Eating Wild Fungi: Fun or Foolhardy?

Eating Wild Fungi: Fun or Foolhardy?

Second speaker for the affirmative – Patrick Jones, 27 April 2012.

Before I begin I should just make clear that my objection to the paternalistic position these gentle folk here are defending has absolutely no expertise. I’m a complete mycological novice, an amateur, in fact the very idea of the specialist repulses me, it’s so twentieth century, so industrial, so cheap oil, so affluent, so not relevant anymore.

We need to be FUN gi and FUN gal foragers again in order to sense the world, to know it intimately, to do what science isn’t supposed to allow us to do – to love; to love the soil and its fruits.

Throughout the many diverse ecological cultures existing in Australia pre1788 the word ‘wild’ had no place; it belonged to no lexicon. ‘Fun’ however did, and so did the word ‘mushroom’. So I’m thinking of a little rewrite of the argument here in recognition or at least in reappearing Indigenous intelligence into the room and replace ‘wild’ with, I dunno, how about YES? Yes belongs to Aboriginal lexicons, wild does not. So let’s do something really naughty here and delete wild from the debate: Eating YES fungi: fun or foolhardy? Ah, that’s better.

Of course pre1788 land was radically altered by human technologies and there were definitive zones constructed such as fire-engineered perennial grassland pastures that grew grazing mammals as fenceless stock, stonelaid eel and fish traps and no-dig yam daisy crop fields, and these applied perennial food systems complimented or dovetailed into hunting and foraging modalities. This essentially is permaculture.

In pre1788 Australia there were also great tracks of land that weren’t as humanconstructed, but these were not regarded wild or separate within the many language groups, which shared common logic.

The success of these human ecological cultures are now well understood, and are alive and regenerating throughout Australia despite the persistent attacks, disappearances, genocides and assimilations.

So despite altering the land with fire and stonework and other forms of perennial food system management these pre1788 cultures are well known for backgrounding technology and labour, and foregrounding ecological knowledges. This is ultimate ecological intelligence.

Children learned how their land worked; its dynamic interrelatedness and their place on country. They learned what food was edible, what was toxic. A three-hour working day (approximately) was at the heart of their economic system and leisure played a significant part of every day’s activities. We need to reengage with this intelligence to land and economics.

Perhaps if we think of Stephanie Alexander’s kitchen garden programme for primary school kids ramped up ten thousand fold while paring back the abstract classroom stuff then we have the sort of learning that produces ecological cultures.

Another note before I continue: I’d like to use the word ‘fun’ here to mean living well, elevated from its typical status as meaning some vacuous consumption of limited world resources for self-interested pleasure and pollution entitlement. Fun, in a non-polluting way, therefore – is to be light, loose, experimental, even at times foolish. Without these things little learning can take place and we remain stuck in the rut of dominant paradigms such as supermarkets, industrialised travel, fossil fuel energies. In short stuck in the rut of a ‘privatised pollution ideology’ and persevering with making pollution the world’s largest commodity market.

So, if fun then is living well without being polluters we can again draw on Indigenous models across Australia for doing just that: living with little or no illness, no tooth decay,

maintaining three-hour working days, having abundant food and abundant leisure time, having abundant diet diversity with high nutrient density.

After the second world war we didn’t know what to do with all the mass death science we invented to exterminate each other so we kicked intuitive domestic food knowledges built up over millennia in the teeth and replaced it with instant industrialised food science – I call ag science today shareholder science (but really it’s war science transferred) – and what has come from this? Diabetes and obesity epidemics of course, wholesale degradation of the landbase, man-made mass death of soil microbials and stomach flora, compaction and erosion, greater flooding, poisoned rivers and oceans, skyrocketing cancer rates… I could go on and on, but we know all this, right?

Or do we?

Today we work for a monetary economy that demands we build wealth and pollution as synonymous friends, have expensive tooth surgery (I call my teeth the Howard Years, but that’s probably unfair, I should just call them my Agricultural Years), and we have a mental illness epidemic where self-harm, anxiety, addiction and depression rates have all doubled every decade from the 1950s on.

Now where’s the fun in all that? If we were humble gardeners and foragers not cutters and poisoners of the soil we would not be facing ecological crises. Ecological cultures think several generations forward in terms of land management but ours has hoovered a thousand years of oil in one brief century.

Thankfully oil has peaked, and instead of romantically wishing, pathetically hoping for an ecological culture it will be soon forced on us. FUN FUN FUN! Hunting YES mushrooms and harvesting autonomous plants as supplementary food and medicine is not only fun, it attends to the toxic industrialised corporate food ideology and the food system that preceded it – sexually repressive Christian Agricultural Toil. Clocks,

bibles, ploughs and glysophate are instruments of control, repression and colonisation, not fun. Foraging for blue meanies or wood blewits and other sentient delights on the other hand banishes the repressive and demands the sensual, the erotic, embodies the fact that life wants to be lived in perennial utopias, anything else is just anthropocenic interruption, but days numbered.

So we must throw our clocks into a heaving teeming soil of clock-eating YESmushrooms and begin to live again, have fun again. Decompressed uncapitalised time allows for something very magical to happen, something rare within the constraints of progress-capitalism – the time to observe, sense muse and interact with the world or worlds of the world.

One way of destroying a hyper-abstracted and destructive culture before it destroys us is to involve children in foraging, hunting and gardening. To garden and tend to plants, understanding the loving economies gifted by plants and mushrooms for all of human history. To forage taking in the whole of our local lands and recognising the seeds, roots, fruits, pulses, herbs, nuts and Yes-‘shrooms that have benefits to humans directly and indirectly; poisonous and non-poisonous. To hunt mushrooms which have closer DNA to animals than plants, or to hunt wild ducks, not for sport or for fun in the capitalist extractive concept of the word, but for fun in the ‘living well’ generative meaning of the word; or to put it another way living within the capacities of the local landbase, understanding ourselves as autopoetical-ecological players both in taking diverse life and making diverse life; recognising ourselves as competitors in the creaturely sense not in the Cartesian Christian-capitalist non-sense.

EXPAND, POLLUTE, COMMAND, FEAR need to be replaced by OBSERVE, INTERACT, UNDERSTAND, HAVE FUN. This project is bigger than mere capitalism. Being ecological players again means not creating waste, forgetting to distinguish between wild and cultivated spaces, human and nonhuman; it means that private property is dismantled and the commons reopened. It

means the universal isn’t jet setting around the globe extracting information but actually being a participant in generating real life systems that nourishes the biota. What fun it is to be post-bourgeoisie!

Imagine our children being able to identify 50 edible species of mushrooms because they’ve never seen a gaming consol, TV, or a shop full of sweatshop brands and their open minds were never scraped out by schooling, never classroomed for industrialism, never abused by admen. What fun that world would be!

Imagine the roadmap to wage-slavery that we impart to our kids in school is replaced with a fungi map so that by the time kids are eighteen they don’t just forage for their free proteins and psychotropics in the commons open to everyone, but they understand another 200 or more species and their ecological function in creating soils that allow for abundant life. What fun! Imagine that. Fun Fun Fun! Myco-remediation of toxiculture! FUN Yes-fungi and its life giving, FUN-making qualities is central to this new culture that composts greed via our non-participation in corporate life – and while there is good warmth and nominal moisture in the soil we’ll eat spontaneous plant and yes‘shroom life and replace totalising oil with ecological functioning – step by step – which simply means we regain autopoesis – we harvest, hunt and glean.