Growing Gourmet & Medicinal Mush

Introduction

Mushrooms have never ceased to amaze me. The more I study them, the more I realize how little I have known, and how much more there is to learn. For thousands of years, fungi have evoked a host of responses from people from fear and loathing to reverent adulation. And I am no exception.

When I was a little boy, wild mushrooms were looked upon with foreboding. It was not as if my parents were afraid of them, but our Irish heritage lacked a tradition of teaching children anything nice about mushrooms. In this peculiar climate of ignorance, rains fell and mushrooms magically sprang forth, wilted in the sun, rotted, and vanished without a trace. Given the scare stories told about experts dying after eating wild mushrooms, my family gave me the best advice they could: Stay away from all mushrooms, except those bought in the store. Naturally rebellious, I took this admonition as a challenge, a call to arms, firing up an already overactive imagination in a boy hungry for excitement.

When we were seven, my twin brother and I made a startling mycological discovery Puffballs! We were told that they were not poisonous but if the spores got into our eyes, we would be instantly blinded! This information was quickly put to good use. We would viciously assault each other with mature puffballs, which would burst upon impact and emit a cloud of brown spores. The battle would continue until all the puffballs in sight had been hurled. They provided us with hours of delight over the years. Neither one of us ever went blind although we both suffer from very poor eyesight. You must realize that to a seven-year-old these free, ready-made missiles satisfied instincts for warfare on the most primal of levels. This is my earliest memory of mushrooms, and to this day I consider it to be a positive emotional experience. (Although I admit a psychiatrist might like to explore these feelings in greater detail.)

Not until I became a teenager did my hunter-gatherer

Paul Stamets is the founder of Fungi Perfecti and codirector and founder of the Rainforest Mushroom Genome and Mycodiversity Preservation Project. He is the author of two seminal textbooks, The Mushroom Cultivator and Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, has been published in numerous journals, and is presenting more lectures on mycology than he can keep track of. An advisor and consultant to the Program for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical School and the 1998 recipient of the Collective Heritage Institute s Bioneers Award, Stamets lives in Kamilche Point, Washington with his collection of more than 250 medicinal mushroom cultures.

The most comprehensive manual of mushroom cultivation ever filled with readable, useful informationabout every known mushroom species that people esteem for food and for medicine. Expanded, improved, and destined to be a classic. Dr. Andrew Weil, author of Spontaneous Healine and 8 Weeks to Optimum Health