mushrooms FORAGING FOR
By Natalie Elvy of frogs rafting
Before arriving in France the extent of my mushroom know-how was pre-packed and purchased button mushrooms fried on toast. Shortly after I’d moved here, my husband announced we were going mushroom hunting; I was underwhelmed. I knew one false-identification when foraging for and eating wild mushrooms could be fatal, and given my poor attention to detail I felt sure buying was more responsible. My lack of enthusiasm surprised him - it seems in France mushrooming is a pretty standard way to pass a damp autumn day; in some areas, it can even become quite vicious. My husband’s tales transformed the mushroom-ers of my imagination (kindly, retired couples filling time) to something more akin to an eccentric elite soldier. Committed and territorial, real mushroom hunters are secretive - they’ll never reveal their spots. Often decked out in camo gear to blend in and avoid tracking, the give-away (so you know you haven’t stumbled on a special-op) will be their wicker-baskets (mushrooms don’t like plastic bags). In Aveyron (a top spot) tyre slashing incidents are common during mushroom season, and researching this article I learned that when it comes to big-money mushrooms (truffles), there are tales of prize truffle dogs being poisoned or stolen, and an instance of a truffle poacher being shot dead by a landowner in 2010. It had never occurred to me to be intrigued (or even interested) in mushrooms, but a quick web search revealed their hidden depths. Their classification alone used to concern vegetarians and vegans, because they are closer to the animal
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foraging for mushrooms
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than the plant kingdom. Happily for mushroommunching vegans everywhere, their similarity to animals is only in the way they make energy. Unlike plants who live above ground and use the sun’s energy to keep them going, mushrooms need an external food source to sustain them (like animals). As they lack any central nervous system and digestion happens outside their ‘bodies’, mushrooms (along with yeast, slime-moulds, lichens and others) have had their very own ‘fungi’ classification since the late 1960s. The general consensus is, given edible mushrooms are packed full of vitamins B & D (which can be difficult to find outside of animal products), they are a beneficial addition to any diet, and given their ‘umami’ taste (essence of deliciousness in Japanese), they can deepen the flavour of many dishes.
pigs pinch them. The cost of white truffles, the rarest and most valuable in the world, starts at 2000 €/kg from truffle dealers, or 6000 €/kg from restaurants. The biggest single white truffle found in 50 years sold at auction in 2007 for £160,000 - it was 1,5kgs. These prices reflect not only the challenges of storage and global shipping (for maximum olfactory impact, a fresh white truffle must be shaved onto your plate less than 72 hours after it is unearthed), but also finding the truffle in the first place. Remarkably, and explaining the competitive nature of some mushroom hunters, humans cannot reliably cultivate many of our most desirable fungi, including truffles (found in warmer parts of France and Italy), cèpes, morilles and girolles (all of which can be found around here).
Many animals get excited about mushrooms. Pigs are particularly keen on truffles - the scent drives them into a frenzy, and they’ll plough a field with their snouts to find them, but they’ll hoover up any other fungi they happen upon. Our own enthusiasm is evidenced by the astronomical sums we’ll pay for truffle shavings and the lengths we take to train dogs to sniff them out before the
So what is a mushroom? It is to its underground network, as a grape to its vinyard - a tiny hydrated, inflated tip of a far bigger whole. Just as grapes spread the seeds of the vine, a mushroom is the reproductive solution for some fungi species. It is a reproductive organ and its job is to spread spores. The rest of the fungi is an enormous underground network of long strands of ‘mycelium’ that
