60 CHESTER COUNTY PRESS - MUSHROOM GUIDE WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2021
By Steven Hoffman and Maggie Horgan The Mushroom Festival is celebrating its 36th anniversary in Kennett Square in 2021, so to commemorate the special occasion, here is a list of 36 interesting facts about mushrooms.
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ushrooms have been eaten for thousands of M years and can grow almost anywhere.
E arly Romans referred to mushrooms as the “food of the gods.”
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Mushrooms love the dark. They thrive on it.
Mushroom production has becoming increas ingly high-tech, with more and more computers being used to monitor production at each step.
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mycophile is someone whose hobby is to hunt A edible wild mushrooms. .
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ne portabella mushroom has more potassium O than a banana.
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There are over 38,000 varieties of mushrooms available, over 3,000 in North America alone, with varying colors, textures, and flavors. There are so many varieties of mushrooms, both edible and toxic, that mass consumption is pretty much limited to those commercially grown varieties which can be trusted to be edible.
J .B. Swayne is credited with starting mushroom growing in the United States. Swayne started to cultivate mushrooms in Kennett Square which is, of course, the Mushroom Capital of the World.
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ushrooms are the fruiting bodies of certain M fungi—the equivalent of the apple, not the tree. Fungi, including those which produce mushrooms, are not plants. They are related to molds, mildews, rusts, and yeasts, and are classified in the Fungi Kingdom.
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In ancient Egypt, only Pharaohs were allowed to eat mushrooms because it was believed that the mushrooms appeared magically overnight. It was speculated at that time that lightning may have created the mushrooms.
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According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the average American eats about four pounds of mushrooms every year.
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The first recorded effort to cultivate mushrooms occurred around 1700 in France.
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Mushrooms are useful not only as food and medicine—there are new uses being discovered all the time. Some mushroom varieties are being used in bioremediation to absorb and digest substances like oil, pesticides and industrial waste in places where these substances threaten the environment.
