Mushrooms, Autumn and Grief

Part 1 of a 2 part series on food and grief

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CW: death, parent death

What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? I go for a walk, and if I’m really lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back to my senses, not just–like flowers–through their riotous colors and smells but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.

 – Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

The endless and constant project of paying attention is both mundane and revolutionary.

– Hannah McGregor, A Sentimental Education

I didn’t realize until very recently that in my sensory world mushrooms taste like the smell of autumn–like earthy, damp and delicious decay.

I probably should have noticed this sooner. I’ve read Anna Tsing after all and the prologue to The Mushroom at the End of the World is titled “Autumn Aroma.” I know of the intimacies of smelling and tasting, of how these sensory processes converge to produce flavour images, of how flavour images pull at threads of memory and possibility, orienting us, placing us in time and space. I know that in autumn leaves fall from the trees in the northern hemisphere, that the world gets damp, that wood holds moisture, that fungal spores thrive in wetness and darkness, that they require a medium rich with decaying plant matter.

 I know that as the weather turns I crave bites and sips imbued with an earthy umami. 

I know, I know, I know, but I only just started to notice.

I don’t know what to do with festering grief and autumn reminds me of this each year. When I can no longer hear the birds, the sound of wind through leaves or the cicadas giving the weather forecast, I stop listening as if there is nothing left to hear. As vibrancy quickly turns to mulch, as fruiting plants grow bare, their final bounty chewed out and rotting in the dirt, and as the skies empty, I look away as if there is nothing else to see.

Mushrooms do not share my proclivity for avoidance. They’re deep in the life of death every day, tending to it in the ways I wish I could. In this sense, mushrooms are instructive not only in confronting the “terrors of indeterminacy” that come from living in a place of ongoing environmental and political attoricities, and resistance to them, of which Tsing writes about, but also those of determinacy–that is, of living with grief; personal, communal, and ecological.

As I addressed last month, mushrooms have been granted an interesting place in public discourse, especially in relation to food and wellness. The benefits attributed to mushroom consumption are vast. They’re lauded for their capacity to “cure” inefficiencies in the body (or, rather, the proprietary blends of mushrooms packed in pretty little tinctures, sachets and jars are). In these contexts, mushrooms are removed from healing traditions, methodologies and rituals. They’re transplanted–or, I should say, trans-spored– across social media and dissolved into a mucky brown beverage that promises eternal youth, endless adaptability and the end of disability. They sound like a mythical promise around the messy business of hurting and dying and living and caring. They also set the scene for a capitalist dream where there is some potion for achieving a clear, linear and scalable mode of efficiency and growth that overrides those things that might slow us down.

And yet, fruiting bodies are inherently at odds with the kind of surplus production lauded here. They do not thrive in intensely regulated environments but require “the dynamic multispecies diversity of the forest–with its contaminating relationality” and rot (Tsing 40). I see them at work, breaking down an old hollowed stump to make way for other life; blooming from the ground in a seemingly random pattern on a neighbour’s lawn, or in the field where we walk the dog. One day they’re there. Another day, they are not. But even when I can’t see them the mycelia are still there, doing the kind of care work that not only makes the planet livable, but also explosively diverse. They are collaborative reapers of degrowth and survival. Not a cure, but a reckoning. 

That I used to hate mushrooms is a fact that I hate sharing. I understand how people may dislike their tastes– nothing is to everyone’s. But that’s not why I wouldn't eat them. Instead of being marveled by their earthy relations, I was once alarmed by their spontaneity, their irregularity, their riotousness, and how much they smell like dirt, even when washed (I bristle now). I didn’t like their confounding materiality, which shuttles in through nose and mouth, the tastes and smells of an unruly world. 

Somewhere along the way this changed. 

Maybe it was when autumn started to feel like the end of the world, when I started worrying that one spring nothing would grow, or that I wouldn’t be there to see it. Maybe it was on the fifth, or the tenth anniversary of my mom’s death. She was dying as the world was, one fall into winter many years ago now, and as I’m shuttled towards the twelfth anniversary of her last breath I want mushrooms. I want to read about radiotrophic fungi growing in the abandoned reactor at Chernobyl and how they hold catastrophe and possibility at once. I want to taste a grittiness that won’t wash off. I’m craving a rotting forest, that taste of dirt and shit, transfused through some brilliant metabolic process into something palatable. When hearing and seeing may not feel possible, with mushrooms I’ll taste my way along, and back, and through.

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Eating

It's been a big instant ramen month! And I finally, finally got to enjoy vegan croissants from Coven, which I’d been craving for so long!

Reading

What I finished this month:

• A Sentimental Education by Hannah McGregor

  I love Hannah McGregor so it is no surprise that I loved her book! I can’t adequately summarize all of the nuance but overall, critical work for those doing public scholarship and modeling care in scholarship. 

• Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat by John McQuaid

  I mean, I didn’t love this and I should have expected that. On the back it reads “Can’t resist the creamy smoothness of butter? Blame Darwinian natural selection.” There were some chapters that I found interesting, but overall, the book felt overly simplified, especially alongside Arielle Johnson’s work on flavour, which I’ve been reading for dissertation work.

• Noble Rot: Cosmic Chardonnay

  The art for this magazine is super cool and eye-catching, and there were definitely stories I enjoyed, but overall this feels way too much like a British boy’s club…not for me.

Question for you all– up until this point I’ve just been telling what I’ve finished each month, mostly for me to track my reading. However, as foodstuff has grown I’m realizing that this is probably not the most helpful format. Going forward, would you like me to keep telling you about the books I’ve finished or curate reading recommendations each month (maybe with a mini syllabus here and there)?

Upcoming Online Events

I wanted to send along some information for two exciting upcoming ONLINE events that are taking place in November in case anyone is interested!

November 15: Fruiting Bodies: The Interconnectedness of Fungi (small admission fee)

November 18: Taste of Place: how food connects to nostalgia, home and belonging (free admission)