No gloom in the shroom boom

Alice in Wonderland wouldn’t be the same without them; something would be missing in Yayoi Kusama’s oeuvre and Frank Lloyd Wright’s reimagining of the modern American workspace of the 1940s would have needed some other organic architectural spark.

The “them” is mushrooms — the fungi of fairy tales, imagination and culinary deliciousness; and also the fungi of the moment. Interest in mushrooms over the past few years has sprung up like a sudden flush of the capped beauties on the lawn after a steamy highveld summer shower; and the full extent of their potential and possibilities relevant in a modern world are only just starting to be fully appreciated.

Among the areas of booming appeal is in home-growing mushrooms. It started with a push on social media — among cats in backpacks on hikes and bubble tea revivals were posts featuring clumps of gilled frills sprouting from cut-out openings in cardboard boxes and marketed as “grow your own oyster mushrooms at home”.

The trend quickly transitioned from social media to a tangible presence of mushroom grow kits at market stalls, vegan stores and local online shops. And now mushroom grow stacks, grow bags and grow buckets are becoming as ubiquitous on kitchen countertops as basil plants on windowsills.

Sven Mollgaard and Matt Keulemans of Afrifungi have been at the heart of demystifying mushroom growing in South Africa, even before it became a thing. They’ve turned their fascination with fungi into a start-up that since spring includes a grow lab in Orchards, Johannesburg. Their focus is on sharing knowledge through workshops and lectures, stocking supplies and giving support to home-growing of an ever-enlarging menu of edible mushrooms.

For Mollgaard, fungis’ enigma is linked to the unseen of what’s happening at a micro level and the interconnectedness of all of nature’s life cycles. It includes what is beneath his feet and what happens at the level of spores and other microscopic organisms.

“I've always been interested in growing things and at some point you start wondering about what's happening underground, and then you realise that fungi play this amazing role within soil biology,” he says.

He’s referring to mycelium, the web of tiny threads called hyphae that become a foundational network from which mushrooms grow. There are about 14,000 known species of mycelia, but new species are being discovered all the time.

“Fungi and working with fungi as a business becomes a metaphor for a lot of things in life, from how it underpins everything happening in ecology to receiving the lessons fungi have to teach us; to growing abundant networks in this industry rather than trying to capture an entire market. And because it’s a new market, it’s also about figuring out things and finding our own solutions,” he says.

It was in 2015 that he and Keulemans’s paths crossed. Keulemans, who has a background in horticulture, had been growing edible mushrooms. Together they started tweaking grow techniques and improving grow substrates and mediums.

“We were learning so much from experimenting that we got to the point where we really wanted to be able to pass on some of what we had learnt. We wanted to not just provide people with mushrooms or mushroom grow kits, but also to be part of encouraging more people to grow their own food and to have more food sovereignty,” Mollgaard says.

Growing your own food is a movement gaining momentum. It’s been amplified in a time of climate crisis and the reality, after two years of Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, of how vulnerable food supply chains can be and how our connection to the outdoors and nature can be devastatingly severed.

Keulemans says watching mushrooms emerge from a grow bucket, first as teeny pins, then enlarging as magnificent flushes of fungi within days, holds a beautiful magnetism for the grower. It’s a starting point for curiosity too, he says. It’s why Afrifungi’s workshops begin with children as young as six and Keulemans says it’s the perfect age to unlearn presumptions, including about nature — of soil as “dirt” or that microbes, fungi and bacteria are bad, instead of just being part of living systems.

Keulemans adds: “As you understand how fungi regulate so many processes and how as a living system it relates to our own, you organically go down a path to ask more questions, to have deeper inquiry about everything, from your wellbeing, your way of thinking and how this is related to everything else.”

It ticks a range of boxes of the zeitgeist of the times we’re living through and is what’s helping make mycelium a literal growth industry. Last year, marketing research company Straits Research said: “The global mycelium market was valued at $2.65bn (about R49bn) in 2021 and is predicted to reach $5.21bn (about R94bn) by 2030."

Driving the market boom is mushrooms’ nutritional, medicinal and healing properties being uncovered or rediscovered thanks in part to Netflix doccies like Fantastic Fungi and How to Change your Mind. It’s also the potential in non-fruiting mycelium being used as a green alternative to polystyrene packaging and as vegan textiles transformed into “mushroom leather”. Mycelium can rehabilitate soil as a biofertiliser and help clean and biodegrade oil spills and other pollutants. It’s also been coaxed into fire-resistant and compostable architectural structures. In 2014, MoMa in New York commissioned artists to create Hy-Fi, a 12-metre structure of cylindrical towers made from zero-carbon shredded corn stalks and mycelium bricks. It pushed new boundaries for eco design and engineering, and by the end of the exhibition was fully compostable.  

For someone such as Johannesburg's Joel van Zyl, mushrooms are at the heart of a new business venture he’ll launch this year. As a recreational athlete, Van Zyl has taken mushroom supplements for sport endurance for more than a decade.

“It contains compounds from a cordyceps mushroom that have been credited by winning Chinese national sports teams as their superpower. Compounds in the mushrooms mimic ATP [Adenosine triphosphate, a source of energy used and stored in cells], so athletes and also older people are able to absorb oxygen better. The Chinese and Tibetans have used the mushrooms for thousands of years for health and vitality.” he says.

These are the mushrooms famous for being “more valuable than gold” and for being called the “zombie mushroom”, Van Zyl says, because in nature the parasitic mushroom spores infect insects, directing them to head for optimal locations where they die and become the substrate from which the mushrooms grow.

In his venture though, Van Zyl is refining a growth model for commercial yields. He’s also developed methods for cordycepin extraction to suit his supplement formulation and his product, “Human Nature”, is about ready to be taken to market.

“There is a body-mind journey with mushrooms. The science is showing this and at the same time there’s still so much about fungi that we are finding out. I think people increasingly want to find ways to improve their health, not with lab-manufactured pharmaceuticals, but maybe with something like mushrooms that have evolved alongside us humans,” he says.

Leigh Martin, of the Mycological Society of Southern Africa, bears out how interest in mushrooms has “massively blown up” in the past two years — in ways as diverse as Van Zyl’s supplements, finding new gourmet mushrooms for foodies’ recipe lists, forays to be in nature more and those looking for a commercial hustle. 

She became hooked on learning everything about mushrooms six years ago when she came across an unusual variety in her garden. As an urban landscaper who works with food ecosystems and regenerative landscapes, Martin was intrigued but couldn’t get a definitive identification for the fungus. As she reached out, an online community grew.

“It meant that the mycological society started off as a citizen-science project of people finding mushrooms, debating and discussing them, identifying new species and collecting them for sequencing. We were a handful of people, but since Covid, we’ve had about 10 times the interest.

“People are realising again that nature is important and that we have to pay attention to how it can heal, its cycles and how it influences us and all social structures. Sometimes when I’m on a foray I might see 15 different mushroom species that I’ve never seen before and then I realise that they’ve probably always been there and I just haven’t noticed them. And that’s when I ask myself: ‘What else haven’t I noticed’,” she says.

It sums up some of the mystery of mushrooms, as well as their magic: that some things we see best when we have slowed down enough to be present and realise that grasping onto forever-afters is futile because all things fade, just like mushrooms flush with vital beauty, but vanish as quickly as they appeared.