Consider
The Shroom

The fungal kingdom has always knitted life on Earth together; now, it’s suddenly burst into sight. The quantity and variety of mushrooms that we produce and eat has been slowly increasing over the last decade. Sales of mushroom grow kits are booming, taking up residence on our kitchen countertops. And even if the fungi aren’t wearing our bodies, we may soon be wearing clothing made from fungi.

A renaissance for fungi was happening long before 2020, but the pandemic accelerated it. Some of us have taken to nursing sourdough starters (fueled by yeast, a fungus), followed cottagecore accounts on Instagram (punctuated by mushroom-inspired iconography), or, if we lived in Oregon, we may have voted on the legalization of psilocybin-enhanced therapy.

Fungi’s recent forays into our cultural consciousness are microscopic compared to what they’ve done, or what they could still do. Before plants climbed out of the seas, there were perhaps fungi already dotting the landscape. Some have posited (dubiously, since the theory is unfalsifiable) that psilocybin, a psychoactive compound found in a variety of mushrooms, might have played a role in the emergence of human consciousness out of the sensorial miasma of the Stone Age. And once humans are gone, we can be nearly certain that some form of fungal life will remain.

The mushroom is only the fruiting body of the fungal life form, like the berry on a vine. Enmeshed in the dirt is the larger body of the creature, the mycelium, which, recent research suggests, can “think” with every cell of its being and might make “decisions” without a brain. Certain types of these fungi are called mycorrhizal. They form mutualistic relationships with the roots of trees, exchanging nutrients as they expand through the soil. Ecologist Suzanne Simard found that these fungi allow trees to, in a sense, talk to one another.

Mycelium has lots of different uses, many of which are only recently being rediscovered. “We have culturally evolved with fungi over millennia,” said Giuliana Furci, the head of Chile’s Fungi Foundation, the first NGO dedicated to the fungal kingdom, over a Zoom call. (She refers to fungi as “them” throughout our conversation.) Many of the companies in the mycological space are “modernizing very ancient technology.” She reached for a rather rustic-looking cap, made from amadou, a spongy material derived from a fungus known as Horse’s Hoof. “Eastern Europeans have been making these for thousands of years. It’s 100 percent fungus.”

The applications of such ancient technology could change the way we produce clothes. Bolt Threads, in partnership with a company called Ecovative, have been developing a material they call Mylo: a bio-leather grown from mycelium. It’s made, Bolt’s vice president of product development Jamie Bainbridge said, by “reproducing what happens on the forest floor in a controlled indoor environment.” They place mycelial cells on a rectangular tray and feed them sawdust and organic material. Within two weeks, it’s grown into a foamy layer (“Imagine a big bag of smashed marshmallows,” Bainbridge said.) It’s then harvested, treated, and turned into a final product—which might soon be a pair of shoes or handbag, a phone case or a wallet.

“We took our inspiration from looking at all the amazing materials that life has evolved on this planet over the past 3.8 billion years and, through advanced science and engineering, used this as the blueprint for developing new materials similar to those we already know and love,” Bainbridge said. “We all know we have to change our habits. I believe fungi is appealing as it represents making a collaborative choice with nature, rather than an extractive one.”

In October of last year, adidas, lululemon, Kering, and Stella McCartney announced that they would begin a partnership with Bolt to expand their production capacity in exchange for hundreds of millions of square feet of material to incorporate into their products. It’s a familiar symbiotic approach to partnership for the companies investing in Bolt: a shift throughout the industry to collectively fund the production of mycelial leather.

McCartney recently called on global heads of state to regulate fashion supply chains at the G7 conference, and has increasingly flexed her power in the industry to push large brands to move toward more sustainable practices. In 2019, she sold a minority stake in her eponymous brand to French luxury conglomerate, LVMH, and secured a position for herself as its CEO’s sustainability advisor. Another company, MycoWorks, is partnering with Hermès to use a signature version of mycelium-based leather, called Sylvania. They, too, have benefited from the last decade’s cultural shift in perspective around mushrooms, fungi, and mycelium, co-founder Sophia Wang said. “People are so excited by its possibilities, and the more they learn about mycelium—the sophisticated and vital role it plays in our ecosystems, its remarkable qualities as a material and a living organism,” she explained, “the more this technology feels inevitable for the future of materials.”

Ecovative, is working on packaging made from mycelium, which can replace cardboard or styrofoam. They’re also partnering with a company called Open Myco, “which sells and distributes grow-it-yourself kits so that you as an individual user could grow anything from a beehive to a surfboard.”

“We’ve been doing this and selling products now for almost 15 years, and there’s been a societal shift over the last three years,” said Gavin McIntyre, a co-founder of Ecovative. “That’s really the result of the growing awareness of the impacts of climate change and the impacts of how we consume materials.” The fashion industry accounts for about 8 percent of global climate-heating carbon emissions, and awareness of this footprint is growing. Some companies are merely looking to cash in on a green trend, and greenwashing in fashion is pervasive. But some designers are looking to a crop of unusual materials—mycelium, plastics scooped up from the ocean, or foam cultivated pond-scum—in an effort to reduce their impact.

Cut a hole in a plastic bag filled with sawdust and spores, spray it with water, and within two weeks, blue oyster mushrooms sprout out. It was beautiful for some of us to see something thrive within our own homes at a time when we—well—weren’t.

This was especially a boon to companies like Smallhold, mushroom growers based in Brooklyn. For Andrew Carter, the founder and CEO of Smallhold, mushrooms aren’t merely food. Fungi have influenced the way he runs his business. “We look at how the ecosystem is organized and try to take inspiration from that,” he said. “I think more people are starting to realize that mushrooms are already part of us.”

“You are fungus, in a way,” he added.

His company, which started with just two employees in 2017, had grown to 25 in February of this year. When Carter and I spoke in early June, they had 40 workers and were still hiring. They started with a farm in Brooklyn; they’ve opened a new one in Austin, and are stocking grocery store shelves in both New York and Texas.

Another mushroom grower in New York, Edward Hall, has seen interest in his products increase over the last few months, too. Some of the mushrooms his co-op, Mushrooms.nyc, sells are grown in an employee’s basement in Crown Heights, where inside a small humidified tent, blue oyster, king trumpet, and lion’s mane mushrooms bloom out bags of nutrient-enriched sawdust.

Mushrooms, which were the meat-substitute of choice before fake meats, seem to be having a bit of a culinary moment, with chefs like Matt Le-Khac at Bolero, a Vietnamese restaurant in Brooklyn, incorporating them into his signature vegetarian version of bun bo Hue, a dish traditionally made with a beef-based broth. In the last few months, lion’s mane, a variety of mushroom whose flesh tastes like crab meat, has gone viral on TikTok, which Carter attributes to a spike in sales. The video responsible, it seems, involves a lion’s mane mushroom hooked up to a synthesizer, which, according to the user who posted it, allows us to listen to its “biological activity.”

The mushroom is proliferating not just as food but in design, too. During the pandemic, mushrooms sporulated their way through my Instagram feed—photographs of alien-looking creatures growing out of trees spotted on walks in the woods, alongside ceramic designs and mushrooms sizzling in a pan—mushroom supplements, mushroom art prints. The mycelial tendrils seem to have reached into designs from brands like STORY mfg. and Online Ceramics. Even the amadou hat is in style. Mycophilia has taken hold as sporecore.

In the late 1960s, William Richards was among the researchers beginning to investigate the use of psilocybin in a psychiatric setting. The drug, now referred to interchangeably as a psychedelic (from the Greek, meaning “mind manifesting”) and entheogen (a medium to the “divine within”), had shown promise. Studies were published in reputable journals. Then President Nixon declared acid-trip guru Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America. The research funding dried up and the psychedelic research at the facility in Maryland, where Richards worked, was shut down in 1977.

