The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [190]
Once the rains stopped in April the chanterelles were done for the year, and there wouldn’t be another important mushroom to hunt until the morels came up in May. I used the time before then to read about mushrooms and talk to mycologists, hoping to answer some of the questions I had collected about fungi, a life form I was beginning to regard as deeply mysterious. What made mushrooms mushroom when and where they did? Why do chanterelles associate with oaks and morels with pines? Why under this tree and not that one? How long do they live? Why do some mushrooms manufacture deadly toxins, not to mention powerful hallucinogens and a range of delicious flavors? I brought the gardener’s perspective to these plantlike objects, but of course they’re not plants, and plant knowledge is all but useless in understanding fungi, which are in fact more closely related to animals than they are to plants.
As it happens the answers to most of my questions about mushrooms, even the most straightforward ones, are elusive. Indeed, it is humbling to realize just how little we know about this, the third kingdom of life on earth. The books I consulted brimmed with confessions of their ignorance: “it is not known why this should be”…“the number of genders among fungi is as yet undetermined”…“the exact mechanisms by which this phenomenon occurs are not entirely understood at this time”…“the fundamental chemistry responsible for the vivid hallucinations was a mystery then, and remains so today”…“it is not certain whether the morel is a saprophytic or a mycorrhizal species, or perhaps it is both, a changeling”…and so on, through thousands of pages of the mycological literature. When I went to visit David Arora, the renowned mycologist whose doorstop of a field guide, Mushrooms Demystified, is the West Coast mushroomer’s bible, I asked him what he considered the big open questions in his field. Without a moment’s hesitation he named two: “Why here and not there? Why now and not then?”
In other words, we don’t know the most basic things about mushrooms.
Part of the problem is simply that fungi are very difficult to observe. What we call a mushroom is only the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger and essentially invisible organism that lives most of its life underground. The mushroom is the “fruiting body” of a subterranean network of microscopic hyphae, improbably long rootlike cells that thread themselves through the soil like neurons. Bunched like cables, the hyphae form webs of (still microscopic) mycelium. Mycologists can’t dig up a mushroom like a plant to study its structure because its mycelia are too tiny and delicate to tease from the soil without disintegrating. Hard as it may be to see a mushroom—the most visible and tangible part!—to see the whole organism of which it is merely a component may simply be impossible. Fungi also lack the comprehensible syntax of plants, the orderly and visible chronology of seed and vegetative growth, flower, fruit, and seed again. The fungi surely have a syntax of their own, but we don’t know all its rules, especially the ones that govern the creation of a mushroom, which can take three years or thirty, depending. On what? We don’t really know. All of which makes mushrooms seem autochthonous, arising seemingly from nowhere, seemingly without cause.
Fungi, lacking chlorophyll, differ from plants in that they can’t manufacture food energy from the sun. Like animals, they feed on organic matter made by plants,