The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [192]
Andrew Weil points out an interesting paradox about mushrooms: It’s difficult to reconcile the extraordinary energies of these organisms with the fact that they contain relatively little of the kind of energy that scientists usually measure: calories. Because they don’t supply many calories, nutritionists don’t regard mushrooms as an important source of nutrition. (They do provide some minerals and vitamins, as well as a few essential amino acids, which are what give some species their meaty flavor.) But calories are simply units of solar energy that have been captured and stored by green plants and, as Weil points out, “mushrooms have little to do with the sun.” They emerge at night and wither in the light of day. Their energies are of an entirely different order from those of plants, and their energies are prodigious and strange. Consider:
There are fungi like the shaggy mane (Coprinus comatus) that can push their soft fleshy tissue through asphalt. Inky caps (Coprinus atramentarius) can mushroom in a matter of hours and then, over the course of a day, dissolve themselves into a puddle of blackish ink. Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) can digest a pile of petrochemical sludge in a fortnight, transforming the toxic waste into edible protein. (This alchemy makes more sense when you recall that what saprophytic mushrooms have evolved to do is break down complex organic molecules, which is precisely what petrochemicals are.) Jack o’lanterns (Omphalotus olivascens) can glow in the dark, emitting an eerie blue bioluminescence for reasons unknown. The psilocybes can alter the texture of human consciousness and inspire visions; Amanita muscaria can derange the mind. And of course there are the handful of fungi that can kill.
We don’t have the scientific tools to measure or even account for these fungi’s unusual powers. Weil speculates that their energies derive from the moon rather than the sun, that mushrooms contain, instead of calories of solar origin, prodigious amounts of lunar energy.
Okay, it is hard, I agree, to avoid the conclusion that some of the people who write about mushrooms have themselves partaken, perhaps immoderately, of the mind-altering kinds. Their reverence for their subject runs so deep that they will pursue it wherever it leads, even if that means occasionally leaping the fence of current scientific understanding. In the case of mushrooms, that’s not a very tall or sturdy fence. A powerful and compelling strain of mysticism runs like branching mycelia through the mycological literature, where I encountered one incredible speculation after another: that the mycelia of fungi are literally neurons, together comprising an organ of terrestrial intelligence and communication (Paul Stamets); that the ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms by the higher primates spurred the rapid evolution of the human brain (Terence McKenna); that the hallucinogenic mushrooms ingested by early man inspired the shamanic visions that led to the birth of religion (Gordon Wasson); that the ritual ingestion of a hallucinogenic fungus—called ergot—by Greek thinkers (including Plato) at Eleusis is responsible for some of the greatest achievements of Greek culture, including Platonic philosophy (Wasson again); that wild mushrooms in the diet, by nourishing the human unconscious with lunar energy, “stimulate imagination and intuition” (Andrew Weil).
I’m not prepared to discount any of these speculations just because they’re not provable by our science. Mushrooms are mysterious. Who’s to say the day won’t come when science will be able to measure the fungi’s exotic energies, perhaps even