BRB w/ Nathan P – 3 Planet-Saving Mushrooms, Apple Pie & Entangled Life

3 planet-saving mushrooms you should know about, Thomas Keller's perfect apple pie, and how nature is weaved by mycelium (#45).

Dec 07, 2023

Welcome back to BRB w/ Nathan P, your 5-min weekly dose of information to inspire climate action.

My mission is to make it fun, easy, and delicious to make more sustainable decisions.

Each Wednesday, I share 💥1 Breakthrough, 🥘1 Recipe, and 📚1 Book on food & climate.

💥 Breakthrough: 3 Planet-Saving Mushrooms

Last Friday, I launched a Food & Climate Advent Calendar on LinkedIn, which includes one story about a planet-saving fungi each day. Check it out if you have not already.

Today, I want to highlight 3 mushrooms 🍄 that could restore contaminated soils, transform agriculture, and save the bees:

Mycoremediation with oyster mushrooms
Companion planting with garden giants
Saving the bees with the hoof fungus

1. Mycoremediation with oyster mushrooms

Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) are delicious wild mushrooms that also happen to be among the best recyclers of the planet.

They can absorb and treat:

🏠 Asbestos
⛽️ Oil & diesel
🔩 Heavy metals
🌱 Pesticides & herbicides
☢️ Radioactive compounds

Oyster mushroom mycoremediation can be deployed relatively cheaply using materials and ag by-products we already have.

A couple years ago, Paul Stamets and researchers at Battelle Laboratories wanted to test oyster mushrooms’ ability to treat diesel & petroleum waste in soil.

They add the following to each of their 4 contaminated piles:

❌ 1st pile: nothing (the control)
🧬 2nd pile: enzymes are added
🦠 3rd pile: bacteria are added
🍄 4th pile: oyster mycelium is inoculated

When the researchers return 6 weeks later, piles 1-3 are dark, dead, and stinky.

To their surprise, the 4th pile is covered in hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms and teeming with life 🍄

Mushrooms can transform uninhabitable environments into oases of life. They are what scientists call “gateway” or “keystone” species, enabling a cascade of life.

2. Companion planting with garden giants

The Garden Giant (Stropharia rugosoannulata) can help restore the world’s soils, which may otherwise no longer be farmable 50 years from now.

More than 33% of soils are degraded today, which could reach 90% by 2050 and threaten global food security (FAO).

Also called the wine cap mushroom, garden giants can regenerate soil, increase biodiversity, and sequester carbon through both companion planting and mycoremediation.

In companion planting 🌱, organisms that support and cultivate one another are grown together.

Think of the indigenous Three Sisters practice: growing corn, squash, and beans in the same plot increases productivity of all three.

The Garden Giant naturally support other soil organisms by:

🪱 Attracting earthworms
🌱 Helping plants access micronutrients
🍂 Accelerating composting for fertilizer

In mycoremediation 🍄, Garden Giants can also clean up contaminated soils.

Garden Giants have proven effective at:

🐛 Consuming nematodes
🦠 Filtering nearly 100% of soil E.coli
⛈️ Teating storm water with other microbes
(Stamets et al., 2013)

Garden Giants are beginner-friendly mushrooms to introduce to your gardens, and also happen to be delicious and nutritious.

3. Saving the bees with the hoof fungus

Bees are disappearing at a concerning rate – and one mushroom could save them.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) wipes out up to 30% of bee colonies per year.

If bees ever go extinct, we could also risk losing:

☕️ Coffee
🍫 Chocolate
🍑 Most fruits & veggies

Thankfully, the solution might be underneath our feet: the Hoof Fungus (Fomes fomentarius) empowers bees to fight CCD.

This mushroom produces anti-viral compounds that neutralize the viruses and parasites behind CCD without harming the bees.

Paul Stamets, Paul Taylor, and Professor Steve Shappard from Washington State developed the BeeMushroomed Feeder™️ with fungal extracts to protect local bees.

I hope see these bee-saving mushroom feeders in every backyard one day.

NB: this image is what MidJourney came up with, note the Hoof Fungus looks like a grey mushroom conk growing directly on the base of trees.

🥘 Recipe: Thomas Keller’s Apple Pie

This is the dessert I’ve made every Thanksgiving for the past 3 years – each time with resounding success.

It’s the apple pie from Thomas Keller, 3-Michelin Star chef behind the French Laundry in SF.

Hope it can serve as inspiration for the holidays and future Thanksgivings. Reply to this post in the comments or by email and I’ll send you the recipe.

PS: if you make it, please send pictures!

📚 Book: Entangled Life

Our world would not exist without fungi.

Dead trees would pile up in forests; soil would not exist; essential nutrients would be inaccessible.

Many packaged goods, manufacturing processes, and vital pharmaceuticals would also not be possible without them. 60% of industrial enzymes are manufactured by fungi, 90% of cheese manufacturing uses enzymes from fungi, and 15% of all vaccines are produced from yeast.

Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is an exploration of how fungi weave mycelium to interconnect nature. From intelligent slime molds to carbon-sequestering mycorrhizal fungi and mind-healing psychoactive mushrooms, this book is a riveting introduction to the mycelial world.

If you are an investor or entrepreneur looking to solve a problem in the food & climate world, I am sure you will find valuable context and inspiration in this book. I hope you enjoy it.

My favorite quotes as teasers:

“Fungi make worlds. They also unmake them. … Whether you’re cured by a fungus, or watch it cure someone else; whether you build your home from fungi, or start growing mushrooms in your home, fungi will catch you in the act.
If you’re alive, they already have.”
“Science isn’t an exercise in cold-blooded rationality. Scientists are—and have always been—emotional, creative, intuitive, whole human beings, asking questions about a world that was never made to be catalogued and systematized.”
“A slime-mold enthusiast told me about a test he had performed. He frequently got lost in IKEA stores and would spend many minutes trying to find the exit. He decided to challenge his slime molds with the same problem and built a maze based on the floor plan of his local IKEA. Sure enough, without any signs or staff to direct them, the slime molds soon found the shortest path to the exit. “You see,” he said with a laugh, “they’re cleverer than me.”

Thank you for reading – BRB next week ✌️

About Me

Hi there! My name is Nathan Paumier – I’m an avid reader, food enthusiast, and climate optimist. I started this newsletter after frequent questions on food tech, reading recommendations, and my secret recipes.

Want to get in touch or chat further? Anything you’d like to hear more of?

Forwarded this email?

Subscribe below to receive an email from me every week.
No spam, just quality ingredients.