A Box Full of Surprises

Most product companies try to keep varying types of fungi from being shipped with their product... ecovative design, a New York-based company is doing the opposite - they want to ship your product WITH fungi.

EcoCradle Packaging is an innovative alternative to the decidedly un-ecofriendly use of polystyrene, packing peanuts, plastic bubble wrap, and paper-based "filler" materials you're often stuck with when you unpack your delivered package.

That's because ecovative design's packaging material is grown. That's right, grown, with vegetative hulls. In just 7 days, miles of mycelia (mushroom roots, if you will) are produced, harvested, molded into a packing shape, and ready to accompany your favorite internet order.

Now I'll be the first to admit that this sounds suspiciously like the beginning of quite a few monster movies. Some crazy scientists (or government agency) holed up somewhere, discover a new process for doing something they think will help mankind... a beaker spills, a lightning storm, and BOOM!, you've got blood gushing everywhere and teenage couple being slaughtered in the woods.

So I contacted ecovative and requested a sample (for the good of mankind, of course). It arrived the other day, and though it wasn't a large sample, you can definitely see where they're going with this.

The mycelial "chunk" is light, surprisingly sturdy (I can pinch it between my thumb and forefinger... I hear a slight crackling sound, but I can't shatter it) and is somewhat attractive (as fungi goes). Both my wife and I did the same thing after first eyeing it... we smelled it. I mean if it were to smell like a old sock in a waterlogged basement, you probably wouldn't want your brand new Amazon package smelling like it, but was pleasantly surprised that it didn't smell like anything.

It's appearance reminds me of the Oyster Mushroom kit I buy once a year for the home school classes I teach (minus the actual mushrooms of course.)

The sample that I was sent was too small to actually use for packing material, but I did take a picture of one of my rubber apes in the box with it. I wouldn't hesitate at all sending Stamp Ape (well, that's his name) through the mail with this stuff. (Actually for now, it'll act as a nice little table for when he has his other ape friends over.)

With a recent article in Scientific American, and a nod as one of the 100 best innovations of 2009 by Popular Science, it appears this melding of fungi and sustainability may be in a box heading your way. You may want to peruse their website to get the full picture. My favorite part is from their FAQ:

Q. Can you eat it?

A. Well, you could, and because it's all natural it wouldn't hurt you. But, it's non-nutritious and doesn't taste very good, so we don't recommend it.

Cordyceps 1, Ants 1

For years I 've been fascinated by the Cordyceps fungi, a genus of fungi that is most known for, well, something out of a good science-fiction story. Able to penetrate a live host via spores and mycelium, it eventually grows into a fruiting body, often bursting through its still-living host. Many Cordyceps also display a type of body control by forcing the unlucky host into movement dictated by the fungus. All types of little critters can be affected, including tarantulas, grasshoppers, flies, and the mentioned ants.

Well it seems the ants are fighting back, sort of. Tired of this abuse, and certainly tired of being turned into zombies to do the bidding of a fungal overlord, recent studies, including a recent one by the University of Regensburg, Germany show that many ants, once affected, "desert the nest in the hours or even days before they died and made their way to a distant foraging area, where they died alone, away from the other workers. They left voluntarily, and were not forcibly removed by other worker ants." This seemingly selfless act appears to slow/prevent the fungus from spreading to other ants.

Ants have always had an interesting relationship with fungi. Leafcutter ants actually nurture and harvest different types of fungi.

We'll see what comes next. Perhaps this.

To Wash, Or Not to Wash

That is the question...

It's up there with some of the great conundrums: Paper or plastic? Invisibility or the ability to fly? Ginger or Mary Ann? Should you wash your mushrooms before cooking/eating them?

Growing up, I liked to make salads for my family. I'd wash, peel, and cut the vegetables, toss them in a bowl with half a bottle of Marie's Thousand Island dressing and place them out for my family. But what of the mushrooms? I was taught to wash and dry them.

But in the years since I've been chastised for such a culinary error of judgment. Don't get the mushrooms soggy! They'll be slimy! Mushrooms absorb water so they'll taste like WATER! Don't ruin them! Don't take one step closer to the sink with that bowl of mushrooms or you'll be walking home to Milbridge tonight! Actually that last one is part of another story.

So I haven't been washing them. I usually take a damp paper towel, wipe off the dirt (or other unidentifiable grunge if they're foraged) and prepare to cut.

Felicity Cloake at guardian.co.uk has thrown her hat in the ring and written an interesting (and highly entertaining) article about this very question. Calling up research from some of our great culinary minds, she not only tackles the question but puts both methods to the test. In one corner, the thoroughly washed and in the other, the thoroughly whisked. It's a taste test for the ages.