I asked Richards what he did between the mid-70s and the founding of the research center at Johns Hopkins where he now works, which, in 2000, got regulatory approval to re-start psychedelics research. “Well, we tell our people in psychedelic therapy to trust, let go, and be open,” he said. “So I tried to apply that. And what did I do? I raised my two sons and played my piano and took care of my garden.” He taught college courses and worked in a private practice. Then: “All of a sudden, psychedelic research came alive again.”

Last year, at least 136 research articles were published that contained the word “psilocybin,” up from about 16 in 2010. The early results have been remarkable. Preliminary findings suggest that psilocybin-assisted therapy may help smokers quit, alcoholics recover, and terminally-ill cancer patients come to terms with their own mortality.

There are, of course, risks. In the depths of consciousness that psilocybin opens up, Richards cautions, “there be dragons,” as anyone who’s had a bad trip can tell you. A recent survey found that nearly 8 percent of people who experience such a trip sought psychiatric care, and researchers caution that we shouldn’t see these treatments as a panacea for all psychic woes. Still, opening those doors, for some, can lead to new insights. Richards published research finding that the chemicals in these mushrooms can bring about a “mystical experience.”

“Once you wake up inside that reality—some people would call it God, but whatever you call it, it is very real and very active,” Richards said. “You find yourself maybe being more compassionate, being more attuned to social injustice, being more courageous, being less self-centered.”

As psilocybin has flourished in psychiatric research, the compound has begun to make its way to the mainstream. No longer a symbol of 1960s counterculture, the possession of mushrooms that contain psilocybin is moving toward legalization in some parts of the country, with Denver decriminalizing them and Oregon voting to open the door to their use in a therapeutic setting.

I asked William Padilla-Brown, a mycologist in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, about whether the mycelium has a politics—whether a human society built like fungus might look more democratic or autocratic, more capitalistic or socialistic, than the world in which we currently live. “They seem like a centralized network-type organism, where they all have their branches and it all comes back to a homogenized, communism, kind of vibe,” he said. “But there is no individual.” Every fungus exists relationally to other organisms, according to Padilla-Brown, and the network is totally distributed. There is no center of control.

However different a fungal society might look, after a year of so much death, they evoke a cyclicality—they recycle the dead back into life. The inert crust of the planet comes alive when we consider the mycelium. Fungi can be mutualistic rather than parasitic, an idea that some scientists once deemed too sentimental a view of natural symbioses. They chart a path toward reframing our relationship with the non-human.

“I don’t know that I could give you, like, a term or a phrase for what that society would look like,” Padilla-Brown added, pausing, before his speech sped up and words tumbled out: “It would be made up of decentralized economically-regenerative sustainable micro-industries.”

In his excellent Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake wonders whether the psilocybin mushrooms are, in a sense, wearing us, the way Ophiocordyceps wears the carpenter ant. (The boundary between the self and the fungus can feel more permeable than fixed.) Scientifically, he concludes that the evidence isn’t quite there, but “whether or not fungi actually speak through humans and occupy our senses,” he writes, “the impact of psilocybin mushrooms on our thoughts and beliefs is real enough.” After all, if the mushrooms were speaking through us, might they not encourage us to wear them as they’ve worn us?

To consider the mushroom is to realize that, in Carter’s words, “this idea that we’re going to go to Mars without the rest of the ecosystem is ridiculous.” The myth of the atomized individual begins to fall apart. Life as we experience it exists, to some extent, thanks to the symbiotic mutualism of the fungi, and we might owe them recognition for that. Over the last few months, fungi oozed out of my phone screen and into my home, where I’m growing blue oyster mushrooms. What has always seemed so familiar—the shape of the moulding in a bedroom, the door you’ve walked through thousands of times, a background aesthetic—all of it bursts into high relief, through a feeling of gratitude, when one thinks for long enough about mushrooms.

Alex Lubben is a journalist in New York.