How mushrooms save us everyday ?

 

Will you believe me if i told you that mushrooms can save the human being on earth ?

Maybe you think i’m exaggerating when i say that mushrooms cultivation can actually save us, it can feed us, heal us and make us rich !!! … If not, i’m pretty sure that you will change your mind or maybe you will think different after reading those next lines.

A mushroom, known as a small piece of food that come into our tables often, maybe in pizza or in spaghetti sauce, more often in salades. Still yet, some people, and i’m talking in morocco, find it weird as food or maybe they don’t know what it is exactly.
The most important thing about mushrooms is that the part that we eat is not actually the real REAL MUSHROOM !! .. The real mushroom calls “MYCELIUM” , it’s a white filamentous aspect organism that we found underground, or under any fructification ( the part that we eat in mushrooms), also near side trees in forest, beside dead plant…
One of the main functions of “FUNGI” in nature (Fungi is a general name of all kind of mushrooms, edible or not), is that they eat dead organisms or/and animals/plants wastes and they recycle them to a mineral elements, a process calls “Mineralization” in wish an organic materiel become once again a non inorganic elements by decomposition, and this decomposition is made by Fungi and bacteria. Without this fungi (and bacteria) in nature, any dead body or organic waste will stay without any alteration or degradation, thing that will make our earth full of dead bodies and out of life.
Here, we start to see a very great role of mushrooms in nature, this role is actually used by industriel in recycling, and we will talk about it in another article (or a video) named economic aspect of mushrooms.

But this is not the only benefit of mushrooms discovered by scientific, matter fact, mushrooms are considered as a small living pharmacy, a great source of medication and second metabolites substrats that used for remediation and therapeutic sessions , and if i told you that some cancer cases healed by just eating delicious mushrooms !! (Check the specie Trametes versicolor, known also by the name turkey tail, maybe you would love to check that one).

Another great exemple is the famous penicillin antibiotic.. This antibiotic is made from bread mold ( the specie Penicillium notatum) wish is also a mushroom species but it’s different from the famous edible ones. Today, this pharmaceutical potential of mushrooms is explored by laboratories and industries everyday, and if you do a small googling you will be chocked about this potential.

What i like about mushrooms is their independent kingdom. Not an animal or a plant, neither a bacteria ou archea (a bacteria-like living cells). They have their own morphological /physiological /anatomical characteristic that take a little bit from both animal and plants world. More likely, listening to Paul Stamets, one of the greatest mycologist today, about the mycelium and the network that it makes underground, it pooped up to my mind the concept of mycorhize, a very great aspect of reunion in nature, and one of the intelligence made by a symbiotic relationships. A relation where a plant lives in harmony with a mushroom, each provides some goods to the other. Plants make organic matter with the photosynthesis and give some of it to the mushroom who lives “inside” the root of the plant. On the other hand, mushrooms use this matter as nutrients source and, thanks to the mineralization that we talked about, recycle it once again to minerals used by the plant to make another organic matter. This cycle gives both, plant and mushroom a continuous cycle of give and take, of duty and right and beauty of life.

This is another potentiel of mushrooms used in agriculture practices today to improve the fertility of soils and the rentability.

If i’m gonna continue like this, trust me, i will write an article of hundred pages just to talk about the role of mushroom in our life. I will absolutely write another time about it, but what i want you here is just to get your attention to a world that maybe you wasn’t even know about it.