Mushrooms, future leaders of the Bio-economy.
Recently, I’ve been working on the idea of “Mushrooms, future leaders of the Bio-economy”, considering mushrooms to be one of the important renewable resources. The unsustainable resources in industries and daily life are now fading away giving more space to renewable livelihoods.
Since I’m in love with biotechnology, mycology, and the impacts of mushrooms in our daily life, it seems so legit to talk about how can mushrooms contribute to our future economy.
Starting with nutrition, mushrooms actually are a great source of healthy, rich, and delicious food in national gastronomy and in many countries’ diets ( such as India, China, France, United state…). Replacing meat, mushrooms are actually a great way to get proteins and carbons with no fats. The mushroom industry is growing every year, which gives us hope to improve the way our world eats.
When I say food industry, I’m talking also about the number of people working in this field of mushroom production, not only the partners and the suppliers of different materiel and kits of this industry, but also the people working as employees representing, each, a potential family.
Talking industrially, and far away from food and nutrition, mushrooms today ( all kinds of mushrooms, edible or not also visible or not) are so explored in the pharmacy and cosmetic industry in a way that the number of active substrates extracted from mushrooms is seriously over hundreds if I’m not afraid to say thousands. This is just with the 1/14 species known and described until now (Still going with discovering and exploring the 95% left every day, and the irony is that we only use a few dozen species in the industry !!). I’m saying industry to take your attention again to another active industry that uses mushrooms in its daily life as a very important part of it.
Still don’t believe in it ?… let me blow your mind with what we call “THE MYCELIUM“.
MYCELIUM is the white filamentous part of mushrooms (Family of filamentous mushrooms) that always persist underground or beside the trees, in the bread, or in forgotten food. It’s the part that always exists under mushrooms after harvesting… In reality, and scientifically talking, the mycelium is the real mushroom in its vegetative state, and what we normally call “Mushrooms”, is actually called “Carpophore”. This mycelium has a super mind-blowing organization in nature in a way that the connection between its filaments is like the server of information flow, it gives the mushrooms an idea about what happening in all the rang of its habitat (sometimes many miles). In another way, you can scratch a mycelium in front of your house door, and it may “Feel it” under the street corner !!! (Check Paul Stamets for more information about it). This is nothing !! you should see how people today use this mycelium in ART works, or in the production of bricks for construction aims. More than that, the mycelium is a great source of polymers like chitin, a very abundant polymer in nature after cellulose. This polymer is used to make materiel in nanotechnology and other industries of synthesis.
Trust me, this is not all about mushrooms, this is just a small piece of the cake, and I don’t want you to feel exhausted reading an article of dozen pages but, I do want you to google it and give some attention. After all, it seems like not bad to me if we give it more attention, we may give our kids a chance to live a clean sustainable life !!!
AIT SAFAR Anass,
Chef of the project MushLab®
