Mushrooms are the sort of thing that most people either like or really don’t like… I think it’s something about the texture, especially when they are cooked… although those who fall into the dislike camp sometimes don’t mind mushroom soup as long as there are no visible mushroom pieces. I was pretty omnivorous as a child and I would eat them, usually fried in butter and on toast, or sometimes in a chicken pie; my sister hated them and wouldn’t eat them at all… she did change when she was older. A cousin’s son used to love them when he was little, absolutely loved them, then suddenly inexplicably went off them… now he doesn’t mind them, but wouldn’t choose them.
We sometimes came across fields with mushrooms, once my mum came across a field full of them and she dashed about picking them and holding them in her skirt… after that she often dreamed of the field and running about after bigger and more beautiful specimens.
Mushrooms, toadstools and fungi are mysterious things and I don’t think I would trust myself to pick anything other than a field mushroom, or a horse mushroom as my dad called them. However, whenever I see fungi growing, I always wonder if perhaps this one or that one is edible.
I didn’t wonder if these were edible though! They look distinctly inedible!
Apparently fungi are not plants/vegetables, nor are they primitive animals… in fact they pre-date both in evolutionary terms. Unlike plants, fungi don’t have chlorophyll which plants need to convert the sun’s energy into food, so fungi have to rely on other plants and animals and they use enzymes to dissolve their food and apparently in a way they could be thought of as closer to animals than to plants.
A tiny weird thing which I think is a fungus
Toadstools and mushrooms are the same thing, I guess we just call edible fungi mushrooms and non-edible or others, toadstools. They are just the fruiting part of the fungi, and they just rot away as any fruit might. However, underground there are fungal threads, which in some cases can ‘live’ for hundreds and even thousands of years.
Here’s a great site with loads of information, and photos:
http://www.first-nature.com/fungi/
Lois Elsden 
They spook me out.
LikeLiked by 1 person
They are very creepy… you know Sylvia Plath’s poem?
LikeLiked by 1 person
No, I don’t know any of her work, just spooked out by the science of Thames, weird alien life forms that form communication webs with plants and some would say, humans via hallucinogenic ones. BT did you see the stuff thus week about magic mushrooms and treatment of depression?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Science of them, not Thames, damn predictive text!
LikeLike
Science of Thames… hmmm… Have you read any of the Ben Aaronovitch books by any chance? But they are more the mystical science of the Thames!
LikeLiked by 1 person
ooo no, I must look out for them
LikeLike
Yes I did… very interesting… and wouldn’t it be wonderful.. depression is such a vile, hidden and misunderstood illness…
LikeLiked by 1 person
I worked in the drugs / addictions field for years and there was some interesting research going on back on the 1960s with hallucinogenic mushrooms, LSD and MDMA, supported by psychotherapy and psychiatry that showed great promise but all closed down by the war on drugs.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes I remember reading articles about it… ditto with the use of cannabis for pain and symptom relief for various illnesses including MS
LikeLiked by 1 person
Back in the 1990s when I was doing some local research into patterns of drug use I was told that in far flung West Wales there was a tradition of farmers using a pinch of magic mushrooms as a cure for colds. Seemed a bit drastic to me but there you go ☺
LikeLiked by 1 person
Not sure I’d go that far… whisky and lemon with hot water is more my thing for a cold!
LikeLiked by 1 person
They’ve got a reputation for being a bit mad 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
That might explain it… all alone up in those distant hills and mountains…
LikeLiked by 1 person