Can I Eat This?
And how will it fuck with my nervous system?
A foundational question unites both fungi and human: can I eat this?
Heterotrophs—here is a word for your word hoard—are fungi and humans (and all animals) that, unlike plants who must only point themselves at the sun, share a phylogeny and as a rule cannot produce their own food but must look for it elsewhere, continually, all the time. This is like the based version of the Joan Didion platitude—that we tell ourselves stories in order to live—now changed to: we eat other creatures in order to live.
For the mushroom’s part, the birds and the bees, the forests and the flowers—our little terrarium is, in fact, a direct result of the eating habits of fungi for the last billion years. Eating is their superpower: the ability to create an incredible array of enzymes (far surpassing the ability of our own science) that can break apart nearly any compound into its composite molecules, to be consumed or left in the soil—the very metabolic flow of earth. If fungi does not now possess the ability to breakdown and eat everything there is—like for instance, paint thinner, nuclear waste, micro-plastics—they certainly will learn to do so one day.
Humans have been perhaps no less ingenious regarding the consumption of diverse beings found in our environment. But it is an ingenuity that has been won by laborious trial and error. The legacy of these first and oldest experimenters, who used their own bodies as a laboratory to find out—for example—if a mushroom was toxic, psychotropic, or a food source, is now but the mundane reality of any grocery store. Hundreds of thousands of years of thankless research has been embarked upon by humanity, including no doubt untold numbers of stomach aches, liver failures and deaths, all in the valiant attempt to discover the edibility of other living creatures.
But this question of edibility—that literally animates us and makes our world—is a two-part question, for, in the quest to find food, humans discovered another kind of substance that is no less monumental: the psychoactive kind. Humans, from time immemorial have been asking: can I eat this? And likewise: how will it fuck with my nervous system? A more recent era would refer to this kind of research as witchcraft; these are life and death queries, carried out upon one’s own body, that put the cult in culture.
Army of Mushrooms, 2002, Takashi Murakami
