16. Growing Mushrooms

One of our co-hosts has started growing lion’s mane mushrooms at home. Is this the early phases of a midlife crisis? After all it’s all the fun of a veggie patch, for those who live in London and don’t have gardens. You get to deal with reality, with nature herself, which is a refreshing change for those of us with email jobs. But it’s also a lot more than a veggie patch - you get to buy all sorts of interesting things on Amazon, read volumes of dissident literature, and then feel like Walter White in your own kitchen. (This is still sounding like a midlife crisis, isn’t it)

The British are very hesitant around mushrooms - we’re an example of a mycophobic culture. We’ll eat button mushrooms if they’re presented neatly, but if it’s yellow and growing out of a tree we are highly suspicious. But, as Eastern Europeans and Southern Africans alike can tell us, this means we miss out on the good stuff - oyster mushrooms, lion’s mane, shitake. Tasty, and extremely good for you and your brain. And you can just grow that home!

This British hesitancy is likely because mushrooms at some point were seen as divine. Look at their place in our culture - fairy rings, gnomes living in toadstools. All highly supernatural, and that’s before you even start thinking about psychedelics.

Anyway, our co-host talks us through the process of growing mushrooms, from spore to fruit, from petri dish to plate. We discuss sterility, senescence, emergence, the general strangeness of fungi, and the value of artisanal knowledge in an increasingly connected, specialised and fragile economy.