145 Mushroom History - Food Edition & What Eactly is a Mushroom Anyway?

In this edition of, hey cool, we still have National Parks. I will bring your attention to Congri National Park in South Carolina. I pulled this one out of the pile because it's a great place to find the subject of this episode. Mushrooms. Located more or less in the middle of the state between Colombia and Charleston, South Carolina, along the part of the Congri River that spreads out into

bottomland and swamps. This sort of environment is rich in diverse life, plant, animal, and fungus. Since mushrooms are usually around 80% water by volume, they tend to be common and prodigious in areas with a constant water supply. And their role as decomposers is essential in the rapid nutrient cycling required in a swamp environment. The old growth force that is preserved in

in Kong Green National Park is unique in an area that has long been mined for its natural riches and timber soil and wildlife. The complex biosphere of life around this river bottom is an important storehouse of native plant, animal and fungus species that pull together the rich life that made South Carolina

so desirable for the early colonists and the indigenous people that made their home there before colonization. Push them west. This popular park while lacking huge canyons or tall peaks has its own attractions with

miles of rivers, creeks and swamps. And all of this is not just great ground for growing mushrooms, it's also home to one of three species of synchronous fireflies. This year the viewing events will take place from May 14 through May 21st.

This is such a popular event that there's a lottery to get tickets, which shall last is already passed, but if you're in the area or want to be, put the Firefly viewing lottery, which happens in early April, on your calendar for next year. And look around, there are synchronous Firefly viewing events at other parks from South Carolina

all the way north to Pennsylvania, and like mushrooms, Fireflies like plenty of moisture too. And let's keep our parks in good shape so they can continue to provide these sorts of unique experiences.

here at Congri and at hundreds of other parks around the country. Episode 145, Mushroom History, Food Edition and what exactly is a mushroom anyway? Hello and welcome to the History of American Food.

This week I'll be looking at the history of mushrooms and they have a long history of humans but the food part of that is not that little documented. I'll also spend some time on what exactly a mushroom is and why all humans are probably living on planet fungess and should sort out how to do a better job of that.

So pull up to your place at the table and let's dig in. The first thing you need to know is that mushrooms are the fritting bodies of a set of fungi, and that fungi are not plants, and they're not animals either. In fact, they're their own thing.

But until the classification of living things became more sophisticated, they were generally classed as a plant until the middle of the 20th century. There's a much longer history of mushrooms on the American continents. Then the period I'm going to look at in my next episode.

But much of that was initially largely lost as the Americans became the destination for adventurous Europeans. But it is being uncovered and recovered slowly as America starts to recognize the importance of specific mushrooms, fungi generally, and how a cautious and cooperative relationship

with fungus will serve humans and the planet much better than the combat of and controlling relationship it has unsuccessfully attempted for the last 400 years or so. The first awareness of the existence of extensive gathering and use of mushrooms for the purposes of worship and medicine in the Americas by visiting or invading Europeans

goes back about 600 years. There's documentation from the middle of the 1500s by one of the many Jesuits who traveled with the conquistadors. He wrote descriptions of mushroom types collected and outlined their uses, while also condemning

these activities since they were definitely en-Christian and probably occult. And so much of the purpose of recording them was to accurately and actively suppress them. When these documents were rediscovered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was some controversy about whether those early-ish Spanish depictions and descriptions of these

mushrooms were actually peyote cactus. After all, the cactus does have a bulbous shape reminiscent of mushrooms, and it is responsible for hallucinatory visions due to its manufacture of the alkaloid masculine. And the first recorded uses of mushrooms were notably about how they were used in service

of producing visions, added to all this confusion. Now it was argued that because Pioti grows in northern Mexico in higher and drier climates, but the recorded mushroom activity was happening in the Aztec Empire, which was down along the southern lobe of the Gulf of Mexico.

But this was not really a persuasive argument since there was already a long history in Europe of transporting both forged and cultivated items that produced pleasurable and hallucinatory effects far from their place of origin. Europeans in the 16th century had experienced the transport of such things as opium, coffee,

saffron and even psychoactive, European mushrooms. However, in the 1930s, a version of the mushroom cult mentioned in the 16th century was documented in the state of Wahaaka. Mushrooms included.

Later on, mushroom awareness, warship and even cults would form out of research published in the 1950s regarding Central and South American mushrooms that were used for spiritual and eventually recreational purposes. So after much backing in forthing the consensus was that yes, the so-called flesh of the

gods being consumed by Aztecs and recorded by those banished aspoilers and religious scholars were actually mushrooms. Along with the more exciting transgressive mushroom encounters, there were also accounts of locals who ate a fungus that grew on corn.

Some even cultivating it deliberately.