NEWSLETTER

PHOTOS AND TEXT BY DAVID FISCHER, mushroom expert and coauthor of Edible Wild Mushrooms of North America: A Field-to-Kitchen Guide and Mushrooms of Northeastern North America. Go to Americanmushrooms.com for about a zillion more mushroom fun-facts.

This is one of the first mushrooms that my dad taught me about as a kid. We had one growing in our backyard. It’s just a big, round, white ball. They have an unusual texture—light and spongy, yet firm and dry. You have to be careful cooking them. They can smoke a lot if you use high heat, and you might keep adding more and more oil until you end up with a greasy mess. Be careful with the small puffballs because they can resemble a button-stage Destroying Angel. I recommend sticking with puffballs at least the size of a softball. They can even grow to be several feet in diameter. The fly agaric, or Amanita muscaria, is the mushroom most commonly illustrated in children’s storybooks. The red-capped variant that grows primarily in Siberia and northern Europe has potent psychedelic effects. In 1967, R. Gordon Wasson wrote a book about the fly agaric called Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, which precipitated the mushroom revolution in Western civilization. In Siberia, the wealthy will buy and eat fly agaric for its psychedelic effects and then urinate into a pot and place the pot outside their front door allowing other, poorer people to come and drink the urine to get high. None for me, thanks. Psilocybin photo © istockphoto.com/Gordon Cable At a high dose—which is just a few mushrooms picked off a cow patty—psilocybin delivers a very powerful hallucinogenic experience. It’s a totally different trip from fly agaric. In 2006, two different papers involving double-blind studies were written about using psilocybin as a therapeutic pharmacological agent. It’s not a new hypothesis: In the 1950s, Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson experimented with LSD and thought it and psilocybin might help recovering alcoholics and addicts to have a spiritual awakening so that they could follow the 12-step program. It can also be a magic bullet against acute OCD.

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