Erecting a Third Culinary Kingdom

I recently made the proposal in a fit of faux outrage that mushrooms are disrespected by being shelved in nearly all cookbooks unceremoniously under "Vegetables."  And this isn't just my imagination: from illustrious home science cookbooks such as "On Food and Cooking" by Harold McGee, to "The Food Lab" by J. Kenji Alt-lopez, to the physical locations of mushrooms in grocery stores, our collective bias, perhaps fueled by misunderstanding, have forced mushrooms into the vegetable section.

You often find the missive "mushrooms are not true plants," as if this were enough to then disregard the factual data which show that not only are fungus definitively not plants, they are evolutionarily older than plants, in fact the progenitor of Kingdom Plantae (Fungi are also the evolutionary progenitor of Kingdom Animalia as well). If anything were fair in this world, vegetables would be a footnote in the fungus section of the cookbook. Maybe not, but such is the depths of my outrage in discovering such bias not only throughout the body public, but also in my own intellectual comprehension. The battle to erect a Third Culinary Kingdom just became personal, as well, as I see bias within me melting away.

Now wait a minute, you say, there is no "Fungus" section in cookbooks.  That is true.

Not yet, at least.

In a recent conversation as I began advocating for a Third Culinary Kingdom to be added to all culinary literature, it seemed a simple task to simply pull all of the information we have collected on cooking mushrooms, in all their varied forms from the vegetable section and simply create a new section. My initial desire to write this book began as a quest to expand the information on specific mushroom fruiting bodies, and collect the data to one digestible location and volume.  But would this new section only include recipes for the 30 or so mushrooms--wild and cultivated--that we utilize in cooking?

As I began to realize, the answer to this quandary is actually far more complicated and considerably more exciting. To illustrate this excitement, we need to take a step back in time, for this episode of Throwback Thursday.
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As has been detailed in previous posts, the difference between mushrooms and fungus is an extremely important distinction. When we talk about the Fungal Kingdom we are not simply talking about mushrooms, though they are the most visible and obvious avatar for the entire bunch, but referencing the Kingdom itself.  Just as the animal kingdom covers everything from shrimps to horses to humans, the Kingdom of Fungi covers all things fungus, from the undescribed under sea molds that help degrade fish, all the way to the beautiful variety of the the fruiting bodies with which we are so familiar.

I have to admit that I have been speaking incorrectly when giving my recent presentations.  One of the more interesting aspects of human and fungal evolution, is that it appears--in direct contrast to the apple or corn or other widely cultivated food stuffs that have evolved with us--that both lines existed in parallel to one another, and developed as they have without any type of evolutionary pressure in either direction. This is true only so long as one sees the fruiting bodies of mushrooms as the only representatives of our culinary interactions.

The point is well illustrated by the human relationship with the plant Maize--what we call corn.  Maize was a small granular form of grass that produced a tiny (2-3cm maximum) single seed pod per plant--called teosinte--a mere 11,000 years ago. Through selective cultivation this tiny source of scant food was transformed into the five different distinct genetic varieties of Maize still in use today, and within these five varieties, the hundreds of phenotypic varieties as well. The result is the multi-colored and variety of shapes that are as numerous as there are valleys in Oaxaca.  This one plant has allowed for the expansion of human settlements throughout Mexico and all of the Americas, and is a staple part of the human diet all over the globe. There is no question that maize/corn was and remains one of the most important symbiotic relationships humans have formed in our recent past.

As the most telling contrast with edible mushrooms, the morel (Morchella spp.)--as detailed in an earlier post--evolved in their current form 129 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous Period, at a time when dinosaurs would still rule the earth for another 65 million years. Yes we eat morels, but we do not rely on them. And we help disperse their spores; but they do not rely on us.

And so I have stated in my talks on the science of cooking mushrooms that we operated in parallel. But I am sorry to say that I have been wrong, and I apologize for allowing the bias against fungus that I am constantly fighting to creep into my own observations. 

Fungi and recent Human Evolution
It would be a very different world indeed if we had not isolated penicillin from a moldy cantaloupe mid-WWII. Perhaps the Allied Forces would not have won the war; perhaps the diseases that tend to aggregate in hospitals would have wiped out a significant portion of the population much earlier.  Penicillin, the collective name for antibiotic medicines derived from various strains of molds--the Penicilliums, all fungi but none a mushroom--indisputably affected human evolution, though being inside the affected/surviving group, it may be hard to say with certainty what the result would have been had we not made our alliance when we did.

Curiously, strains of Penicillium mold were already being used in cheese making and cured meats long before its ubiquitous use in modern medicine. “Mould ripened cheeses include semi-hard cheese—e.g. Stilton, Roquefort—in which the ripening agent, Penicillium roqueforti, grows in the interior of the cheese, and also soft cheese of comparatively small size or shallow depth—e.g. Camembert or Brie—in which the mould-ripening agent P. camemberti or more usually P. caseicolum (P. candidum) grows on the surface of the cheese” [THE MICROBIOLOGICAL EXAMINATION OF CHEESE, W.F. Harrigan, Margaret E. McCance, in Laboratory Methods in Microbiology, 1966]. Though data would prove hard if not impossible to gather, the preponderance of evidence would suggest that by extending the shelf life of dairy and meat products, we humans were able to expand our empires more effectively. Research shows that the molds we use for cheese production produce fungal toxins in the lab, and some tests have shown extensive liver damage to lab rats when exposed to the toxins produced by Penicillium roquefortii, the primary mold used in blue cheese making.  But despite the toxins in isolated cultures of these molds, they have never been found in food products. Some toxins are apparently broken down by their interaction with the dairy products.  So not only are we extending the shelf life and perhaps nutritional content of our food, we are also making the molds that are otherwise toxic and intrinsic components of our diet. [MYCOTOXINS | Classifications L.B. Bullerman, in Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition (Second Edition), 2003].

Stepping back even further in the human evolutionary line, there is much data to support the idea that fermentation, or at least the processes used to make fermented products, including boiling the water used, saves lives. In large settlements--especially since developing agriculture in the most recent 15,000 years--water is often tainted and a carrier of various diseases. The safest source of hydration was instead early beer and wine, due to the active boiling of the wort and the introduced living cultures actively working in our favor, increasing the nutritional availability of the fermented grains and other components. Mead, perhaps some of the oldest recorded intentional fermented beverages made from honey, contains all of the health benefits of the ferment as well as the healing nature of honey itself.

Of course, the yeasts used for alcohol production are similar to the yeasts used in the rising and fermentation of bread, both commercially available and also the sourdough cultures in kitchens around the globe.  Yeasts are perhaps the smallest characters in the fungal kingdom: diminutive eukaryotic single-celled organisms that feed on sugars, and are populating the air, the surfaces of almost everything living, and ubiquitously distributed everywhere around the globe. Early fermentation wasn’t an exception, it was the rule. Not only has fermentation been naturally occurring since long before humans arrived on Earth, but fermented products have a long history of use in the animal kingdom, as well. There are flocks of birds that will populate fruit trees and wait for the fruit to ferment, and imbibe in alcohol fueled revelry. The same is true of apes, elephants and other creatures in our shared kingdom.  While we don’t have the language to know if animals were aware of the health benefits of fermented products, they were certainly benefitting from these aspects, and we know that all of evolution is a meandering path from successful accident to successful accident. 
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Erecting a Third Culinary Kingdom
Since before we recorded cooking methods, multitudes of unnamed mothers have provided wisdom and nutrition from the kitchen when recipes were understood by action and passed down by oral tradition, our species partnered with fungi in everything from bread to cheese to wine, to the wide variety of pickles, koji ferments (shoyu, miso, tempeh, etc.), to cured meats.  Not only did the preservation of fermented products extend portability of products, but the changing flavors and unintended new chemical suites created by these natural processes inspired new methods of cooking and new cuisines while keeping us healthy, delivering safe products that also had healing and immune-balancing properties that we see in many species of edible fungus throughout the fungal kingdom.

One of the main battles of my project is fighting through the intrinsic biases in mycophagy.  Cookbooks and authors betray their readers in unseen biases all the time, presumptively placing mushrooms in the vegetable section without a thought. And in writing this piece, I am taking responsibility for my own betrayal, my own biases. I am both ashamed and overjoyed to see my blindspot exposed: to say that fungus and humans evolved in parallel is only true if mushrooms are the only part of the fungal kingdom we examine.

And so, if we are to truly honor the role that fungus has played in our culinary development by gifting this most ancient kingdom its rightful place in our cookbooks, it would be far from just an expose on how to prepare and utilize mushrooms in the kitchen. We would find ourselves perhaps rearranging our entire body of cooking literature to place all of the above mentioned items squarely in the Fungal Kingdom section of cookbooks:

• Yeast breads and sourdoughs
• Beers, meads, sake, wine and other alcoholic beverages
• Inoculated cheeses
• Lacto-fermented pickles
• Various ferments & cultured foods
  
• Koji products: from miso to garum to shoyu to tempeh
  
• Cured meat products such as salami, etc, which has penicillin or koji on the outside of their skins, helping to protect and dehydrate the hanging meats.
• AND of course the multitude of wild and cultivated mushrooms of which I am so fond.
  

By acknowledging the hugely ignored role of fungus in our culinary heritage, we are actively working through our own bias that mushrooms are the entirety of the fungal kingdom, or that we can choose whether or not we interact with fungus as we exist and eat.  Of course avoiding any contact with fungi is achievable, but as Paul Stamets has said time and time again: when the going gets rough, the organisms that partnered with fungi survive the worst again and again.

As it turns out, Erecting a Third Culinary Kingdom is not so much a mission to collect the disparate science on cooking mushrooms from around the scientific borderlands, but a recognition that we have integrated many of our processes with fungi already, and that by acknowledging the role they have played and giving them their rightful place in our culinary lineage, we will find that the Fungi Section of the cookbook already exists, but is dispersed throughout the pages in print.