Go to any supermarket in the country. Walk to the vegetable aisle. What do you find? White mushrooms. Maybe chestnut ones if you’re lucky. That’s it. That’s your lot. And here’s the thing that nobody seems to find as outrageous as I do: the white mushroom and the chestnut mushroom are the same mushroom. Agaricus bisporus. One is just a bit browner. We are eating a mono crop of a single species and calling it variety.
There are an estimated 5.1 million fungal species on this planet. We know almost nothing about the vast majority of them. A recent study identified over 2,000 edible species alone. Two thousand. And we’ve collectively decided that the one we want is the flavourless white button, available in three sizes, in a plastic tray, next to the carrots.
I find this baffling. And I think it reflects something deeper than just shopping habits.
Ask most people about mushrooms and you’ll get one of two responses. They either love them or they hate them. There’s rarely any middle ground. I’ve always found that fascinating because it isn’t really about taste, is it. It goes much further than that. The love/hate relationship we have with mushrooms runs from the culinary all the way up to the medicinal and spiritual. People are polarised by this kingdom in a way they simply aren’t by, say, a carrot. Nobody has strong feelings about a carrot.
Part of it is fear. Fungophobia is a real thing. William Delisle Hay coined the term in the 19th century, noting a national superstition around toadstools, describing the average person’s attitude toward mushrooms as seeing them as abnormal, worthless or inexplicable. That attitude hasn’t entirely shifted. The fear of picking the wrong one, of being poisoned, of the unknown, keeps most people firmly in the Agaricus bisporus camp and nowhere near anything more interesting.
And look, the fear isn’t entirely irrational. There are deadly mushrooms. But we’ve allowed the existence of a handful of toxic species to write off an entire kingdom of extraordinary organisms. It’s like refusing to eat any plant ever because some of them are poisonous. The logic doesn’t hold up.
Then there’s the other side. The association with psychedelics. Say you’re growing mushrooms and watch how quickly people’s eyes do something. There’s an assumption. And whilst I have absolutely no problem with that conversation, and we will have it, it does mean that a huge swathe of genuinely useful, genuinely fascinating, entirely legal fungi gets lumped in with the taboo and dismissed before anyone’s even looked at it properly.
What we’re missing because of all this is enormous. Lion’s Mane, Reishi, Chaga, Turkey Tail, Maitake, Shiitake, Oyster. These are mushrooms with thousands of years of documented use in traditional Chinese medicine. They are the subject of serious modern research. They are being eaten by people all over the world for very good reasons. And in most British supermarkets they are completely absent. Or if they do appear, they’re in a tiny packet at a price that suggests they’ve been imported from space.
I started growing Lion’s Mane at home because I wanted to understand it properly. I grow things. Always have. Tomatoes, chillies, potatoes, you name it. There is something about tending a living thing and then eating it that connects you to it in a way that picking up a plastic tray simply does not. When I started growing Lion’s Mane and watching those strange white tendrils emerge, I understood why people throughout history have had such an intense relationship with fungi. You can’t be indifferent to them. Once you actually look, really look, indifference becomes impossible.
We have more fungi than plants on this planet. More species, more biomass, more reach. They are older than us by hundreds of millions of years. They are in the soil under every step you take, in the air you breathe, in the food you eat whether you know it or not. The citric acid in your fizzy drink was made by fungi. The cheese with the blue veins. The bread if you’re making it properly. The penicillin that has saved an estimated 200 million lives.
And we’ve decided the white button mushroom is enough.
It isn’t even close to enough.
May the spores be with you.