Her result? Well, you'll just have to read it.

Okay, okay... if you don't like clicking links I'll tell you that she found the washed lot slightly juicier. An exciting verdict? Not really. But hey, it's the middle of January in New England and it's snowing. I can't exactly go outside and look for chanterelles, so you'll have to take what you can get.

Merry Christmas from MycoBabble... I Think

It seems that this Christmas ornament recently sold on eBay for $76.00. Auctioned as a "realistic" mushroom ornament, it appears to be a carved bolete with large oatmeal-like mounds pasted to it. Oh, with eyes. There aren't any boletes that I know of with red caps with white spots. Or eyes.

But really, this is meant to be an Amanita muscaria (Fly Amanita). You know, the mushrooms commonly featured in children books and fantasy landscapes. You know, the ones with thinner stems. And a fleshy ring. And a multitude of small, white spots. You know, the ones without eyes.

But really really, the full description on eBay states this is a "realistic Mario mushroom" ornament... from the line of Mario video game and cartoon characters. And though I'm often familiar with video games featuring fungi, Mario is a little after my time.

But you can see a nice collection of Mario Mushroom pictures here on Google images. So if that's the criteria, then yes, this is a very realistic mushroom tree ornament.

MycoBattle!

As I've mentioned in this post and this post, I'm a big fan of video games where you wander around in armor and your diamond sword +3, looking for things to crush. You know, Acid Grubs or maybe an army of Murderous Cows... what's even better though, is if that game has mushrooms.

Enter The Sword of Fargoal, a new iPhone game based on a classic dungeon crawler from the 80's. Again, the object is to make your way through the dungeon floors... looking for something I suppose. Probably the Sword of Fargoal. Don't know... haven't made it so far yet.

But along the way... you guessed it. Evil Mushrooms.

Much like in real life, these fungi don't move around too much. In fact they just kind of sit there in the dirt waiting to be crushed. You can stomp on the smaller ones (letting out a satisfying crunch or squish) but the bigger ones you can't pass unless you engage in battle.

Most of the time they just kind of wilt and crumble. You get your experience points and journey on, but occasionally they do fight back. Not with maces or a wizard's dagger +1, but with...

Confusion!

That's right. As you can see my character has been turned into some sort of Jabba-The-Hutt snowbeast thing. And I don't even know what that pink, trumpet-faced, seahorse thingie is. Or that orange blobby goo. It's all quite confusing.

And thus ends another important look at the dangers of mushrooms.

The Sword of Fargoal is currently available for $2.99 on the iTunes app store. You can visit the developer's website at http://www.fargoal.com/.

Review: The Observer's Book of Common Fungi

I have a lot of mushroom guides. They come to me in different ways - I buy them, I bid on them on eBay, I receive them as gifts, some have been left in my work mailbox by anonymous donors... but the source of many of the hard-to-find, international, and just downright bizarre books have been those found by my friend, Elizabeth at the bookstore she works at. I've got a pile of them. Most of them are fairly outdated in the sense that the science of mycology has passed them by, either by new discoveries or by classification changes.

But they're fascinating nevertheless.

The Observer's Book of Common Fungi was published in 1958 by Frederick Warne & Co. LTD, as part of an Observer series that included editions on Pond Life, Larger Moths, Railway Locomotives of Britain, and Cacti and Other Succulents, among others. The authorship is credited to E.M. Wakefield and includes one of my favorite features of older guides - full color plates. In this case 32 of them. The descriptions listed in the book, about 200, are British species, though many of them can be found elsewhere.

Wakefield's Introduction begins -

"Soon after the first warm rains of autumn have softened the soil, the floors of our woodlands become carpeted, as if by magic, with a wealth of toadstools, large and small, brightly coloured or sinister-looking, sometimes strange in form, often beautiful."


The Introduction goes on to cover spore germination, life cycles, spore prints, classifications, in descriptions that are wonderfully concise. The 200 individual species descriptions have a personal tone to them and are often written in one long paragraph. Of the Shaggy Ink Cap, he writes -

"This well-known fungus needs little description. It comes up in groups on rich ground in late summer and autumn, and at times becomes a pest on bowling greens and tennis courts which have been laid out over ground containing rubbish ('made ground')."


Many fungi books of this time solely concentrated on mushrooms that were of the traditional cap and stem variety. Here, he is able to sneak in a few pages on shelf, stinkhorn, coral, bird's nest, and other sundry fruiting bodies.

Overall, this is a fun little book. Personable, (Wakefield refers to the Horn of Plenty as "sombre-looking") and informative, and coming in at about 100 pages and measuring an easily pocketable 4x6, it is worth keeping (or adding) to any mycological collection... even if it did have its 50th birthday last year.