“There is an uncanniness, a way in which [fungi] were not behaving perfectly, in which it’s hard to study them in a petri dish… They upset that wish that everything would fall into binaries and categories that have made sense.” – Maria Pinto
What can we learn from looking toward the margins of fungal histories? How do fungi resist dominant ways of thinking and knowing? And how does the trickster figure of Anansi relate to mycology?
This week, I’m honored bring you my conversation with Maria Pinto, an educator and the author of Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival.
Join us as we dive into the past and present of mycophile worlds, then dream into our shared fungal futures ~~
Highlights from our conversation I’m still sitting with…
This part on Maria unearthing and reconnecting with Black traditions and storytelling around mushroom hunting…
Green Dreamer Kaméa: In one of your presentations, you raised this question for the audience and you ask, “How many of you know what your ancestors’ relationship to fungi is?”
Then you show this chart by Gary Linkoff, which in a very reductive way, kind of groups people of different cultures and geographic regions into them either being mycophilic or mycophobic. Under the mycophilic column, there’s notes like French Canada, Asian countries like China, Japan, and Australian Aboriginal people, Native people in Mexico and Africa, scattered peoples in West and East Africa.
So you said, “When I see ‘scattered peoples in West and East Africa,’ I feel it wasn’t completed. So I went mycophile hunting.” I’m curious where you went from here and what stood out to you most from what you learned.
Maria Pinto: Unsurprisingly, there is a whole universe out there of folks who have been hunting mushrooms for ages, for hundreds, if not thousands, in some cases, years.
I appreciate and understand where Mr. Linkoff, who by all accounts was a stand-up guy. He was an amazing speaker on behalf of fungi. He loved mushrooms and also people who love mushrooms. But it did sting a little bit to see that list.
Then to go and find that there is, for instance, family in Uganda who have a certain type of mushroom as their totem and who therefore count this mushroom as kin, the kinship lines are mycelial, and this grows up out of a rich tradition of hunting mushrooms in that region. That kinship means that it’s taboo for this kinship line to eat those mushrooms, but they are allowed to be guides for others to show what best practices are for other people from different clans to engage with the mushroom and eat the mushroom.
Finding things like that, finding cosmologies, whole ways of explaining how the world came to be what it is from West African folklore that was collected in the 19th century when folks were going around trying to see what they could steal and glean from Indigenous cultures.
You get this West African tale about debts being passed from one species to another through this very sort of mycelial and interesting storytelling device. Other stories from other kinship lines where the craters on the moon are explained by the fact that someone who was mushroom hunting and who died in the course of mushroom hunting scattered his caps, the caps of his mushrooms all over the surface of the moon… and that’s why the craters are there.
I found so much, I found such rich and such beautiful storytelling when I went mycophile hunting. […]
I realized that I did not necessarily have to be jealous of folks from Italy and Russia and China and other places with a long history of mushroom hunting. Black folks have that lineage or those lineages as well. It’s just not as spoken about, not as romanticized.”
This part on being cautious around labels of “invasive” species, while also recognizing the reality of ecological disruption…
Maria Pinto: There is definitely a concept of invasion and invasive species in the mycological community. We’re seeing it right now with the golden oyster mushroom, for instance, which has jumped cultivation. It is an incredibly virulent, very successful species because it sends out lots and lots of spores per second.
But it also wreaks havoc on the ecosystems that it is not native to.
I am not going to remember exactly where it’s from, but it has been sort of making a slow eastward migration from wherever it jumped cultivation. And I’m just waiting for the day when I see a beautiful — they’re so stunning — golden oyster, like sort of bounty in one of my stomping grounds, essentially.
But they sort of crowd out native mycelium, and they are extremely parasitic upon trees. So it is definitely something to look out for. It’s a human-introduced thing, obviously. The jumping of cultivation is definitely a thing that we’re cognizant of and keep our eyes out for.
But there’s also the death cap, which, it’s not a North American, so-called North America, it’s not from here, and it’s a European species. So the worry there is when a deadly toxic mushroom makes a jump to a habitat where people are picking mushrooms and are not used to seeing this mushroom, that it’s actually pretty dangerous. The idea is I think that it came in on imported trees, imported oaks. And I’ve seen the debate raging...
But as I hope that we are aware, this talk around invasiveness and around what belongs here and what doesn’t, it can get really problematic really quickly. And I see the debate playing out in ways that I’m interested in pushing back on culturally and then scientifically. It’s like the sort of warring sides of one’s understanding of a topic.
It definitely plays out for me there because sometimes I’m like, what are we really talking about here? Then it also is damaging the ecosystems as we know them. They’re changing rapidly in ways that can be kind of frightening.
So yeah, it’s a really interesting thing to sort of keep your wits about you and discuss cautiously.
Cozy up and tap in ~
Tune into our full audio discussion with the embedded audio player on Substack or via Green Dreamer EP474; and join as a supporting subscriber to watch the bonus video version of our conversation here!
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About our guest ~
Maria Pinto is an author and educator living in the Boston area. She teaches for the literary nonprofit GrubStreet, and her book of lyric essays about mushrooms, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, was published by Great Circle Books at UNC Press.
Artistic credits ~
(B/c we cherish art from real humans!!)
Follow and browse more from our episode artwork’s illustrator: Paul Lewin (Instagram @paullewinart)
Jive to this episode’s musical offering: “If You Want To, You Will” by Lemon Myrtle
Sink in deeper ~
Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, a book by Maria Pinto
Watch Maria Pinto’s lecture “Dispatches from the African Diaspor(e)a”
Learn more about the fungi Amanita muscaria
Discover the works of poet and essayist Anne Boyer
Watch the video “West African Folk Tales: How Mushrooms First Grew”
Read learn more about Anansi (or Ananse), the West African spider-god
Check out Orion Magazine
Rhizome out further ~
Patricia Kaishian: Lessons from fungi as queer companions (Ep407)
Bayo Akomolafe: Slowing down and surrendering human centrality (Ep317)
Imagine, embody, alchemize ~
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