Growing Mushrooms at the End of the World

A mastery of mushrooms and their uses could help me survive in a post-apocalyptic world—a world that didn’t feel all that far away.

Two years ago, I decided that I want to be a mushroom farmer when I grow up.

I came to this quarter-life realization half-jokingly, half-seriously, on a government-sponsored trip to Japan designed to foster US-Japan relations. For ten days, I was surrounded by other young Japanese American adults like myself as we embraced our ancestral homeland with our eyes and our stomachs.

The highlight was a homestay portion that placed us with families living in a rural town. Most of our host parents farmed for a living; mine grew shiitake mushrooms in a forest. One day, our host gathered a group of us to harvest mushrooms with him. After wordlessly doling out empty buckets and sharp knives, he led us to a long line of logs propped up against Totoro-sized trees.

There, in the shade of the forest, dozens of pale-white shiitake caps glowed. He demonstrated first, kneeling and swiftly hacking a mushroom off the log at its base. Then he ventured deeper into the woods without looking back, leaving us to our task.

The next few hours of our work were filled with a delicious silence, interrupted only by the occasional salty gust of wind from the nearby ocean. We were just an hour away from the bustle of Tokyo and I could feel the weight of both my phone and pocket WiFi device in my jacket. Yet, I felt removed from the rest of society. I wondered if this was the kind of calm felt by the people who dwelled here hundreds of years ago.

It was March 2017. I was still reeling from Donald Trump’s inauguration. The people who originally farmed this land didn’t have to think about the internet, or Trump, or the billion other terrible things that were happening elsewhere, like the Syrian civil war, or the threat of North Korean-manned missiles, or the increase in mass shootings in the US. Sure, they had other concerns: the unpredictability of the weather and its effect on their crops; samurai warfare. But they were free of the constant static of modern life and the knowledge that it was all going to shit.

Until my trip, I’d all but accepted an early death for myself and everyone I loved due to the inevitable end of the world, if not from hatred-fueled violence brought on by our current administration, then by some disaster wrought by climate change. But as I carried my full bucket of mushrooms to my host’s truck, gazing out at the swell of farmland rolling on for miles, I felt hopeful. If people everywhere lived like this at one time, and my host parents lived like this now, maybe it was possible for us—all of us—to return to this way of life; a life free of momentary threats. A life that promised a future for us.

When I flew back to the States, I decided to try my hand at growing mushrooms myself. Because the “land” I owned was a small apartment balcony, I ordered a small DIY growing kit online. All I’d have to do was cut a square in the provided box and spray the mycelium inside twice a day. Within a week, oyster mushrooms would sprout forth.

Though tending to my mushrooms required little effort on my part, I still felt a sense of accomplishment. For the first time, I could connect myself to the earliest hunters and gatherers of civilization. Ancient foragers gathered mushrooms. Here I was doing the same thing. I was a provider, even if all I was really providing were some ingredients for a risotto I’d been wanting to make. I was living off the land! Kind of!

As a supplement to my new hobby, I bought books on mushroom history and classification. It was meant to be a light, before-bed activity. However, I quickly fell into a rabbit hole as I realized that a mastery of mushrooms and their uses could help me survive in a post-apocalyptic world—a world that didn’t feel all that far away.

Any time I put on a survival-genre movie, watching strangers cling to one another in the chaos, I’d wonder what I could bring to the table as a survivor. I didn’t possess the brute strength needed to defend my people, nor did I know how to navigate a map that wasn’t a phone app vocalizing directions for me. But my growing knowledge about mushroom identification gave me intrinsic value.

Ancient foragers gathered mushrooms. Here I was doing the same thing.

If I could memorize my wild mushroom types, knowing which were tasty and which would kill you slowly, shutting down your organs, I’d be useful to those who had previously relied on grocery stores. At the end of the day, after all the zombies are slaughtered, people would still need to eat. I could be the one to feed them.

As much as I thought of mushrooms as life elixirs, I also considered their potential to be the ones to end us. In The Last of Us, my favorite PlayStation 3 game, Infected, as the zombies are called, have been affected by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus. In my research, I learned that Cordyceps takes its name after the real fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which attacks insects by invading and replacing the host’s tissue with a fruit body, like a long, skinny mushroom. The fruit infects the mind of its host, forcing it to expose itself to predators as a way for the fungi to spread its spores. Cordyceps acts similarly in The Last of Us, stemming into the host’s brain and turning them into a mindlessly violent creature.

In the game, Infected are barely recognizable as humans. Though they stumble around on two legs, fungal masses—mushrooms—bloom from their faces and split their heads into fragments. As you enter a room, spores that dance in the air are a sign that Infected are nearby. While folk tales and history books cite mushrooms as historical sustenance to our ancestors, The Last of Us turns them into the very thing that brings down the human race.

It’s unlikely that a fungal zombie apocalypse will be the cause of our demise. More realistically, we’d all go out due to worldwide hunger, or by natural disaster, both inevitably linked to climate change. Last year, my home state of California experienced the most devastating wildfire season on record. I read that the Moai, the infamous stone head statues dotting the edges of Easter Island, are in danger of being destroyed due to eroding cliff sides. But if climate change were to claim us by drowning our cities or burning our bodies, mushrooms would still be here, and they’d do wonders for our planet.

Following the 2017 wildfires in Northern California that claimed at least forty-three lives, a mess of ash and other pollutants were left behind in the soil. Toxic materials were removed via triage to prevent runoff into the local creeks. To treat the remaining debris, a task force called the Fire Remediation Action Coalition snaked the edges of Sonoma County roads and hills with a series of tubes containing—you guessed it—mushrooms. They were oyster mushrooms, just like the ones I was growing in my apartment.

The task force was experimenting with mycoremediation, which employs mushrooms to clean up waste, from pollutants to plastic. While still not yet adopted as a common practice, the process has been used to treat contaminated soil in New Zealand and clean up toxic spills in the Amazon. Mushrooms are the product of mycelium, which contains enzymes that not only allow them to digest hazardous materials, but can convert them into nutrients and sometimes, more mushrooms. By adopting mycoremediation, you’re not only cleaning up your spills—you’re also improving the land you spilled on.

Growing up in a society that has already been slowly destroying the Earth for decades, it’s comforting to think that after it’s all over, there’s still a chance we can leave this place better than we found it. If none of us are around, the mushrooms will do their jobs regardless, for it doesn’t mean a thing to them if humans exist or not. They’re the real survivors.

The more I learned about the relative ease with which mushrooms killed and revived things around them, despite the circumstances, the more I realized I could do the same thing. I could work to empower myself, to plan for a future, despite all the things telling me that it was pointless. In a way, I had already begun the process: Foraging for mushrooms in Japan gave me hope, but creating my own hope back home with a DIY kit gave me agency. DIY, as in: I did it myself.

If none of us are around, the mushrooms will do their jobs regardless, for it doesn’t mean a thing to them if humans exist or not. They’re the real survivors.

It wasn’t until I planted my own mushrooms that I understood just how stunted I’d been in my life; how all my decisions had been anxious reactions, rather than mindful choices based on my needs and desires. I used to love setting and accomplishing goals as a kid, and at some point, I stopped. I’ve since made realistic, long-term goals for myself: Go to therapy! Write a children’s book! Run a 5k!

I’ve also attended city council meetings to learn about the decisions being made for my community, and to be among neighbors who care enough about their city to show up. The issues discussed are often mundane and little, like overgrown trees in need of maintenance and the occasional power outage, but I find that I care about the little things now. Whether I’m building relationships with the people who run my local coffee shop, or taking online classes to learn new skills for my job, like digital marketing, the little things add up to something bigger: the feeling that I’m paving my own way. An apocalypse didn’t have to happen in order to push me into action.

Recently, I’ve started learning Japanese via audio guide on my work commute. I ache to go back to Japan, but this time, I want to make the effort to communicate with the people I meet. I want the opportunity to make small talk: What do you cook for dinner? What’s your favorite season? How do you like to relax after a long day?

Each morning I arrive to work, I’ve learned a couple new phrases. When I think about forging a new friendship on my next trip with these phrases, I feel as calm as I did that day I collected mushrooms with my friends and homestay family, and lugged them back home to cook and enjoy together over dinner.