You may think that mushrooms are disgusting things. Perhaps you hate eating them. (But, by the way, they are full of that good stuff protein, and lots of humans, even child humans think they are delicious if they are cooked right, so perhaps you just haven’t had well-cooked ones yet). Or perhaps you think of brown, wet, slimy toadstools in the woods and think they are sluggy. Or maybe you think most of them are poisonous and so you hate the idea of even touching one.

Well, this page, I hope will change your mind about mushrooms.

They are incredible things, and we couldn’t live without them in our world. The more people study them the more obsessed they become. Perhaps you will find the mycologist in you. A mycologist is someone who works with fungi – fungi are the living organisms such as yeast, moulds and mushrooms. There used to be an advert on telly, that went, “MAKE ROOM FOR THE MUSHROOMS.’ In it, singing mushrooms come marching over the hill. It was to get people to eat mushrooms. I think that you will actually find mushrooms very interesting so for that reason, even if you don’t want to eat them, make room for the mushrooms!

Did you know that mushrooms, although they can seem alien and weird and sometimes scary, share more DNA with humans than plants do? Human bodies, animals and plants are made of cells and each cell has a list of things in it, the DNA list. So each human cell will have a DNA list that tells the cell how to be a human cell. Each plant cell will have a DNA list that tells that plant how to be that plant. Well, the DNA list in human cells is more like the DNA list in a mushroom cell than a DNA list in a plant cell. Just a fact. Did you also know that the biggest organism IN THE WORLD is a fungus? There’s plenty of things to discover about mushrooms, and about how they help our planet. Let me tell you just some of the facts.

Heres a fun fact: Mushrooms can actually help different trees communicate, you know, talk to each other, by helping the nutrients travel through the mushrooms between roots. It doesn’t even need to be the same species or kind of tree. So mushrooms are like roads for messages, or maybe they are the messengers in the plant world. That is very cool. Recently mycologists have been discovering even more interesting stuff about mushrooms, like the fact they can even solve a maze. Check out this video…..

On the whole cows avoid eating mushrooms, and you should too if you find one in the woods. But if you get an adult to help you, one who knows about wild mushrooms, there are actually a LOT of mushrooms that grow on the ground that you can pick up! Check out the Wild Edibles app for more info. Remember – adult supervision is VERY, VERY IMPORTANT. You can get very sick if you eat the wrong ones from the wild and I don’t just mean sick like throwing up. I meant like sick and you have to go to hospital, so don’t eat wild mushrooms unless you have an adult with you who knows what they are doing too.

Lots of cool stuff is happening in the mushroom world. Mushrooms can help humans find the medicine we need.

You know penicillin, the stuff you take when you have a bad infection, well thats a mushroom derivative. Mushrooms have been fighting the war on bacteria for thousands of years and have developed lots of ways of attacking bacteria that are the types that cause illness in humans. As bacteria on the planet wise up to our antibiotics (the types of medicines that you get given for ear ache or infected cuts and things), we are going to have to find another way of fighting the bacteria and it seems that mushrooms could really help us. This is why mycologists, the scientists who are mad about mushrooms will be very helpful in helping future generations fight off disease. Maybe YOU will be the brilliant mycologist that works out the new mushroom medicines that will help save lives?

Watch this page. It’s got more coming. Mushroom packaging instead of plastic packaging and bubble wrap and mushroom leather instead of leather that comes from cow skins.. Coming soon!