Mushrooms at Female & Fungi

Bowl of mushrooms — Mushrooms in a Bowl (Photo credit: C. Bertelsen)

I know, I said my last post was the last until after Christmas, but I wanted to share something with you this bright sunny day.

Not long ago, some people who write the remarkable web site “Female & Fungi” contacted me about my book, Mushroom: A Global History. They wanted to know more about the book, so we “talked” and I sent them a little blurb about the book, which is now online at “Female & Fungi.”

An excerpt:

Mysterious and earthy, and often deadly, mushrooms have long mesmerized people. Take the words of the Rolfes, who wrote in 1925:

On the contrary, it [the mushroom] is a human subject. Many are the quaint fantasies which have been interwoven by man into its lore, and thus its history is almost his history. It starts with Adam and Eve, and it will continue after the ultimate man has looked his last on a dying world. It embraces not only our first ancestors, but such diverse characters as Judas Iscariot and the devil, Pliny and Erasmus Darwin, the fairies and witches, and baron Munchausen and Sir John Mandeville. ~ R. T. Rolfe and F. W. Rolfe, Romance of the Fungus World

Many of the earliest foragers were women, long known and respected for their intimate knowledge of this food – which is neither vegetable nor flesh. In the nineteenth century, when the U.S. government decided to print a small booklet about mushrooms, they sought out the women in the open market there, figuring that the women would know more than anyone which mushrooms were edible and safe.

Read the rest HERE.