Published Date: 21 September 2008 THE LARGEST living creature on earth is a 3.5 mile wide fungus. Famously, life is too short to stuff a mushroom. But it’s simply not long enough to fit in all the wonderful mornings you could spend gathering them. It’s a little after 10am on Friday and I am in Binning Wood, near Dunbar. I’m with Dr Alison Dyke of Reforesting Scotland and we’re looking for lunch. It’s not easy. Once you start foraging for mushrooms, you see them everywhere, thousands of little periscopes poking through the forest floor, indicating the fearsome fungal fleet below.
The problem is that most aren’t edible. There are 12,000 different species in the UK, around 2,000 of which are the sort of mushrooms and toadstools we are used to seeing. There are roughly 150 varieties humans can eat, and around 15 are poisonous. It can be difficult to tell a deadly mushroom from one which is harmless.
Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer, was hospitalised in Aberdeen recently after eating Cortinarius speciosissimus; it is thought he may have mistaken them for delicious Chanterelles. Last week a woman on the Isle of Wight died after eating Death Caps. A single mushroom of this species can kill.
Poisoning remains rare in Britain, partly because we have, as a nation, been fungiphobic. We tend to like our mushrooms white, clean and bought from a supermarket, if at all. However, that is changing.
Since the early Nineties, UK firms have been harvesting wild mushrooms and making increasing profits. The industry in Scotland, based mostly in the wooded north, is worth between £5m and £6m annually. The season lasts from August to October and in a good year, warm and wet like this one, a picker can earn up to a grand a week. Anecdotally, it seems that there are more people in our woods than at any point since the end of the Second World War, among them large numbers of migrants from Eastern Europe where there is a long-established culture of foraging.
Some mycologists – fungi experts – are concerned that the increase in harvesting could have a negative impact on fungal populations and on the animals and insects which depend on them for food. To this end, Alison Dyke is conducting a survey on harvesting, available at www.forestharvest.org.uk/news.htm.
She began foraging while growing up in woodland near Oxford, has good “mushroom radar” and can spot a Chanterelle from 30 feet away. We’ve only walked a short distance into Binning Wood when we spot a puffball, edible but not worth eating. In its giant variety these can grow to the size of a plump child, but this is just a tiddler – white and spikey.
Alison used to pick the big version from beneath the corrugated iron arcs a farmer built to shelter his pigs; they grew well because of the pig poo. She isn’t squeamish. We find a few Chanterelles which have clearly been nibbled by slugs, but this doesn’t stop her nabbing them; the plan is to cook them in butter and garlic. “Slugs have probably crawled over the grain that went into the bread you toasted for breakfast,” she says. “We should remember our food really does grow outside and is part of the landscape and ecosystem.”
When picking mushrooms, Alison uses a special knife with a brush at one end, and a curved and serrated blade. She cuts them, scrapes earth from the stem, brushes them off, and pops them in a basket. The Chanterelles accumulate like a heap of golden coins, contrasting with a few Amethyst Deceivers, a vivid purple mushroom shaped like an ornate glass vase. Our haul looks more like pirate booty than food.
It feels natural to regard mushrooms in metaphorical terms. They have a strangeness that has, for centuries, encouraged people to compare them to more familiar objects. The best example is the Stinkhorn, the Latin name of which – Phallus impudicus – translates as the wholly accurate “shameless penis”. It was once sold in Europe as an aphrodisiac, Beatrix Potter said she “could not find courage to draw it”, and Charles Darwin’s daughter is reported to have roamed the grounds of her home, picking and burning Stinkhorns so the maids would not have their morals compromised by the sight. In Hawaii, a scientific study found the smell of Stinkhorn caused spontaneous female orgasm. You don’t get that with closed-cups from Tesco.
Alison and I can’t see any Stinkhorns in Binning Wood. We do discover, rooted to a rotting stump, a clump of what seems to be Honey Fungus, which is edible, but on closer examination turns out to be Sulphur Tuft, which could kill you. This demonstrates the importance of taking a good field guide – such as How To Identify Edible Mushrooms – with you when foraging. If you have any doubts at all about a mushroom, the safest option is not to pick it. “I like that you need specialist knowledge to harvest,” says Alison. “My life is fairly risk free, so it’s good to have something like this that’s a bit risky and mysterious.”
Mushrooms really are mysterious. The bit we see above the ground is just the fruit of a bigger organism beneath. The largest living creature on earth is a honey fungus in Oregon, three feet below ground, 3.5 miles wide, and thousands of years old.
Fungi have been around forever. Trees need them in order to take nutrients from the soil, so if there had never been fungi there would not have been trees. What’s more, global warming is making the world warmer and wetter so it’s likely that mushrooms, which were here before us, will flourish after mankind is gone. This is the mushrooms’ planet, we’re just visitors, a thought to put you off your omelette.
While we’re here, though, there are worse ways to spend our time than foraging. Standing in Binning Wood, listening to fighter jets whooshing over the deep green canopy, it feels like a retreat from a complicated and depressing reality. My advice is this: tell the world to get stuffed; life’s too short not to pick mushrooms.
Source : news.scotsman
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