Mushrooms & the Vegan Diet

The topic of mushroom nutrition, especially as a substitute for nutrient-rich meats, has been a central theme to vegetarians and vegans for some time, but, according to this article from only early 2020, the “exotic” mushroom industry has been seeing a boom over the past several years that has excited many producers. There is certainly an ever growing awareness of the dangers of doing the same thing (and expecting different results), and partnering with fungi and with mushrooms in every aspect of our lives is something we as a species haven’t yet fully embraced.
Mushrooms are the nutrient dense fruit bodies of the mycelial mat--the true body of the fungus--that covers vast areas of ground below us—in some cases measured in hundreds of acres rather than square feet. These dense networks of single-cell thick tubes have been estimated to comprise of up to 8km of fibers within a single cubic centimeter of soil. Like our own nervous system or circulation system touching every cell in our bodies, the mycelium is able to access every part of the forest, transferring nutrients from tree to tree, and using sophisticated trading programs that seem to behave more like capitalism, rather than a simple release and absorb protocol that we have ascribed to nature. Fungi regulates the literal health of an ecosystem. Though it seemed a fantasy at the time, the images of the mother tree with roots connecting the whole earth in James Cameron’s movie “Avatar” wasn’t that far off. A new project launched in 2021 now aims to map this vast network of fungal fibers–estimated to cover astronomical distances.

More than just a simple transference of materials, it has also been observed that the fruit bodies of fungus–what we call mushrooms, generally–including the many edible varieties, have the tendency to hyper-concentrate whatever is in their environment, as well as become a hyper dense source of the same chemicals contained in the dispersed mycelia network below ground. In fact all parts of the mushroom, excepting the basidia on which the spores are produced, are made of mycelium, more densely packed, excreting various chemicals, colors, scents and textures, to aid in the above ground release of spores.
Given this tendency, it should be no surprise that mushrooms would also be bastions of nutrients necessary to the survival of other species. By offering essential amino acids, fats, myco-sugars, and a wide variety of medicinal constituents, or intensely desirable aromas (desirable being quite subjective) plays to the advantage of spore dispersal. Mature mushrooms are full of spores, and, as far as the fungi are concerned, spore distribution can utilize any number of clever ways to successfully reproduce.

The exhaustive list of nutrients from even a single species of fungi is too long for this essay. In short, it includes all the macronutrients--proteins (and amino acids), carbohydrates, and fats--as well as a whole host of biological chemical suites, often exclusive to the mushroom itself, appearing nowhere else in nature. 
But beyond being nutrient dense, mushrooms also clean up their environment by hyper-concentrating heavy metals, chemicals, and even radiation from around them. It is therefore strongly advised to know the chemical history of the area in which you are picking wild mushrooms, but also for anyone supplying wild mushrooms commercially. For example, some orchards in the midwest have dangerous levels of arsenic left over from practices not used for decades: Morchella species–Morels–happen to hyper-concentrate arsenic and grow in these very orchards. Chanterelles in particular are known to concentrate radiation from the environment, such as radioactive Cesium. In the forests around Chernobyl, located in Ukraine, fruiting bodies were found with 10,000 times the radiation of their surroundings. Sometimes mushroom poisoning has more to do with the surrounding environment than the mushroom itself. Though it seems that up to 90% of these radioative toxins were eliminated by… pickling! You go, primitive kitchen science, keep on doing you.
To my surprise, there are a considerable range of people who consider themselves “vegan.” As the name would seem to imply, the practice of being vegan ought to mean consuming vegetive sources of nutrition, though it seems most vegans define their diet more by what they do not eat, with no consumption of any animal derived products whatsoever (dairy, meat, eggs or even honey). In a culinary world of only two kingdoms, flora and fauna, these definitions are more or less the same. Simple enough.
However, a vegan diet almost always includes mushrooms, which, as outlined above, aren’t vegetables at all, (despite being ubiquitously listed in the vegetable section of virtually every cookbook, much to the ire of this author). In fact, the more we examine the many evolutionary kingdoms employed in culinary sciences (algae and seaweeds are eurkayotes, bacteria from prokaryotes, and fungi) the more the definition of vegan as the exclusion of only Kingdom Animalia becomes more appropriate.
Parsing these kingdoms out in a more modern understanding of our culinary heritage is important. The cooking of mushrooms can be complicated, as each mushroom exhibits different traits. The common practice still employed ignorantly today by nearly every cookbook and culinary school of lumping all of these disparate traits under a single heading in the vegetable section is an insult to cooks everywhere. Not only do fungus represent their own kingdom on the evolutionary tree, just as animals and plants are within their own kingdom, but evolutionarily speaking, Kingdom Fungi paved the way for plants to take root on Earth (literally manufacturing the soil in which they grow) and then went on to split from Kingdom Animalia next, proceeding to continue on its way--after these two Kingdoms sprang from its forehead--to nurture and create the very environment on which to raise it’s two children, Flora and Fauna. In this author's incredibly biased opinion, not giving the parent a section in the cookbook while dedicating so many to its children is juvenile (no, not you… it's a built in bias we all have, whether we realize it or not). If I live to see the day that FUNGUS are given their own section in cookbooks, I will die an accomplished mycophile. Funga is at least as equally important as Flora and Fauna, if not moreso. And this author is far from the only one who has noticed: “Giuliana Furci, the founder of Fundación Fungi (Fungi Foundation -- the first NGO for fungi of the world) is trailblazing justice for fungi by revitalizing our very perception of them, through changing language and worldwide school curricula.” A detailed examination of fungi is long overdue throughout the global community.
Beyond the nutritional analysis of each mushroom, fungi nutritional physiology is interesting as well. Unlike plants, whose cell walls are made up of cellulose, or animals, whose cell walls are made up of lipid barriers and cholesterol, the cell walls of mushrooms are made up of chitin, exactly the same constituent of arthropods and crustaceans. The digestion of chitin by mammals was thought to be impossible, as mammals do not manufacture chitinase, the necessary constituent to break down chitin during digestion, leading to the nearly unanimous belief that cooking mushrooms is crucial. “Cooking” means to render them digestible, to release from cells the complex nutrition inside, and to begin the heat lysing and enzymatic breakdown of the tissues to create even more flavors and aromas in the process. Scientists have now found that animals such as pangolins and bats, whose diet consists largely of eating insects do in fact have chitinase-like chemicals in their digestive tract. But moreover, humans who tend to consume more mushrooms have also been found to have chitinase in their digestive juices. It is this author's intuition that because we have more bacterial cells in our digestive tract than human cells, this production of chitinase is likely more related to the genes of the biome within us than our own genetics which, incidentally, are outnumbered one-hundred fold!
It has always tickled me a little, having dealt with the more militant types of vegans as a caterer, retreat chef and restaurant owner, that the majority of fungus we exploit for our own nutritive purposes are most like the vast neural networks of the animals so strictly avoided. Fungi, being more closely related to animals than plants after all, breathe in oxygen, breathe out CO2, and ingest their food after secreting digestive juices; a process not dissimilar to our own digestive processes. Like animals, fungi are metabolizers, breaking down their food—”de-molecularizing” it, as Paul Stamets has stated—even rendering deadly petro-chemicals such as diesel and plastics into harmless and nutritional mushrooms sugars. Their networks are the precursors to both our own neurons, and by extension to the interwoven structure of “the internet.”  There can be no doubt that we humans are not original builders. We, as animals, are more closely related to fungi than we are to plants. I wonder if this ever gives vegans pause before sinking their teeth into their portobello burger. Mushrooms are the fruit of a body so very different, and yet so very the same as animals so eschewed. Fungi are intelligent. Fungi were the first organisms to utilize the technology of branched and “chaotic” biological patterns that animal bodies now employ to survive in this complicated world, such as nerves, circulatory systems, our digestive absorption processes, and even our epigenetic expression of traits.
Of the three macro-kingdoms, it was Fungi that arose first, and not until many millions of years later, having started to break down the earthly rocks into soils and culture bacteria, fungus split from their energy capturing photosynthetic children plants, and again many millions year later, once oxygen began to be more abundant, split from the quantized & free-roaming animalia, who thusly began their own convoluted and unfathomable tumble through evolution to the world of animals and humans we see today.
Fungi are equally, if not more, diverse than any other Kingdom; and today on Earth are sequestering more carbon than all animals combined by a factor of six, (which means Fungi are sequestering more carbon than humans by a factor of two hundred). Meanwhile, it is fungi that created (and continue to create) all of the soil, and still play the most managerial role in the forest, mitigating the transfer of nutrients in the soil between otherwise diverse ecosystems. The newest evidence suggests that bacteria are able to travel along the minute fibers of mycelia like a super highway system!  We may never grasp the depth of the role that mushrooms and fungi play on this planet. They are truly astounding. But at least we can try.
So are fungi technically vegan, given their physiological similarity to animals? This may depend on the degree of the vegans whom you ask, though unlike animals–and perhaps more like fruit trees–the eating of mushrooms does not harm the mycelial creature creeping below the surface of the Earth. But given the vast array of animal-like nutrients contained within the pantheon of edible fungi, a vegan diet without mushrooms probably isn’t advisable. Given their concentration of everything desirable to leading a healthy human life, no diet, vegan or otherwise–excluding those with allergies, of course–is complete without a variety of wild and cultivated fungi. If you can get over their similarity to animals, that is.