GROWING GOURMET - Anto2ni.it

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GROWING GOURMET AND MEDICINAL MUSHROOMS
Introduction
Mushrooms have never ceased to amaze me. The more I study them, the more I realize how little I
have known, and how much more there is to learn. For thousands of years, fungi have evoked a host of
responses from people—from fear and loathing to reverent adulation. And I am no exception.
When I was a little boy, wild mushrooms were looked upon with foreboding. It was not as if
my parents were afraid of them, but our Irish heritage lacked a tradition of teaching children
anything nice about mushrooms. In this peculiar climate of ignorance, rains fell and mushrooms
magically sprang forth, wilted in the sun, rotted and vanished without a trace. Given the scare
stories told about "experts" dying after eating wild mushrooms, my family gave me the best
advice they could: Stay away from all mushrooms, except those bought in the store. Naturally
rebellious, I took this admonition as a challenge, a call to arms, firing up an already overactive
imagination in a boy hungry for excitement.
When we were 7, my twin brother and I made a startling mycological discovery—Puff balls! We were
told that they were not poisonous, but if the spores got into your eyes, you would be instantly blinded!
This information was quickly put to good use. We would viciously assault each other with mature puffballs
which would burst upon impact and emit a cloud of brown spores. The battle would continue until
all the pufthalls in sight had been hurled. They provided us with hours of delight over the years. Neither
one of us ever went blind—although we both suffer from very poor eyesight.You must realize that
to a 7 year-old these free, ready-made missiles satisfied instincts for warfare on the most primal of levels.
This is my earliest memory of mushrooms, and to this day I consider it to be a positive emotional
experience. (Although I admit a psychiatrist might like to explore these feelings in greater detail.)
Not until I became a teenager did my hunter-gatherer instincts resurface, when a relative returned
from extensive travels in SouthAmerica.With a twinkle in his eyes, he spoke of his experiences with
the sacred Psilocybe mushrooms. I immediately set out to find these species, not in the jungles of
Colombia, but in fields and forests of Washington State where they were rumored to grow. For the
first several years, my searches provided me with an abundance of excellent edible species, but no
Psilocybes. Nevertheless, I was hooked.
When hiking through the mountains, I encountered so many mushrooms. They were a mystery
until I could match them with descriptions in a field guide. I soon came to learn that a mushroom
was described as"edible," "poisonous," or my favorite: "unknown," based on the experiences of others
like me, who boldly ingested them. People are rarely neutral in their opinion about mushrooms—
either they love them or they hate them. I took delight in striking fear into the hearts of the latter group
whose illogical distrust of fungi provoked my over-active imagination.
When I enrolled in the Evergreen State College in 1975, my skills at mushroom identification
earned the support of a professor with similar interests. My initial interest was taxonomy, and I soon
focused on fungal microscopy. The scanning electron microscope revealed new worlds, dimensional
landscapes I never dreamed possible. As my interest grew, the need for fresh material year-round
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