This video is sponsored by Squarespace. To understand what exactly mushrooms are,
and why they are so darn delicious, we must first understand that this is not
a vegetable. This is not even a plant. Mushrooms are not plants — nor are they
animals — though they can kind of look like it when you speed up their growth.
Yes, I filmed a mushroom time lapse in my basement. It was a ton of work to set up,
so you best believe I'ma get a lot of mileage out of that footage right now. Buckle up. This is not
a plant nor even part of a plant. It is part of a fungus. And fungi are their own kingdom of life,
totally apart from plants or animals. Fungi are their own thing. From a culinary perspective,
I think they're really more like animals. They usually have complete protein — all
the essential amino acids we need and we find in all meat, but only a few plants.
Mushrooms stick to pans the same way that meat does. They brown the same way that meat does.
They're rich in glutamates, the source of that meaty umami taste.
And they even kind of look like meat and they feel like meat when you chew them.
In light of all these factors, it should not be surprising that, from a biological perspective,
this actually is closer to an animal than it is to a plant. Says who? Says her.
"My name is Dr. [Megan] Biango-Daniels, and I'm a mycologist. So animals, like you and me — we
have stomachs and we have to, you know, eat food. Plants have to make their food. And fungi
are a lot more similar to animals. Even though they don't have stomachs, they have to secrete
enzymes and acids, and kind of digest their food and then slurp it back up."
Yum. Well, another fungus that we deal with in the kitchen all the time is yeast,
right? And maybe yeast don't seem very animal-like because they are unicellular — one cell per
organism. But mushrooms, or the fungi that make mushrooms, are multicellular complex beings with
organs, or at least organ-like structures. The mushroom that we eat is basically an organ
of the fungus. Specifically, it's a reproductive organ. Kind of even looks like it, doesn't it?
The mushroom is only part of the fungus. It's kind of an attachment, an appendage of the fungus. This
is an imperfect analogy for reasons that we'll explain later. But for right now, go with it.
If you think about our appendages, they are part of us. But if you cut one off, we are
still ourselves, right? Our self is here. Our main body is here. The appendage is part of us,
but it's not integral to us. Similar thing down here. Cut the mushroom away, and the fungus' main
body is still there. You just can't see it. So, whenever you look at a mushroom, you should
think of it as the tip of the iceberg. There's all of this stuff underneath the soil, and it's
probably the biggest part of that organism. It's down in there, inside the rotting tree or
whatever other substrate to the fungus is slowly digesting and slurping up. The organism's main
body is inside the wood. And here it is, the mycelium. If any part of the fungus
is the fungus, this is it. And these particular ones in Petri dishes belong to Hunter Pruett,
farmer owner of Middle Georgia Mushroom. "It's really the world's decomposer. This
little organism right here breaks down the lignin in the tree, then continues on just
plowing through it. It goes in through the bark — usually right where the bark meets the wood — and
it just climbs up and colonizes that tree. But that only happens as that tree is dead,
and as that tree is starting to decay. That's the importance of mushrooms in our society.
If we didn't have them, our forest would be just piled high, full of trees that have
grown and fell — if they could grow anymore — because there would be nothing to decay
and decompose that rotted wood, right?" As you can see, this organism is about way
more than dinner. I mean, I love mushrooms. Super tasty, super pretty. But the mycelium,
the hidden mycelium, that's really where the action is when it comes to this being.
"They sort of are doing a lot of things on a cellular level
in the mycelia that is sort of beneath notice. They're recombining, they're exchanging,
they're kind of having sex with themselves. It's very racy stuff, these mushrooms. And
then once they've done that, then they make the fruiting body and they kind of produce spores."
'Fruiting body' is the more scientific and broader term that encompasses
mushrooms. 'Mushroom' is an informal word that people tend to use to describe the types of
fruiting bodies that we would normally eat. The archetypal mushroom is this guy, the white button.
It's got a stem, a cap and gills underneath. But there are other species that are very
morphologically different, and yet we also call them mushrooms, like morels or these beautiful
lion's mane mushrooms that Hunter grows. Very tasty, very different from a toadstool
type of mushroom. And yet we call them mushrooms anyway, probably just because we eat them.
What I've been showing you here on this dead tree in my neighborhood is
a polypore or bracket fungus. People usually call these fruiting bodies conks, not mushrooms,
even though they're the same basic thing as a mushroom. It's an umbrella the mycelium
sends up to drop its spores into the wind, spreading its genetic material far and wide.
Biologically, it's basically the same thing as a mushroom, but the fruiting bodies of polypores
are really, really hard and woody usually. And so, people don't usually eat them,
and so nobody calls them mushrooms. They call them conks. Same deal with this lichen.
British Soldier lichen, they call it, because the fruiting bodies reminded people of Red Coats.
Those fruiting bodies are also super hard, so nobody ever thinks about eating them, so maybe
that's why nobody ever calls them mushrooms. But again, biologically speaking, it's the same basic
thing. It's an arm reaching up from the fungus and casting its spores into the wind, so they will go
off and grow into Fungus Jr. Look at this plated mycelium in the lab at Middle Georgia Mushroom.
See those little blue dots there? Those are the very beginnings of fruiting bodies. Blue
oyster mushrooms, specifically. That's how they look when they're all grown up.
When they're super tiny like this, they're called pins. Here's what those pins look like
a few days later. And a few days after that — pink oyster mushrooms, in this case. Yum.
And under the microscope, you can see those black dots. Those are the spores getting ready to drop.
Most people think mushrooms taste best when you harvest them right before they start to
drop their spores. After that, the fruiting body starts to decompose and go slimy because when the
spores are done, the mushroom has finished its job. The mycelium doesn't need it anymore.
So, that's one answer to the question: What even is a mushroom? It is the temporary reproductive
appendage of a fungus. Here's where that appendage analogy breaks down. To varying extents,
animals like us can regenerate severed parts, the way a fungus can. Break off the lizard's tail,
it grows a new tail, but the severed tail does not grow a new lizard.
If you were to say, chop off my hand, my hand would cease to be an organism. It
would just become a heap of dying cells. I'm the organism. The hand is not going to regrow
a whole extra human attached to it, though I wish it would, I could use a second pair
of hands around here. But unfortunately, with humans, this is just not possible.
With fungi though, this is exactly what can happen. You can cut off a part of
the fungus — that's what that thing in the middle is — and under the right conditions,
that severed part will grow into a clone of the original fungus. That's what Hunter is doing in
this Petri dish. He's cloning a particularly good genetic specimen that he wants to grow more of.
This is possible in part because of what the fungus is made out of. Almost all of this fungus
— the above ground part and the below ground part — they're all made out of the same basic material
called hyphae. A hypha is a string of fungal cells often only one cell wide. It's that thin.
"They're these long, very thin sort of filaments. And then they sort of twist and
wind together to create greater structures." Down in the mycelium, those filaments twist
themselves into these parallel cords called a rhizomorphs. They're called that because they
look and function a lot like plant roots. A rhizome is a kind of plant root.
"They serve as like highways. So, you know, they're secreting enzymes, they're moving
out into the environment, they're searching for food, and they're kind of transporting it
throughout these networks. It's really cool." When the mycelium is ready to send out its spores,
those hyphae just grow up and out, and then tangle around each other into these big
wadded masses. That's the fruiting body. The fruiting body is literally just a tangled mass
of those same hyphae. The mushroom and the mycelium are made out of the same stuff.
Probably the main reason we eat the fruiting body and not the mycelium is that it'd be really hard
to disentangle all of those little filaments from the rotting wood that they are growing through,
right? Though, there is a notable case of mycelia that people do eat: Tempeh.
This surprisingly tasty Indonesian meat substitute consists of soybeans bound in the mycelium of the
fungus that is eating them. We eat the whole thing, and it is a fermented, protein-rich
delight. Speaking of protein and carbs and other delicious things that we like and need to eat,
why are they in here? Why does the mushroom have them?
"I mean, you can think of all of the components of a mushroom serving a function to that
microorganism that's not different from the proteins and carbs in our bodies."
Fair enough, but if we look at plants, their fruits often contain these delicious and
nourishing substances expressly for us animals to eat. A tomato, for example,
is full of sugar in part because the vine that grew it wants me to eat its fruit so that I will
then disperse the seeds contained therein. So does the mushroom 'want' to be eaten in the same way?
Dr. Biango-Daniels says, "Not really." "From what we know about mushrooms, a lot of their
spore dispersal, so how they kind of get to new environments, is done by the wind and the rain.
I think that maybe the exception that I can think of off the top of my head would be truffles. So,
truffles have this very sort of potent smell that's attractive, not just to us, but there's
whole categories of truffles that I've heard people refer to as like squirrel truffles.
And they exist just so that, you know, rodents smell them and they smell amazing, and the rodents
dig them up because they think they want to eat them. And then in the process of doing that, they
kind of free the spores into the air, and kind of also get them on their little paws and transport
them everywhere and kind of spread it." But, of course, truffles are a rare case, in more
ways than one. Primarily, the nutrients inside a fruiting body are there for its own benefit,
not ours. This is probably why many mushrooms have evolved to be deadly poisonous to us animals. I
mean, I love mushrooms and I know a fair bit about them, but I still would never go out foraging for
mushrooms that I planned to eat, unless I had an experienced guide with me, like Hunter Pruett.
"Once you get past your visual and common identification methods, you move into a certain
color spore prints and a certain color bruising patterns. And it can really get
overwhelming, especially with the amount of species that we have on this planet, right?"
It is so complicated, made more complicated by the fact that mushrooms change dramatically in
their appearance, over the course of their very rapid growth cycle. Consider the death cap,
which is exactly what it sounds like. It's relatively easy to spot when it's
full grown. But when it's just coming up, it looks a lot like an edible straw mushroom.
People confuse them all the time, and the amatoxins in the mushroom just destroy their
liver and kidneys. This is no joke. So if you want to get your hands on some mushrooms that
are more interesting than the ones they maybe have down at the grocery store, might I suggest buying
a grow kit like the ones that Hunter sells. He knows exactly what species he's putting in
there for you. And I used one of his kits to grow my pink oysters down in
the basement. A ton of fun. There's a link to his store in the description.
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Thank you, Squarespace. And if you're curious about how exactly mushrooms are
farmed, how they're cultivated, what all that crazy gear down in Hunter's lab is for,
well get excited because we are going to go back down there with him another day.