Fantastic fungi and where to find them

A new crop of mycophiles are promoting a wide variety of mushrooms in India, as health food, health supplement and even eco-friendly packaging. They want you to know that The Last of Us has it all wrong, so wrong

As they creep and swell and send tentacles out in search of new sources of nourishment, fungi are the source of horror and fear that drive the plot in The Last of Us, the postapocalyptic game-based series starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. In the real world, mycophiles — people who love to hunt for, grow and consume fungi — are giggling at all the drama. Even when tended to with great care, fungi have a tendency to collapse from heat and exhaustion, from temperature fluctuations, from too much humidity or too little.

The idea that a variant of the cordyceps fungi could infect a human and then somehow control their movements, as depicted in the show, is absurd, says Jashid Hameed, co-founder of Nuvedo Labs. The Bengalurubased startup grows mushrooms for eventual use in pain-relief and nutrient boosters.

Hameed is among a new crop of mycophiles cultivating and promoting a range of mushrooms as health food, health supplement, even as eco-friendly packaging. Grow The Fun Guy by Adam Shamsudeen in Kerala is a year old and offers kits for easy-togrow organic oyster mushrooms that can be harvested within 10 days (in exotic pink and white varieties). Nuvedo, launched in 2021, has been growing oyster, pink oyster, fairy white, king tuber, lion’s mane and the medicinal reishi. Shroomery in NCR and Green Apron in Bengaluru, both launched in 2018, supply local chefs and restaurants. And Dharaksha, launched in 2020 in NCR, creates eco-friendly packaging.

“The mushroom grown most widely in India is the button variety, and it takes a lot of chemicals to grow it at scale. That’s partly why it has so little flavour,” says Sumit Sharan of Shroomery. “For a chef, any other mushroom is better, and chefs were widely importing varieties in dried form from places such as Thailand. So when I decided to follow my passion for food entrepreneurship, I made up by mind to focus on this gap in the market.” The former business development executive with AirBnB now farms eight varieties, none of them button.

He grew his first crop at a friend’s farm in Manesar, and initially sent his produce out for free to chefs across NCR. “Our mission is to have chefs serve a range of homegrown fungi, so that people can try them and then buy some themselves and experiment with them at home,” Sharan says.

He currently supplies to restaurants such as Ping’s Bia Hoi, Perch and Omo in NCR and a few restaurants in Pune and Bengaluru. Individual buyers make up 20% of order volumes, he says. He has a 3,000-sq-ft mushroom patch on a plot not far from his friend’s in Manesar, and a team of 16 tending to it.

Growing pains

The two big challenges mycophiles face, they say, are scaling up without using chemical boosting agents; and finding the right manpower, which is vital given that little of the business can be automated.

Shroomery sells about 10 kg of mushrooms a day. Namrata (who goes by only one name) of Green Apron supplies 400 kg monthly to retail buyers and restaurants in Bengaluru. Different varieties must be kept at different levels of humidity, they must be monitored closely and harvested twice a day. Even a small amount of automation would help, Namrata says. But at these scales, the systems aren’t available.

Getting the message out about new varieties is vital too, says Hameed. “This is why we also conduct workshops, foraging walks and sell mushroom-growing kits. Mushrooms have been used in traditional medicine for centuries, and we even have our own names for certain varieties — the termitomyces is called arikkoon in Malayalam and olmi in Konkani — but we’ve lost most of our traditional links with fungi.”

Dharaksha, meanwhile, is trying to forge new ones. The company set up a production unit in December 2021 and has begun sending out samples of its fungi-based ecofriendly packaging to small and mediumsized industries. “One of the building blocks of mushrooms is mycelium, which solidifies to become something similar to thermocol. Thermocol is so non-biodegradable, it is one of the great eco-evils of our time. Mycelium breaks down completely in 60 days,” says co-founder Arpit Dhupar.

Miles away, in the Himalayas, the cordyceps surfaces again. Every year, foragers set out in search of a variant here that is the world’s most expensive fungus. The Ophiocordyceps sinensis can fetch up to Rs 5 lakh a kg, because it is rare and widely sought in the pharma industry, mainly for use in aphrodisiacs and painkillers.

This variant does grow inside its hosts, usually moth larvae, and eats them alive. The Ophiocordyceps unilateralis comes even closer to the plot of The Last of Us. It invades the host’s body (often an ant) and then uses it to move around and infect others of the same species. It wipes out entire settlements in this way. Whole anthills lie deserted, and then the cordyceps stretches out its tentacles to seek a new host.

Scan the QR code for more on what it would take for the cordyceps to infect a human, and what the result of such an infection could be. Spoiler alert: It’s highly unlikely to be an apocalypse.

READ: Vegetables (above) and fruits work well. What can’t you freeze-dry? Scan the QR code to find out

The first freeze-dried meals came out of a NASA lab in the 1960s, but the first foods to ever be freeze-dried were potatoes, 700 years ago. Chuno, as the preparation was called, fuelled the Inca army as it marched along the Andes, annexing new territories for a growing empire. The low temperatures and low air-pressure levels at those altitudes were ideal for this preservation technique.

Ages later, in 1909, biologist LF Shackell would replicate this process in a laboratory, refining the procedure so that it could be used in a more widespread manner. By the 1940s, freeze-drying was helping preserve blood plasma and penicillin in the battlefield, during World War 2.

Then came the space race of the 1960s. America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) poured millions into finding the best freeze-drying methods for food. As with so much else — the internet (which originated in a DARPA project), aviator sunglasses (designed for the US Air Corps), GPS (developed by the DoD), even microwaves — the advances made in pursuit of a nationalistic goal yielded a popular new consumer product. In this case, freezedried and indefinitely shelf-stable foods ranging from coffee and herbs to vegetables, meat and fish. (Foods that do not freeze dry well, incidentally, include those high in sugar or fats, such as honey, jams, butter and mayonnaise. The natural sugars hold on to water even at low pressure levels, and fats simply don’t reconstitute well when mixed with water.)

So, how does it work? Freeze-drying combines the best aspects of freezing and drying, while eliminating their negative effects. Frozen foods, for instance, need a constant power source to stay frozen. Drying alters texture, often making foods chewy and less flavourful. Freeze-dried foods remain shelfstable at room temperature and retain much of the original textures and flavours when rehydrated.

The procedure works by sublimating the water out of foods. Substances such as naphthalene balls and camphor sublimate at room temperature, going straight from the solid to the gaseous state.

Water can sublimate too, if air pressure and ambient temperature are very low. How low? In this preservation method, temperatures are dropped to -50

IMAGES: SHUTTERSTOCK