Mushrooms and Economic Botany 1 DAVID ARORA* ,2 AND GLENN H. SHEPARD,JR. 3 2 Dept. of Forest Science, Oregon State University, 3200 Jefferson Way, Corvallis, OR 97331, USA 3 Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K. *Corresponding author; e-mail: arora_david@yahoo.com Mushroom. Fungus. Toadstool. Depending on the context and the company, these words may evoke chuckles, raised eyebrows, an avaricious gaze, frowns of apprehension, legal censure, or murmurs of delight. A haiku by Shigetaka (cited in Arora 1991) celebrates the matsutake (“pine mushroom”) as an almost erotic fantasy come true: It is no dream matsutake are growing on the belly of the mountain Russian writer Konstantin Paustovskiy evokes the sensory experience of mushroom gathering: “The mushroom-scented air of the birch groves is far dearer than the fragrance of the magnolia” (cited in Arora 1991:262). The British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (cited in Arora 1986:2), by contrast, portrays wild mush- rooms as embodiments of death and decay: And agarics and fungi, with mildew and mould Started like mist from the wet ground cold Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead With a spirit of growth had been animated The tendency to use the word “mushroom” pejoratively persists widely in modern English. To paraphrase the late Stephen Jay Gould, prosperity and the arts “flower” while urban crime “mush- rooms.” Many people in the United States are familiar with the schoolyard rhyme, “There’sa fungus among us/And we must stamp it out!!” How different is the sense of awe and wonder expressed in a Nahuatl saying from Morelos, Mexico: Tlategüini, xcaguigan, in mogüitlaxcactia in nanagamé—“It is thundering, listen you all, the mushrooms are putting on their shoes” (de Avila and Guzman 1980:312). Jared Diamond (1989:19), who has spent years documenting the detailed botanical and zoological knowledge of the Foré people of New Guinea, admits to a sudden sense of apprehension when his hosts served him forest mushrooms: [We] were starving in the jungle... one of the men brought in a large rucksack full of mushrooms that he had found and started to roast. Dinner at last! But then I had an uncomfortable thought: what if the mushrooms were poisonous?.. [I told them that] although we were all hungry, it just wasn’t worth the risk. At that point my companions got angry and told me to shut up and listen while they explained some things to me. After I had been quizzing them for years about the names of birds and frogs, how could I insult them by assuming they didn’t have names for different mushrooms? Only Americans could be so stupid as to confuse safe and poisonous mushrooms. They went on to lecture me about 29 types of edible mushrooms, of which 15 grew on trees and 14 grew on the ground. The irony is clear: even someone who has made a career of studying and eulogizing native knowledge about the biological world is not immune to a cultural taboo so powerful that he was willing to endure hunger while offending his hosts’ intelligence and refusing their generosity. By contrast, many mushroom hunters lack generosity when it comes to revealing the locations of their favorite mushroom patches. And legend has it among the Bisa people of central Africa that their ancestors split into different groups, one called the Mushroom Clan, because some of them refused to share edible mushrooms with the others (Merrett 2008). Economic Botany, 62(3), 2008, pp. 207–212 © 2008, by The New York Botanical Garden Press, Bronx, NY 10458-5126 U.S.A. 1 Published online 29 October 2008.