Fungi Hunter

by Jennifer May and photographs by Jennifer May, March 25, 2009

 

There is a common conception that picking and eating wild mushrooms is a dangerous—perhaps even fatal—pursuit. Not according to John Boyle, a self-trained mushroom expert with whom I took a class several years ago.

“Actually, there’s no danger,” he said simply, over a slice of pizza in the Greene County hamlet of Cairo. “You don’t pick a mushroom unless you know it’s safe.”

“But what about all the stories of people getting sick and dying from eating a bad mushroom?” I asked.

“It’s not a gamble,” he said. “If you don’t know the mushroom is safe you have no business eating it.”

Fair enough, I thought. And the best way to learn about wild mushrooms? Slowly. From someone who knows.

Boyle began studying wild plants and mushrooms in the late 1960s. He learned how to live off the land as a protective measure in the days when he solo-trekked five days deep into the Adirondack Mountains. Slugs, he learned, are high in protein. “Oh they’re edible all right…but who would want to?”

These days, if you want to learn about wild plants and mushrooms, you begin by going to a library and choosing from a huge selection of specialized books and guides. When Boyle’s studies began, however, resources were scarce. “Back then if you wanted to know whether a plant was edible, you found somebody from the Depression. People in the country during the Depression knew how to use wild plants.” He would search local taverns for these wise old-timers and tease out their recipes.

Boyle and I flipped through the pages of a mushroom book on the table between us. A mushroom, Boyle explained, is like an apple on a tree: it is the fruiting body of the mycelium. The mycelium looks like white mesh and is found wherever a mushroom grows—under bark or among rotten leaves.
When the environment is favorable, it fruits. Mycelia may connect entire forests, and some mushrooms have symbiotic relationships with plants and trees—current studies suggest a tree at one side of a forest in need of nutrients from the other side may be able to get them through the hidden mycelial web.