I watched a Netflix show called Nadiya Bakes, in which the former Great British Bake-Off star showed recipes as well as taking some time each episode to go to a factory or farm or something and show how some ingredient she was using that episode was made. In one episode, this ingredient was mushrooms. Mushrooms can be foraged in the wild or grown locally, with the latter of the two generally being much safer from a "liability standpoint" for a televised show. She went to a mushroom facility and they explained how the parts we eat (mushrooms) are only the reproductive parts of the mycelium network. Anywhere you see mushrooms growing, there's likely a whole network underneath. These farmers have some dank (literally, not in the meme sense) soil that they have grown a sort of white, webby network in, and when they change the climate to drop the temperature of the soil all of a sudden, it makes the network sprout these mushrooms to try to reproduce (and escape what might be a hostile environment), at which point they can just cut the mushrooms off, raise the temp back up, and do it again after some time has passed.
It's honestly kind of wild that we can eat and digest mushrooms at all, in my opinion.
One more bit to add about mushrooms that I can't believe I neglected earlier: there's this documentary about decay that fascinated me around a decade ago. While many of the facts from it have not stood the test of time, one part - the time stamp linked below - has for me:
When trees first "evolved" (you know from Bruno's post or elsewhere that trees are more of a fashion or a lifestyle than an evolution) there was nothing that could break them down. For a period of years that's unfathomable to humans, trees could not be broken down when they fell, except by fires. Eventually, and only through the help of fungi (mushrooms (legal)), trees began to have something to help them decay.
I still get stuck on that fact from time to time. There were just trees all over, dead or alive, and nothing could be done about them. I have no idea if the documentary holds up, but it's free to watch on YouTube there, so it has that going for it, at least?


