Light up your life with Mushrooms!

I found this whilst hanging around for my Wild Mushroom Omelette this morning!

With the arrival of Japan’s rainy season, a mysterious type of green, glow-in-the-dark mushroom begins to sprout in Wakayama prefecture. The Mycena lux-coeli mushrooms, known locally as shii no tomobishi-dake, sprout from fallen chinquapin trees.

As they grow, a chemical reaction occurs, causing them to glow a ghostly green.

The luminescent mushrooms were long believed to be indigenous solely to Tokyo’s Hachijojima Island after they were discovered there in the early 1950s. In 1995, however, mycologists found the fungus growing wild in coastal areas of the southern Kii peninsula, as well as in Kyushu and other areas.

All sounds a bit funny to me!

For goodness sake .... wild means wild!!

It must be a quiet news week!

The latest crackpot idea from scientists hit the news stands this week with the news that mushrooms could come from trucks. Yep, you heard right.

From trucks!

Apparently, a new concept, known as Made in Transit would see foods, such as mushrooms actually being grown on board trucks on the way to the supermarket. Distributors could become farmers turning their trucks into high density growing facilities and reprogramming what big business see as a waste of time into growing (ie more profit) time.

Here's what the news report said "Our obsession with fresh food irrespective of season and location fuels constant developments in extending their life after the moment of harvest until the point of consumption. Ripening is manipulated through the removal or addition of the ripening gas ethylene, and breathing is slowed down through extensive refrigeration and through modified atmosphere packaging. But these so-called post-harvest technologies are not only economically and ecologically expensive, they are essentially damage control measures that only slow the eventual deterioration down.

‘Made in Transit’ proposes to shift the paradigm from preserving freshness to enabling growth along the way, a shift from ‘best before’ to ‘ready by’ for perishable goods. Growing food on the way would mean it gets better as it travels and that it would be still alive upon arrival, ready for harvest by the consumer (bypassing harvest labour, which for mushrooms can account for 40% of overall production cost). Applied to mushrooms, it also could mean other unexpected things, like more diversity in our supermarkets as some of the most fragile mushrooms (too fragile to withstand transport) could theoretically become available anywhere by growing them on the way. The global industry already shapes our food—thickening a tomato’s wall so it can withstand rough handling, or growing watermelons square so they stack more efficiently. Humans created this global condition. The next step is when the global market starts to produce our food, literally."

For goodness sake, why don't they just leave us - and nature - alone?

Wild mushrooms are called wild mushrooms because they ... errmm .... grow wild.

Or should we just go the whole hog and change their name to Suzuki Fungus?