunt--or at least, a mushroom hunt without a crowd--the quiet but intense contemplation of nature that reveals a hidden mushroom. Cage turned many folks on to mushrooming. I've met a number of people with no particular interest in fungi who claim to have hunted with him. (In New York, that's kind of like running into people who've said they've gotten drunk with Norman Mailer.) But he created many true converts. One is Paul Sadowski, who prepared Cage's music for publication and is now secretary of the club. Back to the hunt. It took me some time just to identify a dying apple tree. To be honest, the whole orchard looked like one gigantic bramble patch, filled with buzzing insects and senior New Yorkers in khakis, but after a sweaty hour I got the hang of it and started to crawl under the thickets and through the poison ivy, the shiny red leaves tiny as squirrel ears, to check the base of the decaying trees. As I crawled under one tree, eyes narrowed to avoid scratching my corneas with twigs, I spotted one large brown morel. And then I saw her. Apple cheeked and undaunted by the thorns, her gray bun pulled askew by snapping branches, crawled an elderly lady from the opposite direction toward the very morel--the only morel--I'd spotted. I deferred to her, of course, as if the fat morel between us were a seat on the bus. The history of amateur mycology in America (from the Greek, myco = fungus, ology = study of) is not that long. While immigrant groups and Native Americans gathered the mushrooms they knew were edible or medicinal, as a hobby mycology didn't gain momentum until the 1880s. Botany--which included fungi in those days--was one of the most popular of the sciences for hobbyists. During the Victorian era, the sciences achieved their cultural authority: Natural history and natural philosophy became science, and science became a profession. For decades, though, fieldwork conducted by amateur mycologists contributed to the body of knowledge, and amateurs collected many of the samples that fill botanical garden archives in the United States today.* The instigating factor that may have led to the advance of mycological societies in America was the death, in 1897, of Count Achilles de Vecchj, an Italian diplomat residing in Washington, DC. The count died from eating Amanita muscaria--the fly agaric. This is the most iconic of all mushrooms-- the one with the red cap with white spots on it--and, except in the count's case, not fatal, although it can make you very sick or get you high, depending on what part of the world the specimen comes from, how you prepare it, and how much you eat. The death of the count, which was a widely publicized sensation, led the United States Department of Agriculture to issue public advisories about toxic mushrooms. Although the Washington mycological club had been organized 3 years before the count's last meal, his death, and the subsequent publication of Charles McIlvaine's 2 1/2-£d tome, One Thousand American Fungi, describing hundreds of edible (although not always tasty) mushrooms, ushered in an increased interest in fungi, and regional mushroom clubs began to, well, mushroom. Today there are at least 95 mycological societies in North America, three regional clubs, and one national club. There is also a professional club, the Mycological Society of America, which organizes conferences and publishes the scientific journal Mycologia. For the amateur or hobbyist, learning about mushrooms in order to eat them but avoid poisoning is definitely one of the reasons why people join mycological associations. Amanita muscaria Most mycological societies have a scientific advisor affiliated with the club who instructs the members on regional identification. This is important, because the toxicity of mushrooms can vary according to their habitat, their age, and their method of preparation, and because mushroom identification books can be deceiving. What does "edible with caution" mean? The New York Mycological Society has a number of expert amateurs, but our guru is Gary Lincoff, the author of The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, a menschy, approachable fellow whose knowledge is as encyclopedic as his collection of mushroom-themed T-shirts, which he wears over long-sleeve shirts--a look not every man can pull off. Experts like Gary are keen to disabuse members of wives' tales like poisonous mushrooms tarnish a silver spoon, mushrooms that grow on wood are safe, mushrooms that animals eat are safe, and mushrooms that can be peeled are safe. (All untrue.) Their portfolio of sayings usually includes witticisms like "No mushroom is poisonous until you eat it" and "Leave one mushroom for the mycologist and one for the doctor." In 1973, the North American Mycological Association established a toxicology committee, and in 1982, they created the Mushroom Poisoning Case Registry based on voluntary information from the regional societies and the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Only 1/2 to 1 percent of poisonings that are reported to poison control centers each year are attributed to mushrooms, and of that, according to a 30-plus-year summary of poisonings, about 1 percent end in death. Indeed, more people die of shark attacks than mushroom poisoning. The majority of reports describe gastrointestinal disturbances like vomiting and diarrhea stemming from eating a wide variety of species. Mushroom poisonings are not necessarily simple to define. When a combination of species is eaten, the culprit may be unclear. The health or circumstances of the eater may be a factor in poisoning, as well as allergic reactions to the proteins in a given mushroom. Additionally, mushrooms may be contaminated by bacteria and molds, or by environmental poisons like pesticides or radiation, and the symptoms from these pollutants can be mistaken for mushroom poisoning. Of the 1.5 million species of fungi projected to be out there, perhaps 5 percent have been identified. Of that 5 percent, maybe 10,000 species produce fleshy mushrooms, and about 400 of them are poisonous. In a field that is constantly evolving, these numbers are speculative, but in general, of the 400 species that are poisonous, 20 are commonly found, 6 of which are lethal. (And of the 2,000 or so species that are probably edible, 100 are widely picked and 15 to 30 are commonly eaten.) The challenge, then, is to know your mushrooms. There are many types of mycetismus (poisonings caused by eating mushrooms), but only three types of poisoning dependably kill.* Amatoxin poisoning is the worst. It is responsible for 90 percent of all mushroom fatalities in this country, and probably in Europe, too. Amatoxin poisoning is caused by eating either the destroying angel (Amanita bisporigera) or the death cap (Amanita phalloides), the mushroom that famously killed Sam Sebastiani Jr., a member of the Sebastiani Californian wine family in 1997, and possibly Emperor Claudius (AD 4-54), among other species. One cap of an A. phalloides will make you very sick, even do you in, especially if you exhibit symptoms within 6 hours of eating. Symptoms start with gastrointestinal pain, vomiting, and diarrhea that subside after a day, leading, unfortunately, to a false sense of security, because without prompt treatment, 40 percent of patients die within a week of the onset of symptoms. A few days after the first symptoms, the patient suffers hepatic dysfunction, sometimes renal failure, and even liver necrosis. With prompt intervention, 80 to 90 percent of patients live. In Europe, injections of the com£ds silibinin and silymarin, extracts of the milk thistle, are used to treat amatoxin poisoning. In the United States, treatment consists of IV fluids and penicillin--although there is no evidence that penicillin, an antibacterial medicine, does any good. Nor are there data to suggest which protocol is more successful. The second serious type of mushroom poisoning is orellanine (or cortinarin) poisoning. It is rare in the USA. Three species of Cortinarius mushrooms will cause delayed-onset renal failure within 2 days to 2 weeks after eating the mushroom. The symptoms start with nausea, vomiting, and anorexia, followed in hours or days by kidney problems. Three to 10 caps will produce irreversible kidney failure, more so in men than women. The novelist Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer, had a kidney transplant in 2011, having mistaken Cortinarius speciosissimus--also known as the deadly webcap--for porcini. At the time of this writing, his wife and brother-in-law, who ate the mushrooms as well, were on the kidney transplant waiting list. The third killer is gyromitrain poisoning. Gyromitra esculenta, the false morel, contains a particularly toxic hydrazine called monomethyl-hydrazine, the same stuff from which missile and rocket propellant is made. Two to 5 cups of this mushroom will cause a gastrointestinal phase (nausea, vomiting, diarrhea), followed by fever and fatigue. Severe poisoning leads to liver toxicity or renal failure, coma, and death. A poisonous morel (left) and edible morel (right) Excerpted from Mycophilia: Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms by Eugenia Bone All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.