Good morning everyone,

How are you doing! I hope all is well. I hope you've got something good on at the weekend, even if it's just pottering around quietly doing tasks. And before that happy time, here's a Fem Fri about the amazing women of mushrooms.

Lynne Boddy has devoted her life to mushroom research and found out (amongst other things) that they will design motorways like it's not even a big deal:

The mycologist Lynne Boddy once made a scale model of Britain out of soil, placing blocks of fungus-colonised wood at the points of the major cities; the blocks were sized proportionately to the places they represented. Mycelial networks quickly grew between the blocks: the web they created reproduced the pattern of the UK’s motorways (‘You could see the M5, M4, M1, M6’).

https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n10/francis-gooding/from-its-myriad-tips

Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World looks at capitalism through the lens of matsuke mushrooms, and here you can read her talking about how much you can find out about them with just your own senses. So yes you can definitely build scale model of Britain playgrounds for them, but there's no obligation:

You have to go underground. Under the ground, the social relations of plants and of fungi are at their most active and visible. If you want to see what I call “the city,” a dynamic scene where all kinds of organisms are working together, you can't stay above ground. When I was writing The Mushroom at the End of the World—an investigation into the matsutake’s ability to survive even in human-disturbed environments—I assumed that you needed complex skills and microscopes to see that underground world. What I didn’t realize is that you can learn a whole lot about the social life of fungi and trees with your own eyes and nose.

http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/45/the-politics-of-the-rhizosphere

Of course we've not even spoken yet about how good mushrooms are to eat. Here's Chido Govera in a long interview about how transformative mushrooms have been for her community in Zimbabwe and beyond:

the power of mushrooms to transform waste into something positive is an analogy for how she has chosen to live her life. “I grew up in a community where it was easy for me to think that I would amount to nothing, almost like waste. Growing mushrooms in waste taught me that if I convert corn stalks into something valuable and profitable like mushrooms, I can convert my life from what it is today into something much better. That has really helped me change my perspective of how far I can go, what I can achieve.”

https://www.freundevonfreunden.com/interviews/the-healing-power-and-future-potential-of-cultivating-mushrooms/

By the way I wanted to call this episode Shroooooooooooooms but also didn't want to get caught by your spam filters. Still, the intention was very much there.

Love,

Alex.