An Ode to Mushrooms

By Jo Longley

My partner is a man of mushrooms. We met because his bio on tinder included the phrase “amateur mycologist.” My first message to him was “Here for the amateur fungi pics,” and he did not disappoint. 

He regaled me with beautiful images followed by long latin classifications.  I was stricken, with both him and them. 

At that same time the biology class I have been subbing for began the ecology section of their course. Mushrooms, we learned, fit into the food web of the world as detritivores. Like vultures or earthworms, mushrooms feed on dead organic matter. 

They repurpose material they weren’t responsible for killing, and as such are a key component of the ecosystem— making sure nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus don’t stay trapped in no-longer-living organisms and can be cycled back through to the rest of us. 

Without mushrooms, or detritivores and decomposers as a whole, dead organic matter would pile up. Soil wouldn’t be churned up by earthworms and plants’ roots wouldn’t be aerated, diseases from the overstock of dead material would spread. The rest of the food web would starve for lack of nutrients locked into the dead material— colloquially, we’d be fucked. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about my approach to love, or rather my inability to stay in it. The past year and a half I’ve been focusing on boundaries: whether I make them, why I need them, how I disrespect my own. Being in love the way I am in love now is only possible because of the work I have done, I know this.  

Through self exploration and purging, therapy and asking for help, my inner systems have evolved. My painful, deep-digging work of finding nutrients in the dead habits that once protected me— mining them for what can be used, and discarding the rest— I’ve grown mushrooms in my mind. 

With my own dead-mining work front of mind for so long, I can’t help but see the necrotic issues of the world at large lurking under every surface. Not even lurking— leaping out. Our dead bodies are piling up everywhere. 

On January 6th, 2021 homegrown white supremacist domestic terrorists stormed the US Capitol. 

Is that not enough proof of the disease that’s spread from our undealt with detritus? 

Talking with my Trump supporting students the days following the event, I asked them what they thought of the act of terror. They didn’t know it as one. 

They saw people doing silly things for what they believe in. They maybe disagreed with the destruction of property, but beyond that… they had about as much idea as I did as to why they supported him. Because their parents did? Because everyone they know does? Because he’s the republican president?

We’ve not dealt with the white supremacist history that built this country through the decimation of indigenous peoples and on the backs of African slaves, nor the white supremacy that nearly tore it apart in the Civil War. 

White people, we’ve locked away most of our compassion, empathy, humanity in our detritus history of white “supremacy”. 

It’s our job, while the world is starving, to eat it. Eat the hatred our ancestors are responsible for, the social barriers that remained as echos, the microaggressions, the aggression aggressions. This is our breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert. 

Photos by Andrew Dodd (@genflag on insta)

Until we know internally every aspect of this hatred we’ve made home, we’re as guilty as they are. Because innately we know— locked in these atrocious acts, in the pain and disgust it takes to face them, real equity exists. And we don’t want to do the hard gross things, because why should we?

Well it’s our job. And without it the world is consumed by our disease. Be a mushroom; eat some dead shit. 

Picture credit belongs to Andrew Dodd. An amateur mycologist, professional chef and baker. If you would like to contact Andrew about purchasing prints of his work, you can reach him at his instagram @genflag.