Mushroom Cultivation Quotes

Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to "cast spells" -- in our vocabulary, "psychoactive" plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladona, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skin of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based "flying ointment" that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the "broomstick" by which these women were said to travel. (119)

Virtue is not a mushroom, that springeth up of itself in one night when we are asleep [...] but a delicate plant, that groweth slowly and tenderly, needing much pains to cultivate it, much care to guard it, much time to mature it, in our untoward soil, in this world's unkindly weather.

Wait until the truffles hit the dining room---absolute sex," said Scott. When the truffles arrived the paintings leaned off the walls toward them. They were the grand trumpets of winter, heralding excess against the poverty of the landscape. The black ones came first and the cooks packed them up in plastic quart containers with Arborio rice to keep them dry. They promised to make us risotto with the infused rice once the truffles were gone. The white ones came later, looking like galactic fungus. They immediately went into the safe in Chef's office. "In a safe? Really?" "The trouble we take is in direct proportion to the trouble they take. They are impossible," Simone said under her breath while Chef went over the specials. "They can't be that impossible if they are on restaurant menus all over town." I caught her eye. "I'm kidding." "You can't cultivate them. The farmers used to take female pigs out into the countryside, lead them to the oaks, and pray. They don't use pigs anymore, they use well-behaved dogs. But they still walk and hope." "What happened to the female pigs?" Simone smiled. "The scent smells like testosterone to them. It drives them wild. They destroyed the land and the truffles because they would get so frenzied." I waited at the service bar for drinks and Sasha came up beside me with a small wooden box. He opened it and there sat the blanched, malignant-looking tuber and a small razor designed specifically for it. The scent infiltrated every corner of the room, heady as opium smoke, drowsing us. Nicky picked up the truffle in his bare hand and delivered it to bar 11. He shaved it from high above the guest's plate. Freshly tilled earth, fields of manure, the forest floor after a rain. I smelled berries, upheaval, mold, sheets sweated through a thousand times. Absolute sex.

Each man’s place in the company hierarchy, perhaps painfully won over many years, became meaningless if his new super boss, the conglomerator, didn’t see things his way. Robert Metz told in The New York Times about an executive of an acquired company who observed that he and his colleagues had been given what he called the “mushroom treatment”: “Right after the acquisition, we were kept in the dark. Then they covered us with manure. Later they cultivated us. After that, they let us stew for a while. And, finally, they canned us.

The forest grows ferns and trees; it cultivates mushrooms and spores; it fosters its creatures from nothingness to more of the mulchy same. And for Jason, the seeds of backbone, of entitlement, were nurtured in the fertile hollow that had dropped the bottom out of civilized advancement. The forest insisted. It pushed back. At some sudden swell of that’s-enough, it emphatically refused to be overrun by bullying machinery and someone else’s idea of what it should be.

In effect, fungi do their digesting on the outside. While we tend to process our meals in the privacy of our own insides, fungi prefer to eat out.