Long Read

The mushrooms sit on high, behind glass, above bottles of Armagnac and mezcal in a bar at the Standard hotel in Manhattan’s East Village. They are barely recognisable at first, just eerie silhouettes resembling coral growths in an aquarium, blooming in laboratory-teal light: tightly branched clusters of oyster mushrooms in hot pink, yolk yellow and bruise blue, alongside lion’s mane mushrooms, shaggy white globes with spines like trailing hair.

This isn’t décor, or only incidentally so; the four-metre-long shelf is a miniature farm, installed by the New York-based start-up Smallhold as part of a larger, sprawling system made up of remote-controlled nodes at restaurants and grocery stores across the city, each producing from 14 to 35 kilos of mushrooms a week. Thousands of data points — on temperature, humidity, airflow — are transmitted daily to the company’s headquarters, to be recalibrated across the network as needed. At the Standard, where the crop goes into plates of chilaquiles and mushroom-infused bourbon cocktails, diners might stop midbite, look up and take note of their meal’s origins a few feet away. It’s a glimpse of the future of agriculture, further collapsing the distance between diner and ingredients, doing away with the cost and waste of packaging and transportation in hopes of alleviating pressure on an overtaxed environment.

Still, the solemnity of the vitrines suggests a more complicated story, framing the mushrooms as art or sacred relics — or, in this high-design environment, luxury merchandise. The market for edible fungi is projected to reach USD$69 billion worldwide by 2024, the biologist Merlin Sheldrake notes in “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures,” published this past spring. In the United States, the boom may be credited in part to the beginnings of a shift toward less meat-heavy diets but also to the broadening of the the Western palate to embrace the Japanese notion of umami, the flavour beyond flavour: rich, carnal and briny at once, hinting at some dark ripening beneath the earth or sea. For decades, diminutive button mushrooms — pallid and “bred for the back of a truck,” as Andrew Carter, the chief executive officer of Smallhold, describes them — have dominated American sales; now, meatier species like shiitakes, hen of the woods and wild matsutakes are increasingly finding a place on the table. (That is, if you can afford them. Prices for foraged Japanese matsutakes, which grow in pine forests and, like truffles, have thus far resisted attempts at commercial cultivation, hit USD$395 per 500g in Tokyo in September 2019.)

To the ancient Egyptians, mushrooms were totems of immortality, reserved for the plates of pharaohs and their kin; to the Indigenous Mazatecs of southern Mexico, they are “holy children,” speaking through the mystics who eat them. A few scholars have suggested that the prototype for Santa Claus can be traced back to the healing rituals of Sami shamans near the Arctic Circle, who, fueled by the psychotropic red-and-white-capped Amanita muscaria, “flew” across the snow in their reindeer-drawn sleighs — supposedly the animals ate the mushrooms, too. The British philologist John Marco Allegro went so far as to argue in a controversial 1970 book that Christianity arose from a mushroom-worshipping cult, with Amanita muscaria, not the proverbial apple, as the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

As emissaries from the underworld and creatures of the in-between, even ordinary, nonhallucinogenic mushrooms defy the binaries we often use to organise the universe. Among the known species — around 14,000, with possibly another 150,000 yet to be named or described — there is no fixed shape: Beyond the archetypal umbrella, mushrooms take on a panoply of profiles, from woolly trumpets and shaggy beards to fascinator veils and black-tipped cigarettes. Some glow in the dark. Lacking chlorophyll and a vascular system, they are unclassifiable as plants, despite their historic inclusion in the study of botany. Nor are they animals, although the fungi and animal kingdoms share a common ancestor dating back somewhere between 650 million and 1.5 billion years.

There is something uncanny, too, about the speed with which they appear. In the wild, mushrooms emerge practically overnight, en masse, a sudden army out of nothing. Such innocents they seem, so close to the ground, fit to shelter only ants and fairies. But they are neither tiny nor powerless: Beneath those charming buttons and listing stalks grow the skinny filaments that make up the mycelium, the vegetative part of the fungus, branching and spreading in a great cobweb inside the earth. According to the mycologist Paul Stamets, based in Olympia, Washington, more than eight miles of mycelium can twist through a single cubic inch of soil. In West Africa, mushrooms have been measured with caps more than a metre in diameter, but the largest fungus on record (and the largest living organism by area) is the mostly invisible Armillaria ostoyae in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, whose mycelium spans more than 2,300 acres, announcing its presence above ground in scattered clusters of pale little parasols — each capable of shedding 30,000 spores per second, each carrying within it a future colony. A mushroom is an iceberg.

Today, those microscopic strands are being repurposed as biodegradable textiles like the Dutch designer Aniela Hoitink’s 3-D-molded MycoTEX, so malleable it requires neither scissors nor needles, and Reishi, developed by the San Francisco-based company MycoWorks and is as buttery as leather. Mycelium can be made into bricks, too, suggesting the possibility of architecture with a minimal ecological footprint: The artist Philip Ross, one of MycoWorks’ founders, once built a teahouse out of mushroom materials for an art exhibition, then boiled the bricks to make tea for viewers. The idea that fungi could be ecological saviours — some species are capable of breaking down plastics, petrochemicals and toxic waste, filtering streams and even absorbing radiation — ran through “Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi,” an exhibition mounted earlier a year ago at the Somerset House in London. Francesca Gavin, the curator, juxtaposed mycelium shoes and lampshades with the British artist Hamish Pearch’s sculptures of mushrooms sprouting out of charred-black toast and the South Korea-born artist Jae Rhim Lee’s Infinity Burial Suit, a death shroud reimagined as pajamas and suffused with mushroom spores to hasten decomposition and break down the toxins our bodies absorb over the course of our lives so they’re not returned into the earth.

“I think humans take for granted how much work is done by other organisms to make the world livable,” says the Minnesota-based artist Liz Sexton, whose work includes hyper-realistic mushrooms fashioned out of papier-mâché, part of a larger project to recreate wildlife in urban habitats as a way of underscoring our displacement of and alienation from the natural world. Mushrooms, she says, “remind us that we’re hardly at the center of it all.” Lee’s burial suit inverts the traditional relationship of humans and mushrooms: Instead of feeding on them, we are the food. She’s gone so far as to train a special cadre of mushrooms to recognise her body, feeding it her cut fingernails and sloughed-off skin in hopes that they’ll make quicker work of her eventual corpse as a result. It’s her way of accepting responsibility for contributing to the environmental crisis — what Gavin calls “the mess we have made” — but also a realignment of how we perceive the inevitability of death, as something to be accepted rather than feared, and of the hierarchy of the world, in which we are not the masters or even stewards of nature but simply part of it.

Mushrooms were once spurned in the West for their associations with rot. The entry on them in the magisterial 18th-century French Encyclopédie declares that no amount of cooking could redeem them and advises sending them “back to the dung heap where they are born.” In fact, the dung heap may be where they do their best work; as the Portland, Ore.-based mycologist Peter McCoy notes in the 2015 documentary short film “Fungiphilia Rising” (directed by Madison McClintock), fungi are “nature’s alchemists,” playing an essential role in transmuting decay into nutrients and keeping entire woodlands alive. Those nutrients are sent in multiple directions over acres of land via the mycelium, which Stamets has called “Earth’s natural internet” and others describe as the Wood Wide Web. This living network has uncanny similarities to latter-day technologies like blockchain, but for mushroom advocates like McCoy, who founded the grass-roots organization Radical Mycology with the naturalist Maya Elson in 2006, it has philosophical implications as well: no less than the restructuring and rehabilitation of society itself.

A quieter revolution unfolds in the pages of the New York-based artist Phyllis Ma’s zine “Mushrooms and Friends,” now on its second issue. Originally inspired by a visit to Smallhold’s Brooklyn office and the luminous blue tanks of mushrooms on display there (which generate about 400 pounds a week), Ma started photographing the organisms in the studio and out of their natural context. Some appear starkly alone, others surrounded by the crumbled ruins of their fruiting blocks, against a dimensionless wash of color that gives them a faintly extraterrestrial aura. Even in these meticulous tableaus, they thwart the viewer: These are not still lifes but portraits, the mushrooms subjects rather than objects. Ma casts herself as a collaborator, one of the “friends” of the zine’s title, along with the mushroom cultivators she met via Instagram or the mycologists she consulted to help her identify specimens she found on her own in the wild, like a puffball in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, so big she thought it was a softball gone astray, or a blewit in Berlin, half the size of her pinkie and dark purple. The back of each zine includes an index with the species’ names, like a dramatis personae.

In the end, what may be most compelling about mushrooms is how they subvert our expectations. The artist and art historian Alissa Walls, writing in a 2014 essay about the mycologically themed works of the American painter Cy Twombly and the American experimental composer John Cage, notes that in the arts, “so often an equation is made between the upward gaze and the uplifted subject,” whereas “the downward gaze is often abjectly cast,” implying distaste and a sense of superiority — or else shame. Twombly challenged this assumption, Walls argues, by making the downward gaze partly one of reverence, as if praying or honoring the dead. Ma does something similar by flattening the perspective, approaching the mushrooms head-on, magnified.

Cage, too, thought that attention must be paid to these lowly organisms — a lifelong obsession chronicled in “John Cage: A Mycological Foray,” an omnibus of his mushroom-themed writings, which came out last month. While living in upstate New York in the 1960s, he often went mushroom hunting, sometimes selling his haul to the (now shuttered) Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, resigning them to commodification in order to supplement his income. Ever attuned to the music hidden in silence, he insisted that we should learn to listen to mushrooms as they released their spores to the air. (The Czech composer Vaclav Halek, born some two decades after Cage, indeed listened; his pieces were, he said, a record of what he’d heard in their presence.)

How potent a metaphor for today, as the chasm between have and have-not widens, to see this army of the ignored and the disdained, massing underfoot. The American writer Sylvia Plath turned the supposed meekness of these nonbinary beings into an insidious strength in her 1959 poem “Mushrooms,” channeling the voice of the “Nudgers and shovers / In spite of ourselves”:

Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

The sibilants in the repeated phrase, spoken aloud, are half whisper, half hiss. It’s a moment of menace that’s reprised at the poem’s end, in an allusion to the Sermon on the Mount: “We shall by morning / Inherit the earth.” Time for the overlords is running out.

On the plate, the red lionfish looks benign, denuded of its grand mohawk of venomous spines, cut down into neat fillets, floured and flopped in a hot pan with white wine and capers, then brought to the table leaking butter. Its flesh is as white as a snapper’s, delicate and faintly sweet. To eat it seems more like decadence than righteousness. But the same fish is considered a menace in the Atlantic. Up to 20 inches long when fully grown and striated in cream and rust, it wobbles underwater with that dorsal mohawk and gauzy pectoral fins fanned out on either side, suggesting a feathered headdress set adrift, dreaming its way through life, until it backs its prey up against the reef and snaps. Its hunger is legend: The predator has been known to graze on more than 50 species, and its stomach can inflate to 30 times its natural size to accommodate its feasts, which sometimes equal 90 percent of its body weight.

Appetite alone is not a crime, of course. What makes the red lionfish ruinous in the eyes of conservationists is not its efficiency as a hunter, nor its toxic, needlelike spines. Those characteristics are unremarkable in its home hunting grounds of the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean; there, the red lionfish was just a fish among fish, a known enemy that the smarter, smaller creatures avoided, and food itself for larger predators. Then, in 1985, one was spotted off the coast of Florida, the species’ first recorded appearance in the western Atlantic. Scientists theorise that specimens imported to the United States as part of the aquarium trade were let loose in the ocean when they proved more troublesome than pretty, perhaps because they devoured all their tank mates. Equally at ease in the shallows or 300 metres below the surface, they appear to have adapted quickly to the change in scenery, thriving throughout the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, and traveling north to Rhode Island by 2001 and south to Brazil by 2014.

As a newcomer — what marine biologists have labeled an “invasive species,” a term of mid-20th-century vintage — the red lionfish has a crucial advantage: In an evolutionary blind spot called prey naïveté, native crustaceans and fish don’t recognise the frilly, candy-striped stranger as a killer-in-waiting. Larger predators like sharks and goliath groupers have been equally befuddled and tend to steer clear. Lionfish in turn don’t seem to know when to stop eating to allow their food supply to replenish itself. Researchers have observed that the presence of a single red lionfish in a small patch of reef can lead, in just five weeks, to an 80-percent decrease in the number of native fish that survive from larvae to adulthood. The damage goes beyond the decimation of biodiversity to the habitat itself; lionfish victims include baby parrotfish, whose mature counterparts would otherwise feed on the algae that, unchecked, can smother coral reefs. Worse still, lionfish breed at a startling rate: Females are capable of producing eggs every three to four days, roughly two million a year.

How to defeat such multitudes? There are costly high-tech solutions in the works, including traps that lure lionfish using recordings of their own burbling sounds. Meanwhile, in a more analog effort, divers hunt the intruders for cash rewards at annual lionfish derbies in Florida and the Bahamas, some run by the nonprofit Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF), others by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. One weekend event last year yielded a catch of over 14,000 lionfish, nearly 3.5 tonnes of which were sold to a seafood distributor as food.

For in the past decade, another front has opened up in the fight: restaurants and home kitchens, where we are slowly learning to defeat the enemy bite by bite. In Florida, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in partnership with REEF has enlisted chefs to make a case for lionfish as a delicacy: pan-seared, skewered on its own spines (provided that the spines have been baked first, to denature the venom) or diced into ceviche. To the south, in Colombia, where the government has declared the lionfish a “national security threat,” an ad agency persuaded local priests to exhort their congregations to eat lionfish during Lent, as a good deed, to help restore equilibrium to the sea.

These campaigns are part of a broader movement to reduce, if not eradicate, invasive species — Burmese pythons up to seven metres long swallowing bobcats whole in the Florida Everglades; sea lampreys sucking the blood out of fish in the Great Lakes; wild boars uprooting crops and wreaking havoc in city streets from Berlin to Hong Kong — by cooking them for dinner. Educational websites such as Eat the Invaders, founded in 2011 by Joe Roman, a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont, and slogans like “If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em” frame what might otherwise be merely an epicurean decision as a civic duty, a heroic act, even a declaration of war.

We eat for survival first, then for pleasure. It’s a luxury to be able to choose — and reject — food. (According to the World Health Organisation, more than 820 million people went hungry in 2018.) Even once basic needs are met, we don’t just descend into gluttony: Although biologically we are built to be omnivorous, there have always been those among us who accept limits on our diets, eating only what our ethical or religious dictates allow. Historically, the ability to control our appetites has been framed as virtue, from the fasting of saints to celebrity-endorsed veganism. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras is said to have refused meat (with occasional exceptions) because he believed in the transmigration of souls after death, among humans and animals alike; adherents of the ancient Indian religion of Jainism go further, following a principle of nonviolence that forbids not only harming but oppressing and enslaving other living beings, which includes the harvesting of honey from bees; vegetarians of today cite the environmental costs of raising livestock.

Often the emphasis is on what’s absent from the plate, as if morality lay entirely in sacrifice. If you eat local, you give up strawberries in winter; if you confine yourself to raw food, it’s the end of bread (unless you can engineer a dupe out of flaxseeds in a dehydrator). For invasivores — a coinage circa 2010 — the injunction is the opposite: to consume rather than abstain, granting what you eat an almost sacramental aura. It is no longer simply food. When you attack a lionfish on the plate, you are striking a blow for all the helpless native fishes who might otherwise go extinct. You don’t eat it because it tastes good or because it’s good for you in a nutritional sense. You eat it to be good. How convenient that in this case, duty aligns with pleasure.

The motive is honorable, although it’s motivated by a capitalistic exchange. After all, it’s easier to promote doing good deeds if no suffering or deep behavioral change is required, and chefs have worked hard to prove that these species are delightful, if not quite effortless to prepare. (Among other issues, federal regulations on trafficking wild-caught game across state lines can make it tricky to procure such ingredients in the first place.) One recipe posted to Eat the Invaders, for spaghetti with periwinkles — a type of whelk that has been turning New England’s salt marshes into mud flats since the mid-19th century — notes that extracting the periwinkles from their shells is a laborious process, advising would-be cooks to “find an assistant if you can.”

For both professionals and amateurs, invasive ingredients continue to multiply, with some becoming prized for their vivid flavor, like wild fennel from the Mediterranean that proliferates in abandoned lots, and black tiger shrimp in the waters off Texas, half the length of a human arm and as plump and sweet as lobster. At Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Conn., the chef Bun Lai deep-fries tiny Asian shore crabs, presenting them as a kind of clawed popcorn, and slices Burmese python gossamer-thin (the flesh is notoriously tough) before tossing it in a wok with sesame oil and ginger. The lyrical-sounding Silverfin is the Louisiana chef Philippe Parola’s rebranding of the formidable silver carp, capable of growing four feet long and known to leap out of waterways and slap boaters on the head hard enough to cause a concussion. This troublemaker now quietly inhabits the frozen-food aisle, in the innocent form of breaded fish cakes, safely free of the carp’s many annoying intramuscular bones.

The damage wrought by certain nonnative species is real — not only in the radical transformation of habitats but in the risk of unfamiliar pathogens borne by introduced species, like the Ceratocystis fungus shed by wood-boring ambrosia beetles in Hawaii, identified in 2014 as the killer of hundreds of thousands of ohia trees, which make up 80 percent of the islands’ forests, its branches home to honeycreepers (a critically endangered species), its spiky red lehua blossoms gathered for centuries to make lei. Some biologists fear that pathogens are increasingly making the leap from one species to another, especially in new environments where no immunity exists; three-quarters of the diseases that have emerged in the past decade, including the novel coronavirus, are zoonotic, passed to us from animals.

At the same time, the word “invasive” has metaphorical freight, encouraging, as the American biologist Matthew K. Chew has written, the “monstering” of flora and fauna, which can make killing them seem like the central mission, diverting attention from the more difficult and demanding task of redressing environmental harm. The language of battle summoned to the cause, however tongue-in-cheek (“be the predator,” one credo goes), suggests an element of vengeance, as in ancient traditions when a warrior would eat the heart of a defeated opponent to claim dominance.

The division of native and nonnative had a different resonance when Elton was writing in the 1950s, as colonialism was collapsing and Indigenous rights were finally being recognised. But today, there’s an uncomfortable analogue to the derogatory language used to describe immigrants. Chew was among 19 ecologists to publish a 2011 paper in Nature titled “Don’t Judge Species on Their Origins,” pointing out that “most human and natural communities now consist both of long-term residents and of new arrivals”. From the long view of evolution, it’s not clear what it means to be native. The ancestors of modern camels, which we think of as indigenous to Asia and the Middle East, spent several geologic epochs — millions of years — in North America before going extinct there around 12,000 years ago, a comparative blip in natural history. The British lineage of Eurasian beavers came to an end in the 16th century, thanks to overzealous fur trappers, but when the government reintroduced the species to Scotland in 2009, some farmers protested that their dams blocked culverts and caused flooding, and a number of beavers were shot.

Even a disruptive species may become beloved. In the United States, the invader responsible for the deaths of up to four billion birds and 22 billion mammals each year is the domestic house cat. Recent DNA research has found a link between the pigs brought by Polynesian voyagers to Hawaii in the first millennium A.D. and the wild boars that ravage the island today; hunting them has become tradition, and no luau is complete without a pig roasting in the imu (underground oven). And kudzu, creeping up telephone poles and threatening to devour porches, is now emblematic of the South.

Some might say that given the scope of the environmental threat we face, there’s no point in quibbling over such nuances. Arguably the great feat of the invasivore movement has been raising awareness of the crisis — although there’s a step further that we have yet to take, to confront what the British ecologist Ken Thompson has called “the most dangerous species of all”: humans. “To argue in the 21st century that any contraction, expansion or shift in the range of any species is independent of human agency is to make an assertion that, almost by definition, can rarely be literally true,” Thompson has written. Our fingerprints are everywhere. We, too, have brought devastation to new lands, plundering natural resources, stealing from and killing those who lived there first, even spreading our own lethal diseases. We are the meddlers, the apex predators, the survivors at all costs who have taken over every corner of the planet, its seas and skies, its icy and desert wastes, and dared reshape it in our image. We are the invaders. Who will come for us?

Food styling by Young Gun Lee. Prop styling by Marci Leiseth